12 things you’ve (probably) never seen before

“What a Wonderful World,” Louis Armstrong once sang. And indeed, the world is full of wonders. Like all things we’ve never seen before – sometimes they’re even right under our noses. There are a few to admire here. Which ones did you already know?

What we see here is not the Grand Canyon of the southwestern US. We see something that escapes our everyday vision because it is far too small to see with the naked eye: the fissure is actually a micro-crack in the surface with a diameter of only 30 micrometers (that’s 0.03 mm) of twisted steel . The image titled “Microcanyon” comes from Martina Dienstleder, who conducts research at the Austrian Center for Electron Microscopy and Nanoanalysis at the Technical University of Graz. In 2011 she won the FEI Owner Image Contest; FEI was a manufacturer of electron microscopes.

It should of course be noted that images taken with an electron microscope are black and white. This also applies to the “Microcanyon”. However, the microcrack in the steel that Dienstleder saw through the microscope immediately reminded her of a fissure – so she asked her colleague Manuel Paller to color the photo accordingly. The result of this retouching looks deceptively real.

>> More photos from the 2011 FEI Owner Image Contest can be found here.

Gears are a man-made structure; they do not occur in nature. This statement has long been considered correct, but it is not true, as it turned out about ten years ago. The real beetle cicada (Issus coleoptratus), which is native to European parks and gardens, has evolved over the course of its evolution to develop gears that sit on its hind legs and synchronize its movements when jumping. The gears are very small and only present in the nymph stage; That’s probably why they’ve been overlooked for so long. It is an arcuate structure 400 micrometers (0.4 mm) long, each with ten to twelve teeth, located on both thighs near the base of the leg.

The edges of the teeth are rounded at the top so that they do not tear off when they mesh. Unlike industrially manufactured gears, these cricket ‘gear rings’ are asymmetrical; this ensures that movement during jumping can only occur in one direction: forward. The gears lock before the jump and ensure that both legs move in almost perfect sync. Nerve impulses would take too much time and could therefore lead to unwanted angular impulses.

In 2000, a dealer in Fukang in China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region received a piece of stone weighing about 1,000 kilograms. This turned out to be a meteorite, estimated to be 4.5 billion years old – so probably formed at the birth of our solar system. A 20-kilogram piece of the boulder is now at the University of Arizona. The meteorite is a so-called pallasite, which belongs to the stony-iron meteorites. Pallasites consist of olivine crystals embedded in a nickel-iron matrix. They are very rare; Only about one percent of all meteorites are pallasites.

According to new theories, the sparkling chunks are created when an asteroid collides with another celestial body, with molten iron from the projectile’s core mixing with the asteroid’s olivine-rich mantle on impact.

In the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, on the island of Vágar in the Faroe Islands, a strange landscape confuses the eye. There, Lake Sørvágsvatn extends over six kilometers. Cliffs on either side of the water prevent the water from flowing directly into the sea; Instead, the lake flows at the southern end via the Bøsdalaá Current and then into the North Atlantic Ocean via the Bøsdalafossur Waterfall. On some maps it looks like it has more direct access to the sea and is therefore a fjord. However, the level of the lake is 32 meters above sea level.

Seen from a certain angle, the surrounding cliffs give the impression that the lake is much higher above the sea than it actually is. The deepest part of the water is 59 meters below the water surface, 27 meters below sea level.

>> More photos of the lake hanging above the ocean can be found here.

Glasses that are not specifically manufactured for fire protection will shatter due to the heat after a short time in the event of a fire – usually long before they reach the melting temperature. That’s why falling glass is one of the biggest hazards when a building is on fire. However, in the event of a particularly intense fire, the glass residue left in the frame may melt.

However, the melting point is not as clear as for water, where ice becomes liquid at 0 °C. Glass deforms at a temperature of 540 °C, but an oven in which glass is to be melted must reach a temperature of no more than 1000 °C. Experts therefore do not speak of a melting point when it comes to glass, but rather of a transformation area.

They are a delicate symbol of transience, of dreams that burst: soap bubbles. They look beautiful when frozen. You can make such delicate ice balls yourself if it is cold enough: add a little sugar to the soapy water and carefully place the bubbles on a soft surface. Temperatures below -10 °C are ideal; but the colder the better. The bubbles only freeze during flight from about -25 °C. However, there should be no wind and no snow, otherwise they will break too quickly.

The ice crystals grow from the bottom up across the sphere, as you can see in the video above. This is due to the different surface tension on the ball: it is lower at the bottom than at the top, which means that the soapy water flows upwards in the direction of the greater tension (Marangoni effect) and pulls the ice crystals with it.

Like all whales, sperm whales are mammals: they have no gills, but breathe through their lungs. However, during their dives the animals can remain underwater for up to 90 minutes. Their deep sleep, in which they float vertically just below the surface of the water, lasts only that long. They then wake up and return to the water’s surface to breathe.

It appears that both hemispheres of the brain are asleep in sperm whales. Dolphins, which are closely related to sperm whales, doze with only half of their brain asleep in what is known as hemilateral sleep. The other hemisphere remains awake and ensures that the animals surface in time to breathe.

When high-voltage electrical discharges occur on or in insulating material, so-called Lichtenberg figures can arise. These are tree-, fern-, or star-shaped patterns that exhibit fractal properties (fractals are objects in which the whole resembles its components). Such patterns can also appear on the skin of people struck by lightning; They are produced by red blood cells driven by the secretion from the capillaries to the outer layer of the skin, the epidermis; these patterns usually disappear again.

Christmas atmosphere under the scanning electron microscope: The spherical structures in this photo look like Christmas baubles, some of which are still stuck with snowflakes. The sight was photographed in November 2011 by Kerstin Brille, a research assistant at the Institute of Chemistry of Chemnitz University of Technology.

Glasses and her colleagues were working on making a microsieve. Such filters have small pores whose size is in the micro- and nanometer range. For example, micro sieves are used for the gentle cell separation of blood. Glasses first covered small glass beads with a polymer, hardened the resin on them and removed the beads. Poorly soluble salts were deposited in a pore of the microsieve, which the glasses then discovered under the microscope.

The traditional red Routemaster double-deckers have long been part of the cityscape of the British capital London. Since 2005 they only operate on two routes; otherwise they were replaced by modern low-floor buses. In 1923, the first double-decker buses appeared on the streets of London. And according to police regulations, these vehicles had to undergo a rollover test, in which the bus tilted 28 degrees without tipping over. Sandbags on the upper deck simulated the 60 passengers.

The physical basis of the test has to do with the center of gravity of the body and the sum of gravity and centrifugal forces acting on it. The direction in which these forces act must be within the standing area. On a bus, this is the area that extends within the points where the wheels touch the ground. Therefore, the buses were heavy below and light above, and for the same reason the number of passengers on the upper deck was limited. Of course, the drivers also had to avoid tight corners at high speeds.

Marine mammals sometimes use their front flippers to grab prey. This behavior was not known in reptiles; Biologists assumed that these animals only used their fins for swimming and crawling. But a snapshot taken by Rich Carey in the Gulf of Thailand shattered this theory: Carey photographed a green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas), a mosaic jellyfish (Thysanostoma thysanura) holds.

The jellyfish, whose pale top at first glance resembles the turtle’s bloated belly, is wedged between its fins. The scene almost seems like a caring hug, but in reality it is a fatal event for the jellyfish: the turtle holds it to eat it. Video footage has now revealed that turtles use their fins in a variety of ways, including striking their prey to stun them.

Bismuth (Bi) – also called “bismuth” or formerly “bismuth” – is an inconspicuous metal that has a silvery sheen with a pinkish tinge and is relatively soft and brittle. One of its properties is that it is one of the few materials that expands when it solidifies. It shares this density anomaly with water and some elements such as polonium or tellurium.

However, the crystals that form from the melting of almost pure bismuth under certain laboratory conditions are certainly not inconspicuous. They have an unusual, staircase-like shape and glow different colors when they react with oxygen. The rhombohedral crystal structure is characterized by extremely closely packed double layers – the shortest distance between two such layers is only 15 percent greater than the shortest distance between two atoms within a double layer.