So you have this little algal forest, and in the size of a laptop you can find more than 100 species of algae, mostly microscopic fit hundreds of species of little animals that then feed the fish, so that the system recovers.

And the fish have grazed the algae, so the turf of algae is a little lower.

And the algae give the corals sugar, and the corals give the algae nutrients and protection.

Here's some algae in the foreground ...

It's just a tiny sub substructure, microscopic.

This one disguises itself as floating algae.

The things on the ground are algae.

And it's covered with algae. That's what happens.

So this, for example, is hydrogen generating algae.

Lichens arose as a co op. Fungi married algae ...

If it passes the microscopic test, we go for a collection.

This sediment is 100 percent made up of the shells of microscopic plants.

I used a microscopic shard of diamond to actually carve the actual base.

We have flexible microscopic probes that we can bring down into the body.

So this is the infamous Caulerpa taxifolia, the so called killer algae.

But when it gets too hot, the algae can't make the sugar.

There's no coral, algae growing on it, and the water's pea soup.

In fact, we're probably forming these microscopic cancers all the time in our body.

The first is that we have fossils of algae from 3.5 billion years ago.

Well, it's probably microscopic, and it's never easy to study microscopic things, although the amazing tools that we now have to do that allow us to study things in much greater depth, at much smaller scales than ever before.

Autopsy studies from people who died in car accidents have shown that about 40 percent of women between the ages of 40 and 50 actually have microscopic cancers in their breasts, about 50 percent of men in their 50s and 60s have microscopic prostate cancers, and virtually 100 percent of us, by the time we reach our 70s, will have microscopic cancers growing in our thyroid.

They've been here for billions of years, and what they are are single celled microscopic organisms.

So if these ideas are correct, this is what the ultra microscopic landscape of the universe looks like.

Well, Bob Russell was telling us about his work on nanotubes in his research at the microscopic level.

The use of food micro algae to combat acute malnutrition in humanitarian emergencies and for sustainable development

And unlike traditional architecture, it's a single process that creates both the overall form and the microscopic surface detail.

It runs down the rivers, and it feeds the plankton, the little microscopic plant cells in the coastal water.

The most exciting prospect held out by Venter, however, is a form of algae that can absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use it to create diesel fuel or gasoline. Synthetic Genomics has a 600 million agreement with ExxonMobil to obtain fuel from algae.

Maybe there is a little bit of oxygen from some algae on the beach not far from here.

As we zoom in on one of these purple neurons, we see that its outer membrane is studded with microscopic pores.

Most of the biomass is low on the food chain, the herbivores, the parrotfish, the surgeonfish that eat the algae.

The challenge is to integrate them into the primary health care system, which is also in need of equipment for microscopic diagnosis.

Just an amazing animal, it can change color and texture to match the surroundings. Watch him blend right into this algae.

After a few years, between five and seven years, fish come back, they eat the urchins, and then the algae grow again.

SeaWiFS, scheduled for launch in 1995, is designed to provide global observations of photosynthetic pigment concentrations contained in the microscopic marine plants called phytoplankton.

It accepts algae and detritus in one end, and through this beautiful, glamorous set of stomach organs, out the other end comes cleaner water.

Most of us don't have fungi or algae in our brains, so what is our brain going to do if we put that in?

You have to put in hundreds of microscopic wires to record from little tiny individual neurons ordinary fibers that put out tiny signals that are microvolts.

Here we're going to see one backing into a crevice, and watch his tentacles he just pulls them in, makes them look just like algae.

This is my baseline This is the Mediterranean coast with no fish, bare rock and lots of sea urchins that like to eat the algae.

There's one last elephant in the room, the proteins themselves, which come from algae and bacteria and fungi, and all over the tree of life.

Stresses the benefits of food micro algae as a concrete aid in reducing acute malnutrition in food emergencies and chronic malnutrition among severely disadvantaged populations

So here we are, at a very microscopic scale, swimming around. And I actually realize that cells don't have eyes, but it helps to make it cute.

We end up with things we've heard about before red tides, for example, which are blooms of toxic algae floating through the oceans causing neurological damage.

They start out as small, microscopic nests of cells that can only grow to one half a cubic millimeter in size that's the tip of a ballpoint pen.