microbes-in-hats

[microbes-in-hats]

Dangit every time I think I've been doing well I accidentally reblog to the wrong place again. Though.... it was probably more relevant than my other accidental reblogs. But on principle, no.

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plasmodium knowlesi in some form of hat popular in indonesia?

it's my favorite malaria <3

Added to the list!

I'll have to look into the hats, but if anyone from or familiar with Indonesia has any suggestions, that would be very helpful! (It would also probably be helpful to have someone who can verify that whatever hats I'm looking at are actually Indonesian, because otherwise I'm at the mercy of Wikipedia and other articles.)

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Lacrymaria olor

Photo credit: Charles B. Krebs

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This is so niche, but I love it!

Hehehe thank you

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Glaucocystis sp.

Photo credit: Jason Oyadomari

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Stentor roeselii

Photo credit: Protist Information Server

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Electron Micrographs

(Part 4 of 4)

Gallium

Rapid-Cooled Gallium

While we were looking at the previous samples, I was holding my tube of 20g of gallium that I bought for $14 for fun, so by the end it was almost completely melted. I used a pipet to place a drop on one of the stages, and then we looked at the strawberry DNA. We couldn't get much of interest from it, so we turned to the drop of gallium.

Poking it with tweezers, we saw that it was still mostly liquid, so the lab manager used a can of compressed air to gently cool it off enough to freeze. This resulted in ripples across parts of the surface of the drop where it was moving as it solidified, which we didn't really take any specific pictures of.

There's also a bunch of unknown flakes of something all over it, perhaps something from the compressed air container or some other kind of impurity.

And there's a spot here where you can see that we poked at it with the tweezers while it was still liquid, and it left an indent with some little splashes.

(The Beginnings of) Crystalline Structures

Metals, when allowed to cool off slowly, generally tend to solidify into crystalline structures. I noticed this in my tube, where I had melted it previously. I think I'd had it sitting on its side for a bit as it was resolidifying the first time, and then at some point turned it so it was vertical instead. As a result of that I think, I observed a rectangular-ish tower sticking out of the gallium in the tube. I didn't think to take a picture of it, though.

Having seen this before I melted it again, we were trying to look for parts in the drop where it had gotten to cool down slowly before we'd blasted it with cold air.

We did manage to find this section where it seemed some of the metal had had a chance to begin crystallizing and forming some structure. (This is the same area as the first set of images in this section, just with a different rendering/view.)

You can see the squarish shapes that formed, along with some areas in the first two images where some wider, almost hexagonal or octahedral angles had formed in the layers.

Liquid Gallium

Here's my tube of gallium, completely melted. (This was the night I got it, and when I caused the tower formation by changing how I had the tube positioned.)

Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed this series of posts, even the two of you that voted for microbes only.

The scale in the bottom left corner of the images is in micrometers. 1 millimeter = 1000 micrometers

[microbes-in-hats]

Electron Micrographs

(Part 3 of 4)

Necklace Chain and Pendant

Pendant Stone

These are images of the surface of the stone. In the first image, the larger lines might be the edges of the facets. The other two show a variety of scratches. From the consistency of the angles, most of them are probably from when the stone was cut and polished.

Pendant Prong

Looking at one of the prongs, we can see the gold plating, which picks up and transmits the electrons quite well. There's darker places on the image where the plating is scuffed. We zoomed in on one of the dark spots to look at it, showing a missing chunk of the gold where the base metal underneath is far less conductive.

Necklace Chain

Here, on the chain, there appears to be something flaky on the surface of the metal, rather than actual damage to the link. Perhaps it's some kind of dirt, but it's hard to know as we can't really analyze it.

Further scuffing on the chain links and/or more flaky bits.

Here's a more full zoomed out of the chain. You can see the same spot we were looking at before, with the little flake on it.

Normal Photo

For reference, the chain is 1mm wide and the stone is about 1cm long and 7mm wide, prongs included. I've had it sitting in my room for over a decade, so I have no idea what it's made of.

The scale in the bottom left corner of the images is in micrometers. 1 millimeter = 1000 micrometers

[microbes-in-hats]

Dictyostelium discoideum with mexican hat 🙏🙏🙏

Added to the list!

[microbes-in-hats]

Electron Micrographs

(Part 2 of 4)

Fugitive Glue, Lollipop, and Strawberry DNA

Fugitive Glue

I received a junk mail credit card offer, and I decided to take the piece of rubbery stuff that held the fake card to the paper to look at under the microscope. I originally referred to it as rubber cement, but I think it's actually called fugitive glue, among other names. Even exposed to air for a few days, it was still rubbery and malleable.

Unfortunately, being an organic compound, it did start to melt from the current of electricity that the microscope runs through it, which you can see happening in these images.

Lollipop Fragment

We had a bunch of leftover lollipops from Halloween at my house, so I took one of the flavors my brother didn't like to smash up and look at under the microscope.

In the first image, don't get confused by the background. The big angular piece is the lollipop, and the round things in the back are from the special tape used for keeping things on the stage (probably some bubbles trapped under it). I forget what kind of tape he said it was, but it was something able to conduct electricity.

The images of the sugar crystals are unclear and blurry because they, too, were actively melting while we were looking at them. Organic compounds just tend to do that. That said, you can still see the shapes of some of the crystals that hadn't yet melted.

Strawberry DNA

Having extracted some of my own DNA before, which I keep in an Eppendorf tube on my desk, I thought maybe it would be interesting to look at under the microscope.

However, I didn't want to potentially ruin the sample I had, so I followed NileRed's video to refresh myself on the process and used strawberries like he did. I also did it at 1/4 scale of what he did, because I really didn't need as much as he got. (By the way, DNA feels disgusting to touch. So much so that I used tweezers and forceps to handle it instead.)

Unfortunately, as you can see, the images aren't super clear or detailed, possibly for a few reasons.

The sample may still have had some moisture in it, which does interfere with how the machine sees it, I think.

It was also very clumped, because when you extract DNA, it all clumps together and I couldn't really separate the piece I was using into a thin layer.

It also may just be the size of DNA in general, which is molecular (just a very long one). I was hoping we'd see at least something, but I guess the indications of lines is all we could get.

I'm keeping the rest of the DNA we didn't use in some more Eppendorf tubes on my desk, because why not.

In the BDS Full images, the white parts are the hotter parts, where more electrons are being conducted through.

The scale in the bottom left corner of the images is in micrometers. 1 millimeter = 1000 micrometers

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cutibacterium acnes in whatever hat you think is most thematic

Added to the list!

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giardia in a hat? love for our favorite protozoa

Added to the list!

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Serratia marcescens in a balaclava?

Added to the list!

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next microbe without a specified hat gets the widest brim you'll ever see

Bet.

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Do you have any posts featuring nostoc?

I don't think so! Added to the list!

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Desulforudis audaxviator is my favorite bacterium and its name comes from a quote from Journey to the Center of the Earth (“Descende, audax viator, et terrestre centrum attinges”- descend, bold traveler, and you will attain the center of the earth). So I think it would be cool to give it a hat fitting with this theme. A headlamp or miner’s hat, maybe?

Also don’t worry about being professional in post tags!! I love reading commentary in the tags on these kinds of themed blogs

Oh interesting! Maybe I can write a caption about that. I only really do it when I find something interesting, I don't often really look them up much. Plus, if I added captions to everything that'd make it take even longer for me to get around to doing them.

Something deep within compels me to be really professional with the posts themselves. Though I do still sometimes yap in the tags if there's something extra I want to say.

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c elegans in a fez…. please…… i need it to live

Can do! Added to the list!