Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
That led to a career in biology although I don't think I really used microscopes much at all over the next 30 years. Recently I adjusted my hobbies and built a microscope from components and use it to apply object detection to tardigrades. Guess what- the state of the art is to collect enormous numbers of images of a microbiotic organism and cluster them into a small number of states (like a markov model) and estimate the transitions between them. I don't even want to solve any specific problem- I just love watching tardigrades. They're hilarious little animacules.
Most components are fairly inexpensive- at least compared to scientific systems- but aren't cheap for a typical hobbyist. The breadboard is >$200, the extrusion is another $100, the cameras at least $250, and my total personal time investment (converted to salary dollars) would be ludicrous.
The important advantage of my design is that I control the closed loop camera/motor control stack (with machine learning inline), and I can raster scan to make large field of view stitches with the camera moving constantly and super-short light exposures.
Here's an example video tracking a tardigrade (keeping its snout as close to the center as possible) I made with the previous generation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYaMFDjC1DQ
Then I use a special tool (really just a mouth tube that has a glass tube at the end) to single tardigrade to a glass-bottom petri dish that goes into the scope. I take movies, then label ~hundreds of frames manually with "tardigrade" "algae" and "junk" then fine-tune an existing object detector with those frames. The centroid of the object detection provides the direction to move the stages to center the detected object.
The other mode is fast scanning, which I described above (move the camera continuously over a large field of view, pulsing the LED quickly/periodically and dropping any empty frames).
(at work I get to play with grown-up microscopes and they are another class entirely; precision machines with extraordinary capabilities and price tags to match)
The game idea itself is so original too!
It's a very simple but gorgeous 2d top-down "strategy" game. It has calming music and a soft colour pallet.
You control these flying boids/bird things by ordering them to conquer other "planets". The goal of the game is to conquer all planets on the map, with progressively more difficult stages.
Each planet you own periodically spawns more "boids". Every planet has a number which describes the amount of boids on the planet.
The only actions given by the player are orders to move boids from one planet to another. If the destination planet is an enemy planet, the boids will attack. If the destination planet is friendly, the boids will combine in forces. If an enemy planet's boid number drops down to 0, it then becomes a friendly planet.
Planets have trees that sprout, and the boids are like leaves that sprout from the trees.
I think once you beat the game you unlock a dark mode.
Does this game ring a bell to anyone? I now want to play it really badly again :)
* https://www.galcon.com/games/
* https://store.steampowered.com/app/294160/Galcon_2_Galactic_...
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2011/03/16/ebay-wetsuit-bear-urinal/
[1] Original 2011 Ebay posting. https://web.archive.org/web/20110317032911/http://cgi.ebay.c...
I'm imagining some sort of aquarium-like tank you stock with ocean water that is able to maintain the microscopic life, allow them to flourish. Meanwhile, some sort of slow or periodic pump draws aquarium water into an attached, miniature "photography studio" where an appropriate camera+lens feeds a constant live stream to a display or to the web or to a Bond-villain's giant projector in their lair.
What a wonderful "screensaver" to have when the occasional appearance of a micro organism graces your screen. Perhaps too there are as-yet undiscovered species we might find with such a device?
1. You have to grow a phytoplankton culture (the base of the food chain) https://melevsreef.com/articles/10-step-phytoplankton-cultur...
2. Then you have to map out to the zooplankton culture chain you want to grow. Usually in the aquarium trade the target are foods that larval fish will eat etc. There are only a few types commercially available. So you would never see the diversity you are seeing in the article.
Conclusion, you can only do it with fresh sea water from the ocean. I would recommend taking a sample from 0 to 10ft on a reef during a full moon or where there is a lot of light. You will see much variety!
We had a confocal microscope in our lab with a robotic arm attached and can automatically image samples. I'm not of the details but the samples are big compared to its field of view so I believe it searches for images with cells before imaging. A lot of experiments are done on these plates with liquid wells.
This isn't our model but shows a larger scope with automated robotic arm and a "plate hotel":
https://confocal.ccr.cancer.gov/nci-microscopy-core-labs/bet...
I'd go into why we switched from PerkinElmer and their proprietary image format to a GE but thats outside the scope.
Meant to be a closed system, where it was all what was inside the glass, plus the sunlight from putting it in the window. Very cool, you could see tiny things swimming around in there.
Whenever we visited him, I would flip through the book and marvel at the creativity of nature.
These photos made me feel a little bit in the same way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYEuo3j2Ly0
(not a "real" microscope, but more like something for the kids to try out and see actually living, moving microorganisms projected on the wall)
https://www.milestone-books.de/pages/books/003613/robert-hoo...
Probably everyone who wasn't an idiot knew it was kinda silly and the sentiments not genuine, or at least exaggerated, but did it anyway. Cf business English, résumé cover letters, et c.
Edit: The text “…Philosophy and Experimental Learning have prosper'd under your Royal Patronage. And as the calm prosperity of your Reign has given us the leisure to follow these Studies of quiet and retirement, so it is just, that the Fruits of them should, by way of acknowledgement, be return'd to your Majesty. There are, Sir, several other of your Subjects, of your Royal Society, now busie about Nobler matters: The Improvement of Manufactures and Agriculture, the Increase of Commerce, the Advantage of Navigation: In all which they are assisted by your Majesties Incouragement and Example. Amidst all those greater Designs, I here presume to bring in that which is more proportionable to the smalness of my Abilities, and to offer some of the least of all visible things, to that Mighty King, that has establisht an Empire over the best of all Invisible things of this World, the Minds of Men.“
The "you" (or: self) is a concept, a perception.
I am just me, and couldn't have been something else, or born in another timeline, or to different parents.
https://open.library.okstate.edu/introphilosophy/chapter/joh...
> The Veil is meant to ensure that people’s concern for their personal benefit could translate into a set of arrangements that were fair for everyone, assuming that they had to stick to those choices once the Veil of Ignorance ‘lifts’, and they are given full information again.
> One set of facts hidden from you behind the Veil are what we might call ‘demographic’ facts. You do not know your gender, race, wealth, or facts about your personal strengths and weaknesses, such as their intelligence or physical prowess. Rawls thought these facts are morally arbitrary: individuals do not earn or deserve these features, but simply have them by luck. As such, they do not deserve any benefits or harms that come from them. By removing knowledge of the natural inequalities that give people unfair advantages, it becomes irrational to choose principles that discriminate against any particular group.
Therefore, also it's not the case that "you can reincarnate into any of those life forms" but rather that all those lifeforms, including you, are incarnations of the same over soul.
So, you always already are both those forms and not, and have just forgotten it was so.
And, then, finally, when you do bad things to those other incarnations you are doing them to yourself: it's not that you have to reincarnate to have someone else do shitty things to you, but rather the case that karma is always already in balance.
Anyhow, just my shitty heterodox take based on a single poorly applied mathematical rule.
Be well, other self.
I suppose it's implied it was "half of life" on a per-species basis. It's basically magic, so probably best not to think about it too much.
Not sure about the rest of Thanos's logic, of course...
Why some group is not empty is different from why it is me who is in that group, when I could very well be in the other one, like almost everyone. When the other group is much larger, then most potential "me"s will observe that they are in the larger, more typical group. The others will be surprised because they get the less common result, but most will not.
There are more intuitive examples than being human versus insect. Let's say, vast majority of people are not members of a royal family, so, knowing nothing else about myself, I should expect not to be, either. (Fits, afaik.) There are also some counterexamples, like that most people live elsewhere than in my town, but these are often tailored to me.
Going back to the plankton problem, I observe the equivalent of being a prince. Someone has to be, for sure, but is there a reason why me?
Also we think being human is the best because we are humans. Right between the start and the end of time in the centre of the universe.
What about us knowing higher creatures exist, and we inhabit a droplet in their oceans?
My next thought was, "What looks at Humans in similar fashion?"
Trust me. Some rooms in this group are top class nightmare fuel.
https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
Since Jewish law prohibits drinking insects that are large enough to be seen without a microscope, there has been quite a discussion if that makes the water undrinkable.
As a result, many religious Jewish New Yorkers will only drink filtered water. So, no copepod protein, but maybe cleaner water?
Does that mean conventional macro camera lenses or a microscope?
It's very easy to find macro lenses that have 5:1 magnification, meaning that an object is projected onto the sensor 5x it's size. Taking 1.7 mm and projecting that onto a Canon R5 45 MP sensor with 5x magnification gives us something that would be around 1934 pixels in length (just under 1/4th the width of the sensor that is 8192 effective pixels wide).
I think you can convert 5x into 10x or 15x pretty easily without much loss in image quality.
That's not the problem, the problem is getting enough light (without boiling your specimen, which they briefly mention) and nailing the focus. At such magnification, both problems are challenging.
That is bit of an exaggregation. Afaik there is for example exactly one 5:1 macro available on the Canon R series RF mount, and in general they are pretty rare.
I don't understand the part about needing high light intensity- at such low magnification, I have to attenuate my LEDs significantly and take extremely short exposures (like, running a 1A LED at 10mA and 1-10us exposures). But I can't fault his results.
If you enjoy this view into microworlds, here's one of my favourite macro photographers. This is a collection of garnets (sand grains) that are 0.2 to 0.3 mm across. That's basically dust IMO!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/194954457@N05/sets/72177720296...
He talks about his gear here. His technique and patience is extraordinary. His gear is fairly modest: Olympus OM-D EM-1 Mark II camera, MC-20 Teleconverter, Olympus 60mm macro lens, Kenko 16mm extension tube, & Raynox 505 close-up lens. That's an older model of Micro Four Thirds camera (the format has magnification and depth of field advantages over fullframe) so you could probably acquire such a setup in the range of $1K used. And then spend a lifetime refining your art... :-)
So even this "conventional" option that you can readily buy is quite the niche.
For a 0.2mm subject, 5:1 is not enough. Luckily, one can use a microscope objective on a camera, like this:
https://c7.staticflickr.com/1/411/31944206126_fee397795a_b.j...
It doesn't have to be a bellow, they can also be a fixed tube, but the idea here is that the camera's sensor is at a specific distance to the back opening of the microscope objective. It would be the same distance where normally the eye piece of the microscope goes.
This way, you can do 10:1, 20:1, 50:1, 100:1. You'll have ever greater problems though the more you magnify (vibration, light, composition).
The device in the bottom is an automated focus rail, a WeMacro in this case. You set a start point and end point, and it takes all photos in between. It can move by as little as 1 micron and is quite cheap.
Is it a hobby/pursuit or can you actually make a living doing this kind of thing?
P.S. It's a fascinating thing and I love it!
Those of us with well-paid salaried jobs have a luxury we easily take for granted.
Why would photos of something like this strike you as any different. Why shouldn't the artist making prints not be able to make money from the effort, experience, and skill of producing those prints in manner that are worthy of a print? It's like asking anybody can write code, why should someone be able to make money doing that. Hell, computers write code themselves now. What makes you special you feel you need compensation for it?
Also, it could just start out as a hobby. Got anything you do on the side that started out as a curious nature, became a serious interest, then got good enough other people were interested in what you did?
"These tiny invertebrates can be found in the deepest ocean trenches and the highest alpine lakes, even in damp mosses and wet leaf litter. Walter once got a call from an Orthodox Jewish organization wanting to know if there were pieces of non-kosher creatures floating in the New York City tap water. The answer was yes"
https://www.canadiannaturephotographer.com/epifluorescencemi...
These techniques also revealed the sheer scale of microbial life, as even the clearest ocean water from the most remote, nutrient-limited tropical seas will contain as many as 100,000 cells per mL. Below that there are the various viruses that infect or cohabit with these bacteria and small plants and animals, which are invisible to light microscopy.
There's also the sheer predation of it. IIRC, for some coastal surface biome I've long forgotten, viral half-life was like an hour, and a third of bacteria were virally lysed each day. A cup of beach water is not just teaming with life, it's a war zone.
With a screen you can show the kids what’s going on. It’s a shared experience.
>Foldscope combines low-cost materials with precision optics to create inexpensive microscopes that are affordable for communities worldwide. With a magnification of 140X, Foldscope can visualize tiny things like bacteria and microorganisms as well as larger samples like insects, plants, fabrics, and tissues. Foldscope can also attach to mobile phones for imaging. This portable microscope is also waterproof. With that versatility, the possibilities are endless!
Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32864413
So one of the most abundant life forms on the planet has a trick to keep their edge. One wonders why they need it.
https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2011/013097/decade-long-study-reve...
But in the article the photographer said he'd come up empty on some of the dives. So it's fairly spread out.
Just narrowly coming ahead of the Seethepods.
But if there is still some subterranean water at the correct temperature in a deep Mars cave... who knows? They can stand huge pressures and extreme environments very well.
You could not count all the finely tuned
Musicians
-Hafiz
I'm wondering how this was handled in the end. Do Orthodox Jews drink the tap in NYC today?
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/nyregion/the-waters-fine-...
It helps if you think about it in terms of historical hardships of the Hebrews. It means if you're hungry and your neighbor cooks for you and there's a tiny bit of non-kosher fat in the soup or something like that, or if you're starving, Yahweh will forgive you because it's such a small amount and you're so hungry it's not right to penalize you for that which you couldn't control. Something that is one sixtieth is colloquially so insignificant that it equates to nil.
> Walter once got a call from an Orthodox Jewish organization wanting to know if there were pieces of non-kosher creatures floating in the New York City tap water. The answer was yes.
Not to pick on them, but I found this illuminating on how religions present such a myopic view of life and what it means to be alive on Earth. Religions seems incapable of fitting their model over the apparent continuum of life. It was also somewhat humorous to read this.
One day, two or three of the young rabbis came to me and said, "We realize that we can't study to be rabbis in the modern world without knowing something about science, so we'd like to ask you some questions."
Of course there are thousands of places to find out about science, and Columbia University was right near there, but I wanted to know what kinds of questions they were interest in.
They said, "Well, for instance, is electricity fire?"
"No," I said, "but... what is the problem?"
They said, "In the Talmud it says that you're not supposed to make fire on a Saturday, so our question is, can we use electrical things on Saturdays?"
I was shocked. They weren't interested in science at all! The only way science was influencing their lives was so they might be able to interpret better the Talmud! They weren’t' interested in the world outside, in natural phenomena; they were only interested in resolving some question brought up in the Talmud.
https://rabbisedley.blogspot.com/2012/08/richard-feynman-mee...
I decided to trap the students in a logical discussion. I had been brought up in a Jewish home, so I knew the kind of nitpicking logic to use, and I thought "Here's fun!" My plan went like this: I'd start off by asking, "Is the Jewish viewpoint a viewpoint that any man can have? Because if it is not, then it's certainly not something that is truly valuable for humanity... yak, yak, yak." And then they would have to say, "Yes, the Jewish viewpoint is good for any man." Then I would steer them around a little more by asking, "Is it ethical for a man to hire another man to do something which is unethical for him to do? Would you hire a man to rob for you, for instance?" And I keep working them into the channel, very slowly, and very carefully, until I've got them - trapped! And do you know what happened? They're rabbinical students, right? They were ten times better than I was! AS son as they saw I could put them in a hole, they went twist, turn, twist - I can't remember how - and they were free! I thought I had come up with an original idea - phooey! It had been discussed in the Talmud for ages! So they cleaned me up just as easy as pie - they got right out.
Orcas that enjoy playing with their food. Lions that eat prey alive. Beautiful and terrifying. Our primate and hominid ancestors that ate the flesh of rival clans.
I respect veganism and personal choices, but the world is a big place with lots going on that will forever escape our ability to control. That's how I frame my own decision, but I respect others' too.
You fall into a trap of using a single English word to cover a multitude of different world-views. It would be as useful to say that the quote "... how people present..."
Within the broad category of "religion" you have thousands of different groups, most of which would find minor, or very major, things to disagree on. Judaism is massively different to say Druidism or Buddhist. Crumbs, _within_ Judaism you have a full spectrum from Ultra Orthodox to unpracticing.
I would thus caution you from viewing the world as falling into either religious or irreligious. Ultimately that classification is not meaningful.
religious
atheist
agnostic
This idea is developed in depth by Bishop Robert Barron. Very interesting to consider.
Scientism is something that philosophers claim exists when they don't want to get in an argument with a scientist.
What I’m driving at is that science is an awesome tool, not at all at odds with religion. It’s one, very effective method, but it’s not the end all be all for truth.
The scientism I’m driving at is people putting blind faith in science as a replacement for other forms of understanding. The argument is that religious or philosophical understanding come in when science has reached its absolute limit. The two are not competitive with each other.
Admittedly the upvotes such a post gets are a bigger problem than the post itself, but there's not much we can do about those. (This post was upvoted to the top of the thread when I saw it. I've marked it off topic now.)
You may be right about connections to the article (I haven't checked) but that is not as important as preserving the ecosystem in general, which is the motive behind moderating HN this way; not arbitrarily but based on many years of experience with how these things usually go.
I don't often see comments replying to dang's moderation (from people other than the ones he's moderating), and generally, I think dang's influence is beneficial, but I would like to see the moderation be more tolerant (IE, slight adjustment of thresholds around "generic flamebait").
I think there can be a bit of religious protectionism, because I don’t see similar comments being labeled as scientific flame bait, because I have often provided much harsher myopia critique to non-religious topics.
But I can see the general moderation point of view and that, maybe disappointingly so, comments referencing religion can be hot, so to speak, and that my comment train got lucky.
Edit: I made the original comment somewhat in passing, and just commented on the part that caught my eye other than "wow, I need to read more about these things".
IMAO This is a trap to force the scientist to introduce religion in their work. Researchers should not spend their time studying religious concepts to validate religious questions. Is bad for them. In the best outcome, the scientist will lose valuable time and their prestige will be linked and borrowed for a religious agenda. At the worse case if the answer is not the same as in the religious books it will spawn more and more questions and the scientist will soon find themself tangled in an hydra of philosophical minutia, and fighting against a closed group in the undesirable role of outer enemy that must be critizised, cancelled or menaced with the goal to reinforce the sense of community.
This people should be redirected directly to ask any religious doubts to a religious figure. Period. Don't let them abuse of your time.
Zoologists are not trained into the subtle details of the concept of kosher. This is the work for a Rabbi. If the Rabbi needs a biology book to study the question, the researcher could kindly suggest several sources so he can start learning.
I'm reminded of a discussion in the talmud. A rabbi says that he heard from an Athenian scholar that there is a type of... mouse? bug? The aramaic isn't clear, some kind of little animal. Anyway, there's this creeping thing which comes to live when the sunlight hits a certain type of mud at a certain time of day. There's a whole discussion about whether these things are really "alive", vis a vis whether or not you can "kill" them on shabbat (this discussion is had elsewhere about lice, which were thought to have generated spontaneously. Jewish law has always been flexible and adaptable and shifted along with changing understanding of ourselves and our surroundings. I don't see how this anecdote suggests any differently.
P.S. most (probably like 98% of) orthodox rabbis I have talked to permit drinking tap water even though it has little bugs in it, because they're too small to see with the human eye and thus are not forbidden to eat. If they were big enough, you would have to filter them, just like you have to check for bugs before you eat lettuce.
"Meticulously staged photos capture highly selectively curate life presented through bespoke drops of seawater".
Cool? Absolutely! Accurate title? Hell no.
"Photos capture tigers, elephants and giraffes that live in the broom room"
The "drop of seawater" is just a literary construction here. This animals don't live "in a drop of seawater", they live in the ocean. They are superfast also for animals so small. I had photographed some of them and you need to apply a restrain of some type to be able to take a clear photo. They are extremely migratory animals. Even more active than birds probably, if we take in mind their relative size.