Diatom Arrangements | Hacker News Reader

Diatom Arrangements

trebeljahr.com

215 pointstrebeljahr44 comments

I've been working on making a little website on diatom arrangements (single celled microscopic algae art pieces) over the last 2-3 days and felt like sharing it.

Here's the result :)

That's really cool. I have bags of their skeletons that are about 13 million years old that I used for pest control. I never really gave it much thought what they looked liked until seeing your site. All the drawings of them I've seen prior were black and white and just showed some shapes but no color.

For those who don't understand, they are talking about diatomaceous earth [0]. It's literally fossilized microbes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatomaceous_earth

Do you know if the shells are still intact? Maybe it's an easy way for people to gather lots of diatoms to make more arrangements :)

What a beautiful web page. Thank you.

And a beautiful site.

I loved your "Principles" page (https://www.trebeljahr.com/principles). Extremely intelligent.

thanks :)

This is great!!! Diatoms are one of those cool little facets of nature that I would hazard most people don't know about.

My favorite images of them are from electron microscopes. They look like biological crystals or something.

https://www.google.com/search?q=diatom+sem&udm=2

I used to have a link to a collection of them but can't find it. Yes this is a pinterest link lol

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/beautiful-sem-image-of-a-diato...

While you're at it, check out snowflakes under a SEM.

https://www.google.com/search?q=snowflake+sem&udm=2

Along a similar vein (though not diatoms), I must recommend Art Forms in Nature by Ernst Haeckel.

Ernst Häckel created some of the most beautiful art ever and a conversation about his work is funnily enough how this whole little diatom post project got started :)

I think a lot of people are familiar with diatomaceous earth, though maybe not what's in it.

Yep!!! I'd heard of it for years and it blew my mind when I realized they were connected.

I salvaged a museum kiosk about diatoms and emulated it at the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/diatom_exhibit

34 diatoms can be browsed using the left and right arrows in the UI. The diatoms of Yellowstone Lake can also be viewed in a separate section by clicking the link in the lower right.

thank you

I always thought these creatures of microscopic silica formed hard glass-like structures as part of the fossilization over millions of years, but nope, I was shocked to find out those glass structures are their cell walls WHILE they're alive.

They look like they'd form their shape like a snowflake does, but it's their DNA controlling the shape.

Why can't we model the math/code that generates their forms? I would love to have a random-diatom creating app. Better still to take it to the next level and generate an .stl file I could 3D print.

While biological structures are ultimately 'DNA-controlled', the translation of the ACTGs to codons to proteins to structures explodes in complexity. Even within that simple molecular (i.e. no microstructures, let alone macrostructures like the whole cell) realm, everything is influencing everything else all at once. Proteins will suppress or enhance transcription of others, alter how other proteins are synthesized, and so on.

Once you have some molecules/proteins, they'll assemble into microstructures controlled by other proteins and small molecules that can push/pull on 'things', and they'll be influenced by the ambient conditions: temperatures, pHs, mineral contents which they're not fully in control of, but they're the progeny of ancestors that have been doing it for millions of years in the same habitat, and they've been trained and optimized to handle those varying conditions, so they get it right most of the time.

The biology then interacts with physics and chemistry to kinetically grow faster here to make something grow outwards, slower here to make it grow inward, then you can start forming shapes.

Diatoms reproduce by separating the two halves of their shell and regrowing a new half. It seems to me that it would be difficult to predict the shape without an existing half shell. If anything, the shape is probably mostly determined by the shape of the existing shell; if a parent is damaged and a chunk is missing, you want to make a new half shell that seals up against that half instead of the shape it's "supposed" to be.

I think you're right. The DNA does control the shell shape, but the way DNA works is always thru chain reactions (secondary effects) rather than something akin to a blueprint of any kind. So if you took out the DNA and put it in the "wrong half-shell" (using your concept), I bet it would be unable to complete the other half shell that looked symmetrical, and I bet it would die, because without the symmetry it cannot "complete" the shell, and the outside environment would therefore seep in, corrupting the cell internals, and it would die from that contamination.

You could create a company called Diatomics and sell them (the 3D prints). Would make great wall decorations. Would be cool to try to use AI to try to write a program to generate the 3D datasets. OpenAI-01 is so smart I bet it could create some diatom-modeling 3D code.

I was yesterday years old when I learned that dynamite is nitroglycerin stabilized by diatoms. The little pockets keep the nitro from getting surly.

Damn. That's an interesting fun fact.

you never know what you find in Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatom

" the entire Amazon basin is fertilized annually by 27 million tons of diatom shell dust transported by transatlantic winds from the African Sahara, much of it from the Bodélé Depression, which was once made up of a system of fresh-water lakes."

A friend of mine has designed an award winning board games about this Victorian practice. Check it out here: https://ludoliminal.com/diatoms

Wow! What a pretty game. Thanks for sharing it.

wow super cool, thanks for sharing!

I have looked at diatoms under a cheap microscope to diagnose an algae outbreak in my saltwater reef aquarium at home. There had to be thousands in my tiny sample. They had a red/pinkish hue that was really interesting to observe. After introduction of copepods and a UV sterilizer, the outbreak went away. These organisms are incredibly interesting along with other photosynthetic marine life.

Thanks for sharing. Despite some prior encounters with diatomaceous earth over the years, I never paid much thought to what I had been handling until I saw some diatom art a few months ago at the Exploratorium. I've been crazy about them ever since and suddenly want to know everything there is to know about them!

I'm also tempted to copycat some of those YouTube microbiologists who collect water samples from random places and throw them under a microscope to look at diatoms, among other things. I could possibly convince my retired pathologist mom to gift me her microscope and repurpose it for exploring the microcosmos :)

> I'm also tempted to copycat some of those YouTube microbiologists who collect water samples from random places and throw them under a microscope to look at diatoms, among other things. I could possibly convince my retired pathologist mom to gift me her microscope and repurpose it for exploring the microcosmos :)

I'm a fan of them and have tried my hand at this a few times with a microscope I eagerly bought. I'll just say, it's harder than it looks. Not simply the observation, but the collection and preparation of specimens - it was pretty rare for me to find something more interesting than fast little living bubbles. But I did see one copepod with a bright red eye, and several very cool varieties of rotifers, and some fascinating nematodes. If you're more dedicated than I am, you could have a really good time finding and filming them.

If you're looking for big stuff like copepods, it helps to get a filter (say, 50 microns). That way you can concentrate the larger microorganisms from several liters of water into a few drops.

At that size, $20 pocket microscopes are pretty usable.

Thanks for chiming in. I had no idea pocket microscopes are a thing!

diatoms are fairly easy to collect in the wild, from moss and other moist areas of your yard. https://www.mccrone.com/mm/the-collecting-cleaning-and-mount... http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artjun15/sb-Diatom-Arran...

they are quite small and mostly transparent which makes good observation challenging.

Diatoms are fascinating. I recently learned about them from an excellent Journey to the Microcosmos video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ygty9HxhFK4

Lots of pictures of diatoms and other microscopic living things:

https://www.photomacrography.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=14

This is stunning work you've put forwards. Diatoms remind me of looking at snowflakes, but so much more alien feeling. The ocean is such a mysterious place.

So cool. Have there been any breakthroughs inspired by diatom shapes, in for instance mathematics or engineering or applied sciences?

I've always loved photos of Diatoms and it's so neat to see so many all in one place. The variety is boggling.

They look so much like drum vibration modes.

Edit: radiolaria is a 3d version of diatoms. If diatoms look like vibration modes of a 2d drum, then radiolarians look like vibration modes of a 3d ball.

Anyone offering insights on how these get formed and the evolutionary advantages of the patterns? :-)

Glass shells! So these things are basically living sand?

Exactly. It's like much of the Sand in the world is produced by these things :)

Wow! Will need to find high res versions to print.

what an incredible art form!

this is the stuff folks

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