Hey all. So let me preface this by saying I am both amazed and jealous by all of you with artistic talent. As someone who occasionally struggles to draw a proper square after decades of practice, I can't comprehend how you do the things you do.
So naturally I gravitate towards photography. I mean.. someone or something else has already gone through the trouble of laying out all the stuffs, and all I gotta do is point and shoot. This is strictly a hobby and I am by no means a skilled amateur (Not even going to touch professional). And..that's all I'm going to say about that.
Well I'll start with something star trek ish relevant. Jupiter and one of its moons.. I have no idea which one. My scope's focal length is meant for deep space so it sucks at planetary images.
Neat stuff, I'm always glad to see amateur space pics. They may not match NASA probe work obviously.. but somehow the most basic form of seeing other planets and stars makes them feel even more real to me.
Animals! I've never had a cat or a dog. I'm a tiny person and not so good with big-ish animals. This includes penguins ( I discovered last year, I'm only marginally taller than an emperor penguin. If we were to fight, it would win.)
I avoid posting photos with people in them. But I really like this picture of a tourist being attacked by geese. I can't get over the emoji face the goose is making.
Happy you guys liked it. Since Sam commented on this, I'd like to call him out in particular but also everyone else too.
Sam, I saw your IRL archaeology thread and I loved it. I'd love to see more of what you do (and Ann too ofc). That goes for everyone else's hobbies/work/misc. I enjoy lurking around the forum posts people make and the IG chat. Even stuff that's probably boring to you positively blows me away and I'd love to see it if you share it. I've learned more about video games, tea, animals, comp sci, and castles than I would have ever known otherwise and I thank you all for it.
Uhh….I guess I'll put something else here so I'm not just making a wasteful post. I'll be quiet after this I promise.
Moon surface shot. Taken the same day as the previous moon shot but a different scope.
Fluorescent microscopy. I can't post most of my work since most of it isn't published or public. But this one is published so I'm clear. The bar is 40 μm in length and serves as a scale.
So what you see in the image is the nuclei of cells. The whole cell isn't stained but the nuclei are stained with a chemical called DAPI which binds to DNA and makes the nucleus visible. The green is a protein called Ki-67 which we label with a fluorescent molecule called FITC. The microscope flashes two lasers at different wavelengths at the cells: one to excite the DAPI and one to excite the FITC. After each laser pulse, a photo is taken of the cells as the excited dyes release light. Since we're only looking at emission, anything that's not emitting (i.e. anything not stained with a dye) is invisible.
Ki-67 is a protein that biologists use as a marker of dividing cells. Every cell which is actively dividing or getting ready to divide expresses Ki-67. So the cells with the green are healthy and dividing. The double nucleated cells without the green are cells that are now incapable of dividing.
We treated the cells with a drug that depolymerizes actin. Actin is a structural protein that lets cells move, divide, expand, and other things. Any cells that were in the middle of mitosis during drug treatment suddenly found themselves incapable of fully separating into two daughter cells. Their emergency machinery kicked in, and they permanently shut off their cell division processes as a safeguard against becoming cancerous. That is why the doubly nucleated cells are Ki-67 negative.
In summary. If you're willing I'd love to see the things you do.
“In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
I can't show much for work right now since I'm in between jobs, but on the path to my next job. That said.... it comes with a security clearance and the basic premise that I am not allowed to share details of it. So... not likely to get much from me other than I'm doing aerospace engineering work for the government. The way I plan to present that later is as thus:
As for hobbies, you get some of that from me already in my incessant over talking about things.... including my Japanese language studies, interest in science fiction (space especially, hard space sci-fi most especially), personal story writing (my dossiers being only one example), and nearly obsessive levels of spacecraft knowledge. I don't know there is much for me to post in a way similar to you as I don't have a lot that is visual (unless you want to see archive photos of old Kerbal Space Program accomplishments, I've sadly not kept up in the game/sim over the years). I could fish out some slightly out of date photos of my Star Trek ship collection (Eaglemoss and some other things) as well as several Macross valkyries and Transformers (I'm also in between permanent living arrangements so I don't have much set up for new photos now). I like collecting things.
Anyway, I'll leave that alone for now, this is a thread about your pics, which are still being of the awesome. Thanks for sharing!
A conversation with Dex made me nostalgic for crazy days past. Here is a picture of my old car, with which I did many stupid things and came fairly close to converting into a pile of flaming garbage. I do miss those days, but yeah.. self driving cars here I come.
Also obligatory biology posts. First up.. lymph node! The green bits are immune cells. Tissue homing cytotoxic T cells to be specific. Lookit all those murdery little guys.
Next. Skin! Not my skin mind you. You can see the hair follicles and dense cell clusters around them. This is what your skin would look like.. if I were to dunk it in formaldehyde and cut it into micrometer thin sections.
Starting with the bottom picture, which is easier. It’s a control stain of a skin section just to test our background. The blue is a chemical called DAPI that stains cell nuclei. The green is a stain to another protein of interest. There should be no green in the pictures, but keratin and dead cells in the follicles and epidermis tend to stain nonspecifically for everything. You see few nuclei in the skin layers because the cells are huge and spaced fairly widely apart.
The clusters of cells in the follicle are keratinocytes, which grow hair, and melanocytes which give the hair its color. Fun fact: Certain types of hair loss caused by disease or chemicals kill both cell types, but melanocytes come back slower. When the patient’s hair grows back it’s white at first then slowly regains color as melanocytes repopulate.
The first picture is more complex. Part of a series on immune cell homing function. The immune system is the biological equivalent of a furious caged chimpanzee on steroids. To be released as needed and an incredibly powerful weapon provided that it’s wielded correctly. But fail to control it properly and it’ll happily murder you and everyone else in the room without remorse. This control is excercised in a lot of ways, but one way the body directs organ specific responses is with chemokines. These are small molecules which are released by certain cell types. Immune (and other) cells have receptors that can pick up these chemokines and follow increasing gradients towards the source.
The green dots in the picture are cytotoxic CD8+ T cells that express a receptor for a certain chemokine. Cytotoxic CD8s are otherwise known as killer T cells... because they kill things. They glow green here because the mouse that this lymph node was taken from is engineered as a “knock-out knock-in”. One of the gene copies that codes for the receptor of interest has been deleted (knocked out). In it’s place has been put a gene sequence for a protein called EGFP that glows green when excited correctly. So any cell that would produce the receptor of interest instead produces EGFP and we can track the killer T population as it migrates around the body.
Mice and humans are both diploid and carry two copies of each gene. Only one copy was deleted and replaced by EGFP so the cells still have one intact receptor gene and behave mostly normally. It’s a partial (heterozygous) knockout. If you see any biology papers that notate GeneName (+/+) or (+/-) or (-/-) or in this case (+/EGFP) they are referring to the genetic state of the animal or sample in question.
It’s a cool experimental system and lets us track how this specific T cell population responds to infections and other stimuli.
