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Secret world of insects revealed in fascinating science photos from the Natural News Forensic Food Lab

Saturday, August 24, 2013
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)
Tags: insects, microscopic photos, Health Ranger

Insects

(NaturalNews) When I'm working in the Natural News Forensic Food Lab, I like to put the equipment to use for much more than just food investigations. Recently, I gathered some insects and brought them to the lab to take a closer look. At 200X magnification, fascinating details emerge.

What you see below is a collection of photos (and a video) resulting from my "insect investigation" at the lab. You'll see the tiny shingles that make up a butterfly wing and the structural support columns of a dragonfly wing.

Also check out the amazing grasshopper foot, the dragonfly head and the close-up of a scorpion's stinger, showing the poison reservoir that's pumped into the insect's victims.

You'll also see the stinger of a wasp, the claw arm of a scorpion and much more.

After checking out the photos, watch the video at the bottom of this article to see even more examples, including microscopic video of a tick, complete with its blood-siphoning "mouth" still in place.

For the record, no insects were harmed or killed to take these photos, except for the ticks which we fed to the chickens. Yumm! (All the other insects were already dead.)

Here are the photos:

Microscopic insect photos by Mike Adams

Have you ever seen a butterfly head up close?



These look like shingles on a roof, but they're actually the structures of a butterfly wing:



This photo shows the structural support "beams" that hold a butterfly wing together:



Butterfly wing "shingles" come on all sorts of colors. In this photo, you can actually see the "transition" colors between yellow and black. How does the butterfly know to create shingles with transition colors? How does the DNA even know what to build between "yellow" and "black?"



Here's a less-magnified image so you can see the overall structure of wing shingles and support struts:



Amazing engineering! This dragonfly wing uses a combination of 4-sided and 5-sided polygons to create an ultra-strong yet extremely thin wing:



Here's the body of a grasshopper showing two different kinds of wings. The "outer" wing is tougher and built for camouflage. The "inner" wing is engineered solely for flight and is thinner and semi-transparent:



Here's an extreme close-up of a grasshopper foot, shot against the underside of a leaf. Ever wonder how grasshoppers can hang on to everything so well? Here's the answer:



Here's the head of a moth. It's covered with a combination of "shingles" and tiny hairs:



This image of a moth appears to be blurry, but it's actually in sharp focus. The intent of the moth shingles is to appear "fuzzy" to potential predators. This is part of the stealth strategy of the moth. These structures, by the way, also have "audio camouflage" features that makes them appear fuzzy to the echolocation of bats. In essence, Mother Nature was building stealth aircraft millions of years before the Pentagon:



Here's the wing of a small yellow wasp:



And here's the eye. Notice that the lack of a pupil eliminates the need for focusing the eye. Instead, the wasp eye has thousands of tiny visual inputs that assemble a very wide view of the world in the wasp's mind:



The wasp's foot is engineered to allow it to easily grip things, much like the grasshopper foot:



Here's the "business end" of the wasp. If you look carefully, you can see the tiny stinger:



The underside of this wasp looks a lot like the "Predator" from that movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger:



If you get "stung" by a scorpion, you're actually being injected with nature's hypodermic needle. The large bulbous sac contains the poison, and once the stinger penetrates your skin, muscles squeeze the sac, injecting the poison almost instantly. I've been stung by this same species of scorpion, and it feels like somebody drove a nail through you:



Here's how the scorpion holds on to its victims, which are mostly other small insects. Scorpions normally try to avoid humans and will typically only sting people out of self defense:



See the video:


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About the author:Mike Adams (aka the "Health Ranger") is a best selling author (#1 best selling science book on Amazon.com) and a globally recognized scientific researcher in clean foods. He serves as the founding editor of NaturalNews.com and the lab science director of an internationally accredited (ISO 17025) analytical laboratory known as CWC Labs. There, he was awarded a Certificate of Excellence for achieving extremely high accuracy in the analysis of toxic elements in unknown water samples using ICP-MS instrumentation. Adams is also highly proficient in running liquid chromatography, ion chromatography and mass spectrometry time-of-flight analytical instrumentation.

Adams is a person of color whose ancestors include Africans and Native American Indians. He's also of Native American heritage, which he credits as inspiring his "Health Ranger" passion for protecting life and nature against the destruction caused by chemicals, heavy metals and other forms of pollution.

Adams is the founder and publisher of the open source science journal Natural Science Journal, the author of numerous peer-reviewed science papers published by the journal, and the author of the world's first book that published ICP-MS heavy metals analysis results for foods, dietary supplements, pet food, spices and fast food. The book is entitled Food Forensics and is published by BenBella Books.

In his laboratory research, Adams has made numerous food safety breakthroughs such as revealing rice protein products imported from Asia to be contaminated with toxic heavy metals like lead, cadmium and tungsten. Adams was the first food science researcher to document high levels of tungsten in superfoods. He also discovered over 11 ppm lead in imported mangosteen powder, and led an industry-wide voluntary agreement to limit heavy metals in rice protein products.

In addition to his lab work, Adams is also the (non-paid) executive director of the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center (CWC), an organization that redirects 100% of its donations receipts to grant programs that teach children and women how to grow their own food or vastly improve their nutrition. Through the non-profit CWC, Adams also launched Nutrition Rescue, a program that donates essential vitamins to people in need. Click here to see some of the CWC success stories.

With a background in science and software technology, Adams is the original founder of the email newsletter technology company known as Arial Software. Using his technical experience combined with his love for natural health, Adams developed and deployed the content management system currently driving NaturalNews.com. He also engineered the high-level statistical algorithms that power SCIENCE.naturalnews.com, a massive research resource featuring over 10 million scientific studies.

Adams is well known for his incredibly popular consumer activism video blowing the lid on fake blueberries used throughout the food supply. He has also exposed "strange fibers" found in Chicken McNuggets, fake academic credentials of so-called health "gurus," dangerous "detox" products imported as battery acid and sold for oral consumption, fake acai berry scams, the California raw milk raids, the vaccine research fraud revealed by industry whistleblowers and many other topics.

Adams has also helped defend the rights of home gardeners and protect the medical freedom rights of parents. Adams is widely recognized to have made a remarkable global impact on issues like GMOs, vaccines, nutrition therapies, human consciousness.

In addition to his activism, Adams is an accomplished musician who has released over a dozen popular songs covering a variety of activism topics.

Click here to read a more detailed bio on Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, at HealthRanger.com.

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