Scanning Electron Microscopes

Ok, well, screw not doing a content-y post tonight.  Screw you graph!


For the last several days, and again on Wednesday, I've been working on a machine called a Scanning Electron Microscope.  It allows me to see far more detail on the my forams, allowing me to look at incredibly small details.

Forams are microscopic plankton, and they leave a calcium carbonate shell behind when they die.  When people go out on the IODP legs, one thing they use Foraminfera for is to date the layers of sediment that they are drilling.  To make their identifications we need good reference pictures to see what the minute details of these shells are, what they texture of their shell wall is, etc.  This sort of thing is of the utmost importance for figuring out who is related to whom. 

The best part is they're really cool.

Here's a eye-ball view of a slide filled with forams.  My finger here is for scale.

Somebody needs to cut his nails.

Those little white dots are the forams.  I'll get more into why they're useful and interesting (they are, really!) in a later post.  Right now, all you need to know is they're really small.

So, using a microscope we can start to see some details, like their general shape.
This isn't my image.

Image credit: (c) 2002 David Field

http://www.mbari.org/news/news_releases/2006/forams-images.html

A little easier to see.  That's just with an ordinary scope.  Now, we enhance.

yeguaensis-globularis plexus

Pretty sweet eh?  This is with the SEM.  It's just stark black-and-white, but the amount of detail you can see is remarkable.  You can see very well the individual pores and pustules on each chamber.  But we're not done yet.

Enhance.

 yeguaensis-globularis plexus (Penultimate Chamber)

So, here's a view of the wall structure.  See how there are little holes in the above picture?  Those are the same holes that are in the full view, just bigger.

How about a little more?  See the little wagon-wheel type deals in that image?  A little closer now.

Enhance.

 Coccolithophores

These are little pieces of another type of plankton that uses these as little focusing prisms to guide the light into its cells (I think, I'll edit this out if I'm wrong).  They're also what makes chalk, basically.

I'm looking forward to getting back on the SEM on Wednesday, and hopefully I'll shoot another bunch of cool images.

Not-so Interactive Graphs

Well, my new years resolution to blog here is going great.  I suppose I shouldn't have picked such a busy time to start.

I'm currently working on trying to get this (How to make an Interactive Area Graph) working.  I feel like I'm getting closer, but not having anything more than 1 session of a web-training course in FlexBuilder, it's a little tough.  My plan is to make a interactive version of the Sepkoski database.  Hopefully having it be interactive, filterable to fauna or genus would make it a little more understandable for people not quantitatively driven, like undergrads.

First Year Faculty

Here's a pretty nice write up about being a first year faculty at a University.  I've actually been thinking about what it'd be like to teach about Evolution vs. Creationism for a while, this seemed like an interesting place to be doing it.
Adventures of a First-Year Faculty Member

For me, after having sat through a freshman science class from the teaching side for the first time, I think it'd be really fun to teach a freshman History of the Earth to non-majors.  The class could even be broken up with an intro to evolution and geology, then an exam.  Then the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic would be their own section, each with an exam.  If there were time you could get into subjects like Time's arrow, or other broader paleo-type questions.  Could be fun.