See Inside the Microscopic World

Rosie Dickins grew up in England and Hong Kong. An avid reader, she always loved dreaming up her own stories. After studying literature at Oxford University, art in Paris and plenty of travelling, she settled in London, where she works for Usborne Publishing. She has written over a hundred children's books, from award-winning information books to fiction.

1 A Secret World
There is a secret world of teeny-tiny things that you can't see with your eyes alone. Your eyes can't see anything much smaller than the thickness of a human hair. Microscopes help you to look at things up to a hundred thousand times smaller than your eyes can see. Powerful hi-tech electron microscopes can see things a hundred million times smaller than a speck of dust.

2 All About You
Using a microscope, you can see the structure of your body from your skin, blood and bones to microbes that live inside you. Friendly bacteria lives all over and inside your body and keeps you healthy. Some tiny creatures that live on people aren't always welcome like mites, threadworms and head lice. Germs are microbes that make you ill if they get inside you. Washing your hands with soap kills many microbes.

3 Pond Life
Ponds are full of green growing things known as algae and algae-like bacteria which give off oxygen - a gas in the air that we need to breathe. Algae also provide food and homes for many tiny water creatures like water fleas, amoebas, water bears and euglena.

4 Backyard Safari
Billions of tiny creatures can be found on a handful of soil and some can't be seen without a microscope. These tiny creatures mix up the soil, keep it healthy and help plants grow. Microbes in the soil break down waste and turn it into plant food.

5 Micro Monsters
Microbes like bacteria cause deadly diseases. Some diseases are caused by tiny parasites living in other animals. The smallest microbes are known as viruses which only really come to life when they infect someone. An example of a virus is the Corona virus which causes COVID. Vaccines and antibiotics are used to fight off disease-causing microbes.

6 Micro Marvels
Microbes help in making food like bread, cakes, yogurt and cheese. Food made with bacteria is sometimes called fermenting. Our tummies have friendly bacteria in them and eating food with microbes keep their numbers up and make the food easier to digest. As the number of people on the planet grows, microbes may be the answer in cleaning up the waste that we produce.

7 Micro Materials
Using microscopes help us explain astonishing like how geckos walk on ceilings, how snowflakes are formed and how computers 'think'.

8 Did You Know?
Microbes know as extremophiles could cope in space as they thrive in conditions that are deadly to other animals. Bacteria can break down plastic bottles and turn them into vanilla. In Ancient Egypt, rotten bread, which was full of fungus and good bacteria, was used to treat wounds and infections.

9 Micrscope Timeline