Impressions
Impressions
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Mark and I are now married! Yeahhh. And since December 2008 we are living in Kuala Lumpur.
This is me with our UHV AFM/STM.
It is one of the best microscopes in the world, and we can watch SINGLE atoms with it (more below !!).
And these are electron microscope images from the most amazing little creatures I know: diatoms.
The images were made by one of my most talented friends, Mary Ann Tiffany from San Diego, US.
Diatoms 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 glass houses 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 ofwater.
Just imagine, thousands ....
And once again, diatoms. These images I made in theyear 2k 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. Adopted in 2000 from an 86 year old man who couldn't care for him anymore.
He was an architect and was always improving his home (i.e. he enjoyed to destroy big paper boxes, like here :). Lausi died during his summer 2005
vacations from a heart attack. Thanks for being!
Hasi got a new partner in March 2006. His name is Jocki. He is a lovely bird who is now slowly realizing that he is a bird and not a person. Many parrots are kept alone and develop diseases like feather plucking. A person can never replace a partner for a parrot.
And here, both of them, in silver. Lausi sitting on my knee, Hasi sitting on my finger.
She is wonderful, a clown who talks and sings and whistles.
Hasi having a bath with me in the kitchen. She enjoys sitting on the pipe and having a warm shower from the flower spritz - I have to sit there
and spritz for about half an hour, until my hand nearly falls off, and she still tells me "more". Afterwards, she is so heavy that
she has trouble flying high up in the air and therefore flies across the rooms very close to the floor - making loud flapping noises and making
everything wet :)
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 in the year 2000 !!
One of my ratboys -Waldi. I love to have rats, but the tragedy is that they die so early - they were originally bred for cancer research,
as laboratory animals, and therefore, they carry "cancer genes" in them. I had several lovely rats during the last years, they were all different,
they were all sweet: Fridolin (white), Waldi (grey), Fakidomiti (white and grey), Kitty (black), Hasili (brown) and Lucy (brown) and the Husky boygroup
Gerda, Gundula and Yasmin, the black-white Cassandra and the black Nuki from the geriatric group at the Vienna veterinary university.
In our place, they were living in a huge cage, 2 meters high, 1.26 meters in width,
perfectly equipped for playful smart little creatures like them. They ran and played and jumped and hided and were so lovely and so great.
Sweet babies. Fridolin and Waldi were my first ones. I saved them from being fed to a raven, when I was camel riding northwest of Vienna - and Lucy from an animal experiment laboratory in Vienna.
Before we went to Kuala Lumpur, a wonderful friend of mine, Sissy Gotsbacher, adopted our last rats, Bauchweh and Durchfall.
I never ever will understand how people could do animal experiments on them, and hurt them. They are marvelous animals, tender and nice.
And here a link to some nice poems (mainly in German).
I hope you enjoyed the show !
Constructed March 28, 2001. Last update January 3, 2012.