[Mezla PigDog]

I love electron microscopes! Not really a discussion, but more a "ain't science cool" thread

Pollen


Snow


Glucose


Spider


Blood cells

[Stalker]

that is cool, of course.

Though spidey there is scary. I don't like even small ones, but magnify it.... gah.

integrated circuit, which looks like more...

This post has been edited by Stalker: 20 March 2009 - 03:33 AM

[Mezla PigDog]

I found another good one! This one is a type of virus called a "bacteriophage". How mental is that?! It clamps onto a bacterial cell with it's leg bits and then injects it's RNA (like DNA) from the head bit, down into the bacterial cell to infect it! Then the RNA produces loads more little spidery structures and they kill the cell by bursting out of it and go on to infect more!

This post has been edited by Mezla PigDog: 20 March 2009 - 03:33 AM

[HoosierDaddy]

And on that note, I'm never visiting this thread again.

[Mezla PigDog]

HoosierDaddy, on Mar 19 2009, 11:35 PM, said:

And on that note, I'm never visiting this thread again.

Philistine!

[Mezla PigDog]

Sub-chromosomal structures showing that DNA is packed differently in cells with different jobs. It is folded more tightly or more loosly depending on the genes that are needed in each specialised cell



Herpes virus!!

This post has been edited by Mezla PigDog: 20 March 2009 - 03:54 AM

[Cold Iron]

Thread of the day

+rep

[Aptorian]

Mezla PigDog, on Mar 20 2009, 04:23 AM, said:

I love electron microscopes! Not really a discussion, but more a "ain't science cool" thread

Pollen


Snow


Glucose

It's images like the above that makes me think there has to be some kind of devine creator making small stuff look that cool. But then I read the bibble and I know I'm just being silly.

[Traveller]

Amazing pics and thread, Mez...!

Got any moars?

That bacteriophage looks incredible that close-up.

[Mezla PigDog]

Aptorian, on Mar 20 2009, 03:18 AM, said:

It's images like the above that makes me think there has to be some kind of devine creator making small stuff look that cool. But then I read the bibble and I know I'm just being silly.

It makes me think otherwise because you can see that most things are made up of small repeating and/or symmetrical units which leads to them being more simple to construct.

I'm not such a fan of these falsely coloured ones (like when you realise all of the Hubble pictures are falsely coloured, it takes away some of the awe) but this is Staphyloccocus aureus, the species that can turn into MRSA and what I am working on later today in the lab! 2 cells, approximately 1um in diameter (0.0000001m). I like all of the extra-cellular filaments which are polysaccharides (sugar chains) that they use for sticking to stuff.




All these pics are just from t'internet! The crazy thing about the bacteriophage is that it looks like an animal but viruses are just made of RNA/DNA, sugar and a few proteins. They have no nervous system to speak off. It should look more alien.

[Cause]

That spider, is it actually a dust mite or something? cant really be a spider can it?

[Menandore]

Awesome pics!

Although I now feel like a slight idiot because I didn't know snow actually looked like that! I though that was just kinda made up (like drawing <3 shape for a heart). I have learned something new today

[Mezla PigDog]

Cause, on Mar 20 2009, 10:44 AM, said:

That spider, is it actually a dust mite or something? cant really be a spider can it?

Dust mite. They look different to me. I do some experiments on housedust as it is related to asthma. Dust mite poo is a considerable headache in my professional life

[Aptorian]

How big is the spider in the above pic if it's featured under an electron microscope? Pinhead size? How small do they get?

[Mezla PigDog]

Aptorian, on Mar 20 2009, 11:22 AM, said:

How big is the spider in the above pic if it's featured under an electron microscope? Pinhead size? How small do they get?

Beats me. It doesn't have a scale on the picture. Electron microscope magnification levels range from 5,000x to 1,000,000x I think so the spider could easily be smaller than 1mm. Dustmites are a lot smaller than that since you can't see the millions that crawl around in your bed, living off your dead skin.....eeeuuwww. The vacuum cleaner is their mortal foe.

[Sparkimus]

So....egg like herpes makes me want to not eat breakfast anymore.

[stone monkey]

I like the bacteriophage one. I've not seen a picture of one of those at that high a magnification before. I read a paper, not all that long ago, on the structure of the hypodermic syringe style apparatus they use to inject their RNA through the cell wall. Very cool. I'm intrigued by the idea that when things are operating at that small a scale a lot of their structures turn out to be analogous to mechanical devices (Just built out of atoms instead of cogs, gears and wheels etc.)

I'm more of an astronomical photo person myself, the scale of the things being imaged just blows my mind. So I'm not sure I agree with you over the whole false colouration issue in Hubble images, the colours tell us something. I mean, the universe is a fairly dull place if you're only limited to the spectrum of visible light. The really cool and interesting stuff is happening at other wavelengths. And also electron micrographs show things that it's impossible to image using visible light, as the photons are too "big"; so for all intents and purposes they're really false colour images too, only in black and white. But that's just me being pedantic...

So from one extreme to the other. I just love this picture:



It's a supernova remnant (Tycho's Star to be precise, which went up in the 1500s) and is taken in X-rays: the higher the colour in the spectrum the hotter (more energetic) the gas is - and given this is an X-ray image, the gas is really hot, the blue shockwave is at 20 million Kelvin. And it's much bigger than the solar system.

And this picture will forever fill me with joy...



The small thing is Io, it's 3600 km across and is orbiting Jupiter at about 421,000 km... And human beings sent something way out there to take that picture. How cool is that?

This post has been edited by stone monkey: 20 March 2009 - 05:31 PM

[Mezla PigDog]

Both very cool!

I agree the coloured images are relevant but they do take away from the pure science of it by adding the element of artistic license. I mean, who chooses the colour range? Which colour is assigned to what wavelength and why and under what cultural bias? It adds the element of the pictures being moulded into something that is within our realm of understanding. Obviously they need to be, but something of the true beauty of the data is lost to me. Black and white just feels more like a depiction of data as it is relative scale.

[Aptorian]

I maintain my suspicion that colors weren't invented before the 60s and before then everything was in Black and White. Hence, all colors are controlled by the Jewish World League.

Do you think that's air you're breating?

Mezla PigDog, on Mar 20 2009, 04:18 PM, said:

Who wants to slap a harness and saddle on this thing and go for a wild ride? Am I the only one?

[stone monkey]

As someone who is not a scientist but maintains a healthy interest in the sciences, I find the colouration of images like these useful as it allows me to see what's going on. As I don't usually have access to the raw data... or the training to use it properly. There is a certain amount of artistic licence used in false colour images but as long as a good key is given I can at least appreciate what it is I'm seeing.

This post has been edited by stone monkey: 20 March 2009 - 06:47 PM