National Geographic: The Invisible World Page #2

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best kept homes

microscopic dust mites quietly

live their lives

Like miniature dinosaurs from

a long lost world

their bodies rarely grow large

enough for the naked eye to see

Dependent on us for survival

dust mites feed primarily

on the flakes of dead

which our bodies constantly shed

What at first sight appears to

be a crude medieval machine

is actually a precision instrument

nearly all of us depend on

Its roughly chiseled surface offers

little clue

that this clumsy contraption is

actually the complex movement of

an ordinary wristwatch

Our skin itself hides a miniature world

from the normal view of our eyes

When seen at high magnification

an alien landscape appears

Stubbles of hair grow like tree

stumps in a terrain

whose complex ecology supports

a wide variety of life

On almost any strand of hair

tiny fungi can be found

In numerous forms, their population

on our hair

and skin numbers in the tens

of thousands

Our intimate fellow travelers

fungi have lived with us through

evolution

to establish a permanent niche

in the habitat of our skin

In the roots of everyone's eyelashes

live tiny mites

called Demodex folliculorum

Apparently they cause us no harm

But why they are there and exactly

what they do have yet to be discovered

The varied micro-landscapes on the

surface of our bodies

also fall prey to less

desirable guests

Meet Pediculus humanus capitis

the head louse a tiny

and bothersome pest

which lives its life firmly attached

to a single strand of hair

Sarcoptes scabiei, the scabies mite

is a microscopic creature that makes

a comfortable home

by burrowing directly into the skin

On the warm, moist regions

of our skin

there is life in enormous abundance

Bacteria the simplest form of

free living life-are constantly with us

A single bacterium can multiply to

more than a million in about

eight hours

and mo matter how much we wash

millions remain on our skin

Each of us is the keeper of a huge

invisible zoo

In fact, at any given time

there are as many creatures

on our bodies

as there are people on Earth

If our numerous companions do

not inspire our love

at least we have the consolation

of knowing

that we are never completely alone

At the Enrico Fermi Institute of

the University of Chicago

a new frontier of the microworld

has recently been bridged

Using a powerful electron microscope

which took 14 years to develop

Dr. Albert Crewe has captured

on film

what no one had ever seen

You are looking at atoms-uranium atoms

The smaller single specks are

individual atoms

each with a diameter of only a

few billionths of an inch

The larger masses are clusters

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