Philadelphia’s diatom archive is a way, way, wayback machine

Diatoms are pretty cool.

Their frustules (shells) are nanostructured pure amorphous silica, which gives them interesting and possibly useful optical properties:

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/fd/d0fd0...

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2018.003...

Some pictures of the frustrules, with some words and diagrams too:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2018.0012...

If you want to see an elemental map of a Diatom you can take a peak at some data collected on one with my company's new instruments.

https://zerok.com/assets/slides/MM2022_Vendor_Tutorial.pdf

slide 28

Background: This is SIMS data (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_ion_mass_spectrometr...). We have a new instrument can perform these analyses at much higher resolution than has been possible historically.

Diatoms are of the more enjoyable things to look at through a microscope. Google Arts and Culture ran a post on this collection a while back that has some really good photos: https://artsandculture.google.com/story/diatoms-of-the-acade...

Diatoms are single cell algae.

Since diatoms exhibit movement, reproduction, production of food, metabolism, etc they are characterized as living organisms.