Happy birthday, Chris !!

Hello Sunshine !

No flowers here, but great images, impressions from my current life at the university.

And these are electron microscope images from the most amazing little creatures I know: diatoms. They are algae, smaller than the diameter of one of your hairs. They live in rivers and the sea, and make themselves houses of glass. The surface of these glasshouses is most beautiful - and the funny thing: nobody, really nobody, knows how they are doing this. How to make glass in a river, in the sea, when you are small, green and have no oven ? This is one of the secrets of Nature I'd like to find out. Little beauties - there are thousands of them in your hand when you go down to the sea and take a handful of water, Chris, thousands ....

And once again, diatoms. These images I made last year in Santa Barbara, California. They show features of the glass shell of diatoms who used to live in an Austrian waterfall, before I took them with me to the Death Valley and Las Vegas, to the Golden Gate Bridge and to LA. Tough little ones - not a single complaint and they all survived !!
The feature in the image on the left looks like the holy syllable OM written in glass, doesn't it ?! And the man on the right, with eyes, teeth and beard - on 10 micrometers, which is a tenth of the diameter of one of your hairs ....
The beauty of life has no parallel.

One of my two babies - Lausi. 8 years old, adopted from a 86 year old man who couldn't care for him anymore. He is an architect and is always improving his home (i.e. he enjoys to destroy big paper boxes, like here :).

And here, both of them, in silver. Lausi sitting on my knee, Hasi sitting on my finger. She is 10 years old, a clown who talks and sings and whistles.

I shivered when I recorded this image. It shows the Carbon atoms of an area of 1*1 nm^2 (1 nm = 10 to the power of -9 meter = 1 millionth of a millimeter), imaged with my new cute microscope. A dream of so many people, my dream for years, come true here in my lab on a spring afternoon last year !!

This ends your special 2001 birthday show, Chris.

I do hope you enjoyed it !!
Bacio, Ille

Constructed March 28, 2001. Last update March 29, 2001.