Microcosmos: Extreme Close-ups

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