If you were one of those kids who dreaded an errand into a dim, dank basement and who ran back out three steps at a time, sure there was something horrid hiding in the gloom–you were right. Scoffers should take in the “Microspace” show at the Chicago Academy of Sciences, an exhibit of photographs taken through a scanning electron microscope, or SEM.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
It’s true that the horridness of these basement creatures may not be apparent to the naked eye. But magnify the face of an ordinary ant 230 times and you have a one-and-a-half-foot-wide helmet of a head that’s covered with whorls of short bristles, and that’s split nearly in two at the jaw. Or blow up the head end of a tick 320 times life size and you’ll find little that resembles a head. Only jointed legs wrapped in thick plates where they stick out of a wrinkled mass. At one end of the mass is a crumpled knob, in the center of which is a large maw. Or swell the head of a mosquito 620 times. What first appear to be eyes in the middle of that head–two doughnuts covered with flattened hairs–are actually the bases of its antennae. Below these antennae, a rounded flap hangs over all you can see of its bloodsucking stinger, a buckled straw apparently supported by a channel that is thick with scalelike excrescences. Step back and you see that almost the entire head is one of two enormous symmetrically segmented eyes.
Electric current heats a thin wire at the top of the SEM to 2500 degrees centigrade, forcing a stream of electrons out of it. Strong magnetic fields concentrate that beam as it heads toward the fly. The electrons in this beam bang into the various angles of the fly, knocking off other electrons, which are then picked up by a monitor and converted into the image we see.
