You know what this means? That’s right: line items on science grants asking for lego funding! (of course, whether such an ask would be successful is another matter entirely).
For more details, plus close ups of the internal workings of the scope, go to Lego, CUUSOO. Via Fresh Photons.
PRETTIEST CHRISTMAS LIGHTS EVER
Animated gifs of epithelial cells doing the mitosis
From Infinity Imagined, via Fresh Photons. (Source:MICROSCOPYU.COM)
Just staring at this makes me think about the brilliance of nature. Just consider the complexity of what’s going on during mitosis – you have a genome, compartmentalized with chromosomes, doubling. Then, you have a perfect splitting of the two copies into two separate cells!
That’s like having a group of people in a room, then somehow making copies of all of them, and then getting them to split perfectly into two groups, so that one set of them can move (in an orderly fashion) to another room entirely. But now imagine doing that blindfolded, and without being able to utter a sound to each other, and essentially getting this done solely on the basis of touch. Wondrous…
(see more of Popperfont’s Sciencegeek Advent Calendar Extravanganza here)
By Eckhard Völcker, via Flickr.
…looks like this.
“…a grain of sodium sulfate and sodium chloride (salt) while researching jet turbine safety. Jet turbines become very hot when in use and are also exposed to the atmosphere. This combination can lead to compounds such as salt encrusting the turbines. Rosier and her colleagues reproduced and photographed one such salt grain in the laboratory.”
Image by Hollie Rosier of Swansea University, Winner of the 2012 2012 Research as Art competition. Via Live Science.
Definitely worth taking a look. The one below is my favourite.
“This false-coloured scanning electron micrograph shows a moth fly (Psychodidae), also known as a drain fly. As its name suggests, the fly’s larvae commonly live and grow in domestic drains; the adult fly emerges near sinks, baths and lavatories. The moth flies’ bodies and wings are covered in hairs, which gives them a ‘fuzzy’, moth-like appearance. The fly is 4-5 mm long, and each eye is approximately 100 microns wide.”
By Kevin MacKenzie.
popperfont.net 