The following pictures are from the book Microcosmos by Brandon Broll, which is going to be published this month.

South African Broll, who specialises in science and health writing, said: 'The book will show readers the beauty of what is too small to see with the naked eye.

Taken by over 30 'microscopists' using a variety of powerful microscopes, Microcosmos charters a voyage through a miniature world showing the unlikeliest parts of our lives in minuscule detail.

Readers can view extreme close-ups of items including ladies' tights, the surface of the human tongue and the beautiful scales on butterfly wings.

The spectacular visuals were captured using a variety of traditional light-based microscopes, powerful scanning electron microscopes which bombard the subject with electrons and build the image using a computer and transmission electro microscopes.

Holding steady: The wood or heathland ant holding a microchip in its toothed (serrated) mandibles. The wood ant is social, and acts as a slave for the blood-red ant Formica sanguine

Another world: A clutch of butterfly eggs sits on a raspberry plant

Vegetable world: Actually looking like you would imagine it to, this is the head of a cauliflower

Cosmic: What may look like a filmmaker's vision of an apocalyptic world is actually a cigarette paper. The blue crystals are additives that keep the lit cigarette burning by producing oxygen

Colourful clutter: Magnified 22million times, this microscopic photo is of household dust containing long hairs such as cat fur, twisted synthetic and woollen fibres, a pollen grain, plant, serrated insect scales and insect remains. It comes from Microcosmos, a new book which takes readers into a world of extreme close-ups

Raised eyebrow: Eyelash hairs growing from the surface of human skin.... magnified 50 times

Enlarged 21 times: This colourful flower is actually of fimbriae, a fringe of tissue, of a Fallopian tube

The tip of a hummingbird's tongue

Contagious: A human head louse clings to a strand of hair

Electronic wizardry: This photo - or, more precisely, scanning electron micrograph (SEM) - is of the surface of a silicon microchip

You wouldn't want to meet a mosquito that looked like this. Fortunately, the insect's head has here been magnified 160 times

A corroded surface of a rusty metal nail appears like an alien environment when enlarged 600 times

The weave of ladies' nylon stocking tights

Scales from the wing of a peacock butterfly

Magnified seed: Perhaps not as surprising as some of the photos, this microscopic shot is of human sperm

Close encounter: Nylon hooks and loops interweave to form the material more commonly known as Velcro