Bleary-eyed and staggering, many of us partake in a morning coffee ritual before mustering the courage to face the daily workload. In addition to psychoactive chemicals (drugs, anyone?), the coffee routine provides structure and emotional support — rumours suggest it may be largely a placebo effect, but I won’t go into that debate. Instead, I [...]

For me, the second more relaxing activity after microscopy is vector art. And then regular art. (This excludes non-activities, such as napping in the sun, and staring at life passing by. That’s all I’d do if one didn’t have to work — watch things.) Since I’m not often creative with my subject matter, the art [...]

Seldom do protists show up in public places (as man-made creations; plenty of them thrive happily unseen), especially those who reside where the sun don’t shine: the hindgut of wood-eating termites and cockroaches. There, they perform a function glorious for the termite or roach, but often annoying (or devastating) to us — they digest cellulose [...]

This Mayorella‘s (?) nucleus is smiling and wishing you a very happy day =) The auspicious pattern is formed by heterochromatin clumps. To the right of the nucleus is a contractile vacuole — devoid of any emotion this time. Cells do speak to you from time to time. In your head. Pareidolia is fun!

I may have mentioned a few times to never mess with amoebae. Let me reiterate how lucky we are to be a few orders of magnitude of size removed from those creatures. Remember yesterday’s prey-stuffed ciliate, Frontonia? Well, while procrastinating and perusing random literature, I came across this title: “Observations on Amoeba Feeding on the [...]

Frontonia are a large, gluttonous species of ciliates, which makes them a wonderful, colourful, subject of microphotography. Despite the modest appearance of their mouth, they can swallow some impressively big prey — the suture beneath the mouth can open to widen the engulfment. Essentially, the critter unstitches its belly to fit more in. Would be [...]

I’ll return to blogging by starting off with a stunningly boring micrograph. Here, you can see a narrow blob, with a blob attached, and a stem below. The scalebar is 2um, so we’re really up against the limits of conventional light microscopy here. *yawn* Not the most flashy micrograph you’ve ever seen, most likely. But [...]

A free-living cyanobacterium (above) lies next to its brethren from a distant past, now a chloroplast coiled up and trapped (for good) within a eukaryotic cell (bottom). The chloroplast still has remnants of the cyanobacterial genome, with a greatly reduced gene set. Both bacterial inner and outer membranes have also been retained — which is [...]

Here’s a diatom (alga in a glass case), probably Cymbella sp. (apparently also called “rock snot”…),  sitting atop a stalk of mucilage. These diatoms can sometimes be seen on rocks in creeks and streams as fuzzy brown stuff growing, comprised of large colonies. In masses, they are also extremely slimy — perhaps you have unknowingly [...]

I meant to throw these stockfish photos up during Science Online as compensation, but there wasn’t exactly any downtime at that conference. At all. Shocking and entirely unexpected, I know. Evidently, I don’t post enough creepy things around here, so here’s an attempt to make up for it. Stockfish are outdoor dried cod, and was [...]