First microscope pictures

For Christmas, we bought Reed a new microscope and some goodies to go with it - including blank slides. This morning, after my normal breadmaking, I thought it would be fun to look at the dough and yeast under the microscope. So Reed and I spent a half hour being amateur scientists in our office.

First was a chunk of our bread dough -- flour, salt, water, and yeast, having risen overnight:

Then a bit of dry yeast, which wasn't particularly exciting:

I thought that if we dyed our samples with iodine, they might pop a bit more. The bread dough turned out to be pretty tough to do -- it didn't seem that the iodine really penetrated the mix terribly much. Around the periphery, though, we did get an interesting result -- we all thought it looked very much like a top-down view of a forest:

The yeast, though, was quite interesting:

His microscope isn't setup for taking pictures, so unfortunately the quality isn't great.