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I took this scanning electron micrograph of a spider head back at Smith. It’s a little bleached-out-looking (I hadn’t really mastered the instrument) but nonetheless gorgeous and creepy.
Before you image a biological specimen, you have to dry it using a gizmo called a critical point drier. Simply evaporating off the water doesn’t do the trick, because the surface tension at the interface between water and air damages the spider as it dries out and you end up with a wrinkly specimen — not so pretty. If you bring water to its so-called critical point, where the density of water and air are the same, you can avoid the surface tension issue. But then you have a really-dangerous-conditions issue: the critical point for water occurs at 374 degrees C (705 degrees F) and 3,212 psi (about 219 times the atmospheric pressure at sea level). The poor little arachnid corpse isn’t likely to make it through that experience intact. Read the rest of this entry »
Just wanted to toss out a quick enthusiastic plug for Barbara Kingsolver‘s fantastic newest, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. I’m almost constitutionally incapable of recommending a book with “Miracle” in the title but as they say, don’t judge a book by its etc.
(Image poached from www.animalvegetablemiracle.com.)
It was the spring of 1977, and New Englanders had monsters on their minds. In Dover, Massachusetts, three high-school boys spotted a creature with orange eyes and a melon-shaped head. Meanwhile, in Hollis, New Hampshire, a father driving with his two sons encountered a nine-foot-tall hairy behemoth.
Arnold Vellucci, mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, took notice when the Boston Herald-American reported these mysterious sightings in side-by-side articles. But he wasn’t worried about aliens or Bigfoot, the usual suspects in paranormal sightings. Vellucci worried instead that the peculiar beings had escaped from a molecular biology lab at either Harvard or MIT.
On the same day that the Herald-American articles were published, Vellucci penned a letter to Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences. Vellucci politely requested that the NAS investigate the matter. “I would hope as well,” he added, “that you might check to see whether or not these ‘strange creatures,’ (should they in fact exist) are in any way connected to recombinant DNA experiments taking place in the New England area.” Read the rest of this entry »
“Physics envy. The lure of reducing complex problems to basic physical principles has dominated the philosophy of science since Descartes’s failed attempt some four centuries ago to explain cognition by the actions of swirling vortices of atoms dancing their way to consciousness. Such Cartesian dreams provide a sense of certainty, but they quickly fade in the face of the complexities of biology. We should be exploring consciousness at the neural level and higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles as emergence and self-organization. Biology envy.”
—Michael Shermer, “Quantum Quackery” (Scientific American, January 2005)
idiosynchrony 