Hello, my name is Murray Gans. I'm the scanning electron microscope lab coordinator at Eastfield College in Mesquite Texas. During the day I like to take some breaks and one of my favorite places to go is out in one of the courtyards here on campus and the other day I'm sitting out in next to this planter and I look over at some of the rosemary that's there and realize my gosh it's covered in spider webs. So if this if we have so many spider webs here we're the heck are the spiders. So what I did was I took one of these sprigs of rosemary, made myself very smelly too, back to the laboratory and put it in the dissecting scope and was able to find this little guy and he's actually quite small as you can see. He's a type of spider called a Theridian. He's like a cobweb spider and that's a really nice picture of him right there and then I got to thinking well why is the rosemary so smelly so in addition looking at the spider I went ahead and an image some of the leaves. This is the upper surface of the leaf of the rosemary and you can see that there's some some glands here that contain lots of oils. The bottom surface is even more interesting. If you look right here the leaf is actually curled around. Let's magnify this a little bit and take a look. Really nice image here. A lot of the glands contain that really nice smell that makes rosemary such a good spice magnification even more. Then I said well what the heck let's get out the scanning electron microscope and see what these leaves look like. So here's the outer surface of the leaf and you can see that what the scan electron microscope does for us here's it gives us lots of depth of field and really really nice resolution. Of course we lose the color but if you don't see color we can go back to that. But anyway so here you can start to see on the outside a few of these little glands that contain the aromatic oils. Now if we go look at the inside again you can see where the leaf is curled over here you've got a mid-rib here and you can see lots of these glands down in here. That's at 24 times magnification. This is at 70 times magnification. What's really cool about this picture but the side is the fact that you can see all these glands containing oil is that's part of the spider silk right there that that little spider was actually was actually spinning to stay on the on the leaf. Here's a little bit higher magnification. This is 99x and again you can see the spider silk there and you get some hint down here of the stomata on the bottom of the leaf where gas exchange occurs. So here's a closer look at the stomata on the bottom of the leaf. This is at 1000x. The shinyness you see here on these little glands is actually a phenomenon called charging. It's not really that bright. This is what it looks like. But you can see the stomata here under the leaf and then a final version here. This is at 2490 magnification and you can see this stomata is slightly open. That one is slightly closed. I just want to show you this because this was kind of an unexpected thing for me to find. And remember biology is everywhere. All you have to do is look. If you if you would like to use the scopes at Eastville College free of charge to get a closer look at your your world just give us a give us a call.