Back in Belgium, the scientists looked at the ants under an electron microscope and found that their dense, triangular hair reflects light like a prism, giving them a metallic glint and shielding ...

SEM stands for scanning electron microscope. The SEM is a microscope that uses electrons instead of light to form an image. Since their development in the early 1950's, scanning electron microscopes ...

and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). They discovered that the velvet ant’s cuticle is covered in dense nanostructures — grooves, hollow interiors, and layered lamellae — that scatter ...

Knowledge of the microscopic structure and composition of materials is essential for understanding their properties and designing functional devices. Microscopy techniques based on electrons and X ...