If you aren’t regularly looking at The Big Picture by now, than I don’t think I can help you anymore! It’s a fantastic collection of themed high-resolution pictures hosted at the Boston Globe.
A few days ago, the theme was microscopy. All I can say is: "THEM!"
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Shoot the antennae! He’s helpless without them!
Actually, there are several pictures in that series that will haunt my dreams. There is something incredibly creepy about little teeny things seen through an electron microscope.
[shudder]
If you went to BadAstronomy.com and found yourself here, never fear: the BA Blog has moved to its new home at Discover Blogs. The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking and all that) is still online, too.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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 | Bad Astronomy was chosen as one of Time.com's Best Blogs of 2009. | |
 | Open Lab 2008 is a collection of the best blog posts of the year, all in one place. Are you a science junkie? Yeah, you want it. |
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"Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan. Frightening, but oddly exhilarating."
-- Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising
DISCOVERmagazine.com: Latest Articles on Space DISCOVER Blogs: The Loom
November 20th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
No, sir. Since you started posting links here, I began subscribing to the feed. I have been spreading the word, too, about this feature. So, thanks!
Yes, the micro world is just awesome! But I find it too difficult to be amazed — by that I mean it’s too damn difficult to imagine the size of these things! The same thing happens with the cosmos. I just think of them in powers of 10, and everyone’s happy again.
For a while, the picture of the pollen was my desktop wallpaper.
November 20th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
C’mon! Telescope, microscope, what’s the difference?
November 20th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
I almost e-mailed you yesterday about these pictures. Really great.
Of course there’s that one of the squid suckers that might appeal to a certain fellow in Minnesota….
November 20th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
and just remember, there are more bacteria in your body than human cells. yay!
November 20th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Them was an awesome movie (called “Formicula” here).
Awesome pictures.
November 20th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
The hexagonal shapes always trip me out. They seem to be in the smallest and biggest of structures. For example, the close up of an insects compound eye shows thousands of hexagons. Honeycomb in a bees nest is perfectly hexagonal. Here is a recent pic (see link) that shows a monstrous hexagon on under the cloud cover of Saturn. WTF man. Makes my head hurt.
November 20th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Huh. I killed one of those in Fallout 3 the other day. I had to. It was breathing fire at me.
The mission in the game involving the giant ants is called “THOSE!”
Nice nod by the developers.
November 20th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
My first ever lab job involved dissecting fruit flies under the microscope. The usual procedure was anaesthetize flies with CO2, dump them in isopropanol to kill them, set up the microscope, carry out the dissection.
One day, the scope was already set up, so I went anaesthetize, dump in isopropanol, look under scope, SEE GIANT THRASHING BUGS IN THEIR DEATH THROES.
Took me a little off guard, I must say.
November 20th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Here’s something else to think about tonight when you’re lying down in a nice, warm, comfortable bed — Dust Mites: Everything You Might Not Want To Know!!!
November 20th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
… and let us not get started on bedbugs… urf!!!
November 20th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
I think you mean to say she’s helpless without them. Worker ants are female.
November 20th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
The Boston Globe’s “Big Picture” series are cool, but I take issue with them being described as “high resolution”. Sure, the precise taxonomy of “high-” vs “med-” vs “low-resolution” is extremely arguable, but IMO any image smaller than my computer desktop (ie one that would be scaled up to be a desktop background) is only medium resolution, at best.
Note that in fairness I’ll use my laptop screen as the benchmark, at 1440×900 pixels, and not my home gaming PC with the 2560×1600 Dell 30″ LCD, nor the Mac I edit video on at work at 1920×1200.
The “Big Picture” images are around 990×680 - too small to deserve “High Resolution” status IMHO.
November 20th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Isn’t evolution a wonderful thing?
November 20th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Was I the only one that thought “sandworm” when I saw #21?
November 20th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
OtherRob I thought “sandworm” too…
May Shai Hulud clear the path before you.
November 20th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
I never realized how hairy ants are.
November 20th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
The columnar snow crystal is awesome! Hello new wallpaper!
November 20th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
You know, when one looks very closely to some of the creatures on Earth, they come very close to resembling monsters from those cheesy movies.
November 20th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords…
November 20th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
#29 makes me think of Yivo.
November 21st, 2008 at 4:51 am
Bad Astronomer,
Thanks for this link.
Some site that.
Eddie
November 21st, 2008 at 4:59 am
I love the Big Picture blog. I’ve been going there regularly since the Olympics.
November 21st, 2008 at 7:32 am
Wow! Check this one out..
It’s Saturn’s rings falling across Titan, with a little Enceladus in the mix.
November 21st, 2008 at 8:24 am
Heh, I’ve just come back from using an SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) actually. They are indeed incredible machines. Not only can you see really, really tiny stuff (with a ginormous depth of field, to boot) you can literally point to, say, the eye of the ant there and ask “what elements is that made of, and in what proportion?” and a couple minutes later out comes the answer.
Also, not only are those little things amazing in their own right, I can guarantee that anything non-metal (including the snow flake and the lil critters) will actually be coated in Gold. Yeah, as in jewellery, Au, Gold. We’re talking nano-meter thick coatings, of course, but gold-plated all the same. If you want to know why, consider that an SEM is essentially bombarding a sample with electrons, and without a conductive path to ground, you could probably put the-mother-of-all-static-charges into your sample, not to mention mess up your imaging and the (extremely) expensive imaging equipment.
November 21st, 2008 at 8:33 am
IBY:
Yes, movie monsters. Just goes to show, we really have no imagination to compare with the random designs of nature,,,
Note the following monsters and where they were derived:
1) the Blob: A unicellular critter blown up to our size:
2) Alien: a really big wasp, with the same “laying their eggs in living tissue” aspect.
3) Them: Really big ants(impossible, due to their lack of lungs)
etc,etc,etc,,,
Blowing up small, seldom seen critters to macro-scopic size is a favorite SciFi technique. After all, the only life we know is what’s right here on earth, so they are the progenitors of all our monsters(well, except possibly for ghosts). Even vampires are just mammalian versions of mosquitoes, with a big bite(snark) of magic thrown in,,,
GAry 7
November 21st, 2008 at 9:15 am
I brought in Fleas from my dog to look at when I used the SEM.
November 21st, 2008 at 9:54 am
You said:
Actually, there are several pictures in that series that will haunt my dreams. There is something incredibly creepy about little teeny things seen through an electron microscope.
[shudder]
I am reminded of a quote from Sir Arthur C. Clarke:
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.