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The smallest, but most prolific life around us is usually invisible to us. Most of us don’t stop to think about how cannon blastingly amazing it all is. These remarkable images are guaranteed to make you appreciate the smaller things in life.

Pollen

From the wonderful Jennifer Frazer at The Artful Amoeba, may I present: Pollen from sunflower, morning glory, hollyhock, lily, primrose, and castor bean plants. 500X magnification; the bean-shaped pollen grain at lower left if 50 micrometers (μm) long. Believe it or not, these microbes are actually an entire plant — the male gametophyte.

Jennifer also alerted me to this interactive picture, a sliding scale that takes you from a coffee bean down to a human egg, bacteria, viruses and a single carbon atom. It’s even better than Honey I Shrunk the Kids or The Incredible Shrinking Man (remember the giant spider? SO SCARY! My skin crawls with the mere memory of it.) The program is REALLY pretty with fantastic graphics, it really makes you appreciate the relative size of microbes, and would be great if you had to do a project on cell sizes.

And finally, I give you one of my favourite bloggers, Lab Rat.

Scatalog - Coloured Poop

Yep – ’tis coloured poop! This design proposal was created for him during a science/design workshop dubbed E. chromi, to help them visualise the work they’ve been doing hunched over PCR plates creating colourful e-coli cultures. Seriously. Coloured bacteria. Lab Rat, this is like the coolest science project EVER! He blogged about it and his own ideas for scientific art here.

A big mug o’ grog to both them bloody brilliant bloggers Lab Rat and The Artful Amoeba, you prettify my RSS.