Inspiring things

Wanna hear about my first love? I was reminded (as I always am) of it when I taught about a certain type of observation in lab. When I was ten years old, my 5th grade science classes walked down the hall from our elementary school wing to the junior high, and we went upstairs to a room with several long tables with stools on either side. Sitting at each spot was a simple compound microscope, illuminated with a mirror, which reflected light into a specimen and through and objective lens which was magnified a second time through a single eye piece. We were instructed to gently scrape our cheek with a toothpick, then swish the toothpick around in some blue stuff on a slide, coverslip it all, and try to find something under the microscope. I admit to really scrubbing my cheek with the toothpick. I really wanted to see something under my scope. And I did. It looked like this:

The first cells I saw under a microscope were my own.  How cool is that?!

From then on, it was love.  A love story that continues and one I get to share with others on a regular basis too.  This week, in one of the labs I teach, we looked at cells and their response to hypertonic, hypotonic and isotonic solutions.  

This is elodea.  When you add distilled water to elodea, (hypontic), you can actually see chloroplasts moving around in response to water moving into the cell.   Chloroplasts are organelles.  To see them is just... awe-inspiring.

These are red blood cells.  In a high sucrose environment (hypertonic), the cells desperately try to remain in equilibrium with the environment, and expel water from their cytosol into the environment.  When this happens, these typically perfectly-round cells get spiky looking.  That is because the cell membrane is actually taking the shape of the cytoskeleton below.  That is INSANE!

Microscopy inspires me.  The feeling of looking into these machines and seeing otherwise invisible things is just amazing to me- even after all these years.  I still love looking at specimens I have seen before.

My favorite scope ever was the inverted Nikon fluroescent/light microscope I used the most in my graduate school lab.
I am so inspired by microscopes.

More food for thought:


Is it not awe-inspiring that this image magnified x1000:

Bovine pulmonary artery endothelial cell labeled with probes for mitochondria and the phosphorylated form of histone H3

Looks SO MUCH LIKE THIS image taken of a dying star?

A dying star is throwing a cosmic tantrum in this combined image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX)

From dust to dust, my friends... and THAT is inspiring.