A closer look at cloth

All of these shots were taken with a clip-on in the first couple of days after I got the first one in the mail.

When people get their first hand lens, they examine their hands, fingerprints and fingernails, and then they look at their hair. With clip-ons, the first time they set their device down on their lap while they move something, they see the detail in cloth.

Two views of one piece of cloth, probably satin.

You will need some different types of clothes (or a ragbag of clean scrap material), and an embiggener. Shirts and blouses are usually woven cloth, t-shirts are typically knitted, and I know little more than that. There are some interesting images to be gathered, though. What you do from there is up to you. Discover something!

Three other cloth samples, but how many types of fibre can you see?

Now look at the fibres in cloth samples, to see if they can both be distinguished in the fabric, or not. Here are two shots of cotton polyester at x15 and x60, then three of pure merino, at x15, then at x30 and x60. This exploration began when I wondered if you could see the different fibres in composite cloth like cotton polyester cloth. I think I can do that!

But can you tell merino from cotton polyester without labelling or a microscope? I don’t think I can do that!

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Looking at coins

 

This is one of the fun ones, but I suppose I would say that, because I was once an amateur numismatist, working in the Commonwealth Treasury Department, and used to answer all the odd public enquiries about money and other things. You will need a range of coins of different ages.

The best fun comes with pre-decimal coins (earlier than 1966), so ask your grandparents if they have any. There are fine details hidden away on coins, like the abbreviated Latin details around the sovereign’s head, but there are also mint marks and designers’ initials.

On the pre-decimal coins, look for the abbreviated Latin description around the sovereign’s head, but there are also mint marks and designers’ initials.

A 1951 sixpence, minted in London. In 1966, the sixpence became the new five-cent coin.

Some 1951 Australian coins have PL on them, telling us they were minted in London (nobody knows what it means, but “it is traditional”, and the L is probably for Londinium, the name the Roman invaders gave to London). 

Pennies and halfpennies have KG near the kangaroo, but it doesn’t mean KanGaroo, it reminds us that George Kruger Grey designed it (and also the shilling coin, which later became 10 cents).

A 1942 penny: the dots each side of .PENNY. tell you where it was minted.

The head of King George V was done by Bertram MacKennal, so there is a BM under the neck. Herbert Paget (HP) did King George VI. I can’t recall who did Queen Elizabeth II, but there were four or five different queen heads, I think.

An old florin (two shillings, which became the 20 cents), minted in San Francisco. 

Most of the decimal “silver” was designed by Stuart Devlin (SD), and if you look at coins minted during World Wars I and II, you will find many foreign mint marks like S (San Francisco), D (Denver), I (for India, meaning Calcutta).

Spot the designer’s initials on the Australian 10 cent coin, between the lyrebird’s tail and foot.

Of course, if you can’t get any of those older coins, there are still plenty of other surprises, like gashes, scratches and other marks.

Now take a look at this image below: do you know where it came from? I came across the shot in my files, and even though it was one I had personally taken with a clip-on. I had to check where it came from. It is an Australian coin, but foreign coins have secrets as well.

Let the hunt begin! Clearly there are many more puzzles like the ones suggested here for you to explore!

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Looking at stomates

 

In the diagram above, the stoma or stomate is in the lower surface of of the leaf: stoma is a Greek word, with the plural stomata. In English, we say stomate and stomates, but whatever name we use, it’s time to look at these pores.

The lower surfaces of most leaves are covered in stomates, and while they require a good microscope to see them well, we can take a cast of a leaf surface and look at that, using either a clip-on or even a hand lens!

The cast is usually called ‘a peel’, and last century, peels were made with stuff called collodion. Now, there’s a simpler way. All you need is some clear nail polish, some sticky tape and a glass slide. Choose a leaf: it seems that most leaves work, but not Camellia, and leaves without hairs on their lower surface are best (use the hairy ones for Looking at leaves!).

Using a small amount of clear nail polish, paint a thin strip on the lower surface, about 1 cm wide and 3 cm long (accurate measures aren’t really important).

The tape, loaded with nail polish, is ready to go on the microscope slide.

Leave the nail polish to dry for about 10 minutes, and then lay a strip of clear sticky tape over the nail polish. When you lift the tape off, the polish will come with it, and there will be a perfect cast of the leaf surface on the lower side. When you attach the tape to a glass slide, you are ready.
  

Above, you can see two views of a peel from the lower surface of a bay leaf, at x100 and x400 (the inset).

Stomates let carbon dioxide in and oxygen out. They also let water vapour escape, so plants need to control their stomates, which are very tiny, about 0.05 mm (1/20 mm) across, so you won’t see them with the naked eye. Still, once you know what you are looking for, you can see them with a good hand lens, but only as closely-packed dots.

Sometimes research is just trying out ideas, and that was the case when I tried looking for stomates on fishbone fern. They are indeed there, but another form of scientific research involves reading ‘the literature’, the things other scientists have seen, noticed or discovered. That revealed that other people had already seen fern stomates. I found it has clear stomates on the under-side.
 
Another literature search told me that the very best plant for this exercise is Tradescantia pallida, a garden favourite with purple leaves, and one that grows easily from cuttings. Here on the left is what you can see of Tradescantia pallida with a clip-on at x15 and x65 (in the inset). Then I reached for a microscope, and the results are on the right. The same ‘peel’ is now seen through a high-end monocular microscope, at x40, x100 and x400. This is better!

 

Once you see this, the clip-on and hand lens views will make sense. Each stomate looks like two fat sausages (or lips) lying side by side: when they curve around, the stomatal pore opens and gases go in and out. The stomate is made up of two guard cells: these are the ‘lips’ of the ‘mouth’, but in Tradescantia pallida, there are two other cells, one at each end, making a rectangle.
 

It turns out that you can see the stomates on the plant’s actual leaf with a clip-on, if you know what you are doing! The shot above is not a peel: it is the actual plant that is under a clip-on. The first shot is with no digital zoom, the second is with full zoom. Look for the pale squares. This view is looking at the leaf itself, with reflected light. The stomates are the pale square shapes. The stomates are very visible at x60, but you can even see them with a hand lens offering x10, if you know what you are looking for.
 

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Looking at leaves

 

Almost all the flowering plants have leaves. A few have phyllodes or cladodes, types of stem that work like leaves. Apart from that, there is a huge amount of variation to look for. They also have a few things in common. Most of the photosynthesis in a plant, the work of food-making, happens in the leaves.

The pictures above show a member of the pea family called Bossiaea (pronounced ‘bossier’). They are hard to find where I live, and these are the best shots I have. Notice how the leaves are reduced to little scales, poking out from the sides of the flattened stem, which is called a cladode.
 
Leaves also have openings called stomates, which we will come to later. Most leaves are green because of the chlorophyll in them. Chlorophyll is the molecule plants use to capture the sun’s energy to drive photosynthesis. Some leaves are coloured because they contain other pigments that hide the chlorophyll.

Old leaves get their colours because plants break down the chemicals in the leaves and try to take back as much goodness as possible before the leaves fall off. The autumn colours are leftovers. Most leaves have different upper and lower surfaces, but try to find a top or a bottom on a gum leaf!

Most leaves are free to wave around in the breeze, catching as much sunlight as possible, but gum leaves hang down vertically, which is why the two sides are identical.
 

Image credit: based on a Wikipedia Commons image, Leaf Tissue Structure by Zephyris.

You would never see the picture above under the microscope: it is built up from different views under high-powered microscopes. Ignore the names, but note that there are openings into the leaf, and air spaces inside. The chloroplasts inside the cells are the places where photosynthesis happens.

She-oak 'needles' are really stems that have the leaves stuck onto them. At each 'joint', there are leaf tips sticking out. Some leaves have hairs on them

Blady grass is found in many parts of the world, and its leaves can cut your skin because they have silica hairs, which are like spikes of glass.

There are other leaves that are furry. 

And then there are the stomates... 

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A neat microscope camera

 

 

 

This is my review of a neat little toy that I came across while writing this book. I went into some technicalities which I think are sufficiently explained, but they aren’t essential to readers here. I have my reservations about this gadget as a tool, but I recommend it as an informative toy for youngsters.

Mine seems to have no brand, but it is a camera, sold by various suppliers as a “digital microscope”, and it comes with a USB cable. Mine cost me about $26 on eBay, and it came minus the software, but the suppliers promptly gave me a link so I could get amcap.exe (for Windows). On my MacBook, I just use Photo Booth to capture the images.

I got another one from Amazon, but there seem to be many versions out there: just enter USB microscope into your search engine.

The camera looks like this: the USB lead delivers the power to light up the LEDs. The right-hand shot shows the cicada shell that was being taken in the middle shot. As you can see, the pictures are sharp and clear, but the gadget comes with deceptive labelling.
 
On the carton, there are magnifications as high as x1600, while this one is only claimed to be x1000, and on the gadget, we are told we can change between x40 and x1000. This is all rubbish! I decided to test this, using the handy scale that came with the gadget, and below this are the two extremes that I could obtain.

A few technicalities here: the camera only delivers 640 x 480 pixels, and the images are reported to be at 96 dpi (dots per inch), which means the images ought to be about 170 x 128 mm, but setting my simple software program to “actual size”, I get an image that is 200 x 150 mm on the screen. This is near enough, and it means that the images above show magnifications of x18 and x40, near enough.
 

Of course, if I put that image on a huge screen, the magnification would be more, but things get blurry, as the simulation above shows. Still, this “digital microscope” is a cheap, simple and interesting place to begin.

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Magnification and scale

Microscopists talk about resolution, not magnification, but I will start with magnification, to avoid getting bogged down. The next four pictures show parts of the same millimetre scale at four levels of magnification, but remember that as I write this, I am looking at the images on a screen where each A4 page is three times as wide as a real A4page: if you read this on your phone or in print, things may be smaller. In other words, be careful what you believe!

The first two pictures below were taken with the Open Camera app on my Android tablet, held steady, about 50 mm away, the first at normal setting, and the second one at maximum digital zoom.
 

 

Length of ruler shown: 57 mm.
 
Length of ruler shown: 13.2 mm, but it is more blurry.

The next two were taken with a GoPro attached to my tablet, first with no digital zoom, and then at maximum digital zoom.

  
 Length shown: 9 mm
 

Length shown: 3.3 mm

On my computer screen, each image is 300 mm wide, and the ranges are as shown beneath each shot. On my big screen, I see magnifications for the four images above of about x5, x23, x33 and x91 — but the magnification you see will be different.

Notice how the pictures get less sharp as we magnify more. This is an example of how you trade off magnification and clarity. With other screens, the magnification is determined by how and where you are viewing the image.

I probably should say something about the little camera that I have been using! 

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Looking at dust

The photos here were taken with a real microscope, and with home-level gear, you may not see as much: it is still worth doing, because any dust collection will contain all sorts of surprises. With a good microscope, you may be able to identify a few pollen grains as well (and we will come back to pollen at some point, later on).

You will need sticky tape and a microscope slide. If you don’t have any glass microscope slides, pieces of the clear polystyrene cases that come with CDs will do just as well, and so will flat pieces of clear plastic chocolate boxes, but slides are better.

Look for dust under beds, on outside or inside windowsills, on floors and carpets, even sitting on the tops of books. For my example shots, I sampled my lounge room floor, my desk (which is rarely dusted), and a Venetian blind. 
 

Dust from my desk, seen through a monocular microscope at three magnifications.

You can collect dust from anywhere, by pressing a piece of sticky tape onto the dusty surface to collect a sample of the material you found there. Stick the tape down onto the slide, and you’re ready to look at the dust, but expect a few mysteries...
 

Above, you can see dust particles from my lounge room, taken with a real microscope. Floor dust may include fibres from clothes, food scraps, bits of tiny dead animals that have fallen apart, mineral grains, flakes of human skin and hair, fragments of paper, pollen grains and tiny bits of rotted leaves.

The dust may have been picked up by the wind and whirled around, mixed with fragments of food and soot particles. As you zoom in, so you begin to see new and enchanting details that were hidden at lower magnifications. You will only find what is hidden there if you search! Here is some dusty cobweb. 
 

When you look closely at things, any sign of order, any regular pattern like the helical strands of fine web or a series of branches usually means that a living thing is involved. Patterns like this are the sorts of signs a spacecraft, flying past a planet, would seek out, when they scan for extra-terrestrial life.

Computer monitor screens attract dust, as I noticed, one sunny winter Sunday morning. I used sticky tape to sample it, and then made an odd discovery: blue fibres! Below, are two shots at x40 to the left. The rightmost one is at x100. The curved thread across the middle was bright blue!

With a bit of experimentation, I discovered that the blue was a trick of the light, and that it came from slanting sunlight shining on the slide at an angle, because when I blocked the sunlight with my hand, the blue disappeared. I have a theory about what caused it, but I’m not sure, and I’m not saying!
Things to look out for in dust:
*  Flakes of skin or hair, food scraps;
*  Tiny dead mites or their fragments;
*  Mineral dust; threads from clothes;
*  Spider web, bits of plants: just keep looking!

But does ‘x40’ or ‘x100’ really mean what it says? Let’s look at the word ‘magnification’ more carefully.

That topic comes next. 

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Looking at sand

 

Get used to it: many of my shots have a 50-cent coin for scale: the coin is 32 mm across, and each edge is 8 mm long.

To study sand, you only need a pinch, like this picture. The coins in many of my pictures are there as a scale.

Every grain of sand has a history. The average sand grain takes many hundreds of millions of years to lose 10% of its weight by rubbing, but it slowly becomes rounded. Even so, a sand grain moving on the bottom of a river loses 10 million molecules each time it rolls over.

We won’t run out of sand though, no matter how much the grains wear away. In 1959, a geologist calculated that all through the long geological past, each second, the number of quartz grains on the planet increased by 1,000 million! Look at what you have.

Sand is made up of light-coloured rock fragments, right? Not really: take a look, even under a hand lens, and you will start to see differences.

Look out for these:
*  Look to see if the grains are angular or rounded;
*  Squeaky sand (an obsession of mine since 1947!);
*  Look to see how many different kinds of grain there are;
*  Look to see how much the sand grains are uniform in size.

From the left: sand from a bush track in Sydney; squeaky sand from Rennies beach; sand with shell grit from Coller's Beach; and hind-dune sand from Piha near Auckland, NZ.

Next, we will look at leaves. 

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Starting with a hand lens

As I explained in Embiggening, there is a right way and a wrong way to use a lens. The real Sherlock Holmes would have known this, but the actors who played him don’t. For the best results, you need to hold the lens close to your eye, and move the object towards you until you see it in clear focus. With the lens near your eye, you will find there is a small flat zone where everything is in focus.

Photographers call this area the focal plane. It is flat and lies at the exact distance of best focus. Anything above or below this level will be out of focus and blurred. When you hold the lens close to your eye, the things you are looking at appear less distorted if they are in the focal plane. Note that this applies in all aspects of looking at small things.

Any hand lens will help, but the best sort is the two-lens variety, lower left in the pictures above (and also on the right). In that right-hand picture, look at the size of the image where the lenses overlap. Each lens magnifies, and together, they give around x20 (meaning a magnification of 20 times).

For field work, you need a folding hand lens, or jeweller’s loupe. You can buy these at natural history shops, camera shops and telescope shops. A web search on <jeweller loupe site:.au> will find people selling reliable loupes from about $10 or $15 upwards.

For about $30, you can get a lens advertised as x30 and x60: I have one of those, and it seems good, but you don’t quite get the claimed magnification. You never do, with cheaper optical gadgets.
 

The main benefit from these new lenses is the light. The shots on the right were taken with a similar power clip-on. Here, you see a thumb print and a hairy leaf, taken with a clip-on.

Get to know your hand lens before you start examining living things. Look at your fingertips, cloth, wood, newspaper, stones, leaves and anything else that is in reach. Then look at some leaves and flowers, any insects you can find, and some soil. Once you have mastered the hand lens, why not examine some sand, close up? Microscopes are usually better, but we will get to them later. I will deal with sand next.

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Using a clipon

 

When I was signed up to provide material for the start-up, I was thrown in at the deep end, sent two clip-ons with no instructions.

Most beginners start out, just holding the clipped-on clip-on against something, but I prefer a set-up like this, balancing my phone on several books:   

I added the clipon to my phone, set a skull that was handy in place near the three books, then set the phone and clip on in place over the active lens with camera mode started.

You are looking here at a suture in the skull of a dead rabbit, with a few scraps of soil. 

I found that gentle downward pressure brought the object into sharp focus. This is fine for dead things and never-living things, and you get a result like this, using the camera app on a phone or tablet, once you get the clip-on carefully placed over the phone or tablet lens: here, my placement was a bit to one side.

Try photographing some cloth, first: you can see the weave, and also the fibres that make the thread.

Other things to try: currency notes and coins. I will come back to these later.

 

 

 

 Then try your skin, and some sand, and I will come back to that.

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