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Scientific American

October 27, 2012

Mystery Micrograph revived, v2.0 chapter 1

By Psi Wavefunction

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

Back in the good ol' days on Skeptic Wonder I used to run a little "Mystery Micrograph" series, where an image or a plate (that's not immediately obvious without context) would be grabbed from a paper and posted without source, and much agony would ensue over trying to figure out what it is (or some cheater who happens to work on the bug would drop by and ruin the fun ;p). Or sometimes it was immediately obvious to readers. In any case, it seemed like people were having fun! So I'd like to bring back the Mystery Micrographs and hope for a bit of interaction (which I probably haven't been helping by vanishing for the better part of a year...), and this time  I've got some of my own images to use too (haha, good luck with reverse Google image search on those!). And of course you are allowed to make guesses and ask questions.

Just one little request: if you've already seen the image elsewhere or are deeply familiar with the subject from your work... please try to give others a chance first!

Alright, so let's start the first round of enigmatic imagery from the alien world of small things! Tell me who this critter is (genus is enough), and what we're looking at.

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[caption id="attachment_321" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Mystery Micrograph 01 (click to enlarge)"][/caption]

Big hint: The colour is completely natural and no stains were used.

(My hope with these Mystery Micrographs is to encourage some active thinking both about interpreting micrographs as well as the microbial world itself -- it really takes work to intuitively "feel" things on a foreign scale, and I'm just getting started myself, to be honest!)

About Psi Wavefunction

I first encountered the wonders of the protist realm back in childhood, when a murky droplet of pond scum was revealed by the microscope to entail an alien world in its own right. It took another decade to discover there was a field and a community dedicated to these organisms, and I bade farewell to the study of more familiar big things. As a kid I was also fascinated by tales of exploration of the New World, as well as those of fantasy worlds. I was then sad that the age of surveying new landmasses on earth was over, and that human extraterrestrial adventures are unlikely to happen within our lifetimes. It seemed everything was discovered already. But that could hardly be further from the truth -- all that is necessary to begin one's own Age of Exploration is a new approach or perspective, and a healthy does of imagination. Since reality has conjured far more than the human mind alone ever could, science yields a way to write stories much wilder than fiction. All one needs to access the alien world of microbes around (and inside) them is a shift of scale by simple glass sphere.
I'm currently finishing up my undergraduate degree in Vancouver and in transition career-wise, hopefully to end up in graduate school soon. I was born in Russia (and speak the language) and spent most of my life in US and Canada. In addition to protists, I'm fascinated by evolution, including that of culture and languages, diversity and biology of cells and how they self-organise, linguistics and anthropology, particularly of the less talked-about cultures, sociology of science and plenty of totally random things that snag my attention.
Banner image was kindly post-processed and enhanced by my friend: an accomplished comic artist who goes by Achiru.

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