Nikon (through Wired) presents some of the most amazing windows onto the microscopic world ever seen:
Super-close-ups of garlic, snail fossils, stinging nettle, bat embryos, bone cancer and a ladybug are among the top images this year. The first place winner (above) shows the blood-brain barrier in a living zebrafish embryo, which Nikon believes is the first image ever [...]
Is it cute?
It’s a tardigrade, also known as a water bear. That’s a cute name. And they’re tiny, too, which is part of cuteness, usually. Less than a millimeter long.
But they’re also durable. You can zap them with gamma rays like the Hulk or send them through space like Superman, but they just [...]
Dark field microscopy is the art of using indirect light to illuminate specimens under your microscope lens; because the light is indirect, it doesn’t shine into the microscope, and the specimen appears to be floating brilliantly against a night-black background.
Image via Wikimedia Commons, on which Uwe Kils has quite a few wondrous images.
I decided to [...]
Happy blood. April fool blood. Pancreas blood. Turning sweetness to pep blood. Smiling blood.
Very, very enlarged blood.
Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Click to embiggen
A bouquet of flowers, and one of the deadliest poisons known to humankind.
From the image’s Wikimedia Commons page:
Pollen from a variety of common plants: sunflower (Helianthus annuus), morning glory (Ipomoea purpurea), hollyhock (Sildalcea malviflora), lily (Lilium auratum), primrose (Oenothera fruticosa) and castor bean (Ricinus communis).
Hollyhocks and morning glories are lovely; castor beans are where [...]
From the mustachioed microscope-gazer who gave us the method (for staining specimens), the receptor (inside our tendons) and the bodies (inside our cells) comes a hypnotic look inside a dog’s nose.
As cited on Scientific Illustration (where I found this):
“This 1875 drawing of a dog’s olfactory bulb by Camillo Golgi is but one [...]
This is the infectious microbe (alive? not alive? who knows?) that causes Western equine encephalitis. It’s a deadly virus.
I can remember when they said taking pictures of viruses was impossible. Well, they were wrong.
This picture comes from the super-cool electron microscope at the W.M. Keck Center for Virus Imaging in Texas. I mean that literally – the [...]
New Scientist has microscopic video of what malaria looks like bursting into a blood cell:
Jake Baum at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues used transmission electron microscopy and 3D immuno-fluorescence microscopy to record a series of still images during the 30-second-long invasion, and combined them into a movie.
To boost [...]
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