Under the Microscope

This alien glob is a piece of gum arabic from the hardened sap of the Acacia tree, most likely collected from a tree in Sudan. Rox Middleton explains...

This image shows a ‘forest’ of carbon nanotubes – thousands upon thousands of tiny rolls of carbon atoms, grown on a scrap of copper foil. James...

In this video we see an electron gun made of many thousands of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes, each more than 1,000 times smaller than the width...

In this video we see a synthetic opal, which is made using polystyrene spheres surrounded by even tinier polystyrene spheres around 1,000 times...

Nanowires growing in real time. Each nanowire is roughly 450 atoms wide.

Dr Andrew Gillis shows us an elephant fish embryo, which live in their egg and feed off of their yolk supply for 7 to 10 months before hatching out...

The epidermis, which is the outer layer of mammalian skin, is maintained by numerous stem cell populations.

Dr Andrew Gillis shows us an embryonic skate head and explains how the red denticles dotted all over it have very similar properties to human teeth...