Kermit the Frog famously said that it isn't easy being green, and in Living at Micro Scale David Dusenbery shows that it isn't easy being small--existing at the size of, say, a rotifer, a tiny multicellular animal just at the boundary between the visible and the microscopic. "Imagine," he writes, "stepping off a curb and waiting a week for your foot to hit the ground." At that scale, we would be small enough to swim inside the letter O in the word "rotifer." What are the physical consequences of life at this scale? How do such organisms move, identify prey and predators and (if...
Kermit the Frog famously said that it isn't easy being green, and in Living at Micro Scale David Dusenbery shows that it isn't easy being sm...