85 thoughts on “What are they?”

  1. That third, machine-looking one is incredible. What in tarnation is that? Wow, nature is crazy amazing.

      2. It looks like a whimsical spider. If I had discovered it, I would have called it that, in Latin. 🙂

      3. Look at the scale bar. Whatever that thing is, it’s half a millimeter long. That’s naked-eye visible.

      1. I don’t think so. This page has several images of TMV, and none of them look like #3 above (or #2 either for that matter).

      1. I’d go for “space vehicle from Star Wars” but that would violate the “from nature” requirement.

    2. 1 is a flea. Look at those teeth, that’s why it hurts when the little buggers bite you. I’ve taken pics of them through a light microscope.
      2) Virus, definitely, perhaps bacteriophage?
      3) I’m thinking diatom skeleton, but that’s a guess.
      4) I’m guessing butterfly or moth wings scales.

    3. The last one is human tongue. I only know that because I have seen that photo before.

      Never kissing anyone ever again.

      1. Been there too, for two kids, then myself! Learned the hard way that the ‘natural’ shampoo was totally worthless. After several failures we just nuked ’em with prescription shampoo.

        1. I accidentally bought a homeopathic remedy at the drug store–took it back and had a few words with the store manager about how they should put such things in a special section titled “Magic”.

          I did get them too! And my daughter has very long, curly hair–I threatened to shave it off if it happens again. I love entomology and ended up with a rather morbid sense of fascination with them. I just wish they hadn’t decided to live on my child!

        2. That reminds me of a Seinfeld episode Jerry Seinfeld explains to Elaine that she uses rainforest shampoo while he uses Prell – pulls the hair right out by the roots (or something to that effect).

  4. You think the first one is a louse and not a flea? Or are you sure the first one is a louse?

    If the third one is an ice crystal, that is way cool.

    Yeah, this kind of photography can creep me out, too.

  5. 1) Flea…likely Ctenocephalides felis, at least based on genal comb
    2) Virus
    3) ???
    4) filiform taste buds

  6. The third one is an ice crystal …. ( I have seen the photo before !)

    We all know what number 2 is ( although the precise phage – T4?), 1… hair louse ..

    But 4 …. Why does a close up of a shark’s skin come to mind.

  12. 4 resembles the protozoan parasite Giardia lamblia on the lining of the small intestine. The similarity is probably only superficial, because there are no flagella. Maybe they fell off during evacuation of the Chamber.

  13. Might be easy for you science people! The first one looks like a flea, and the last a tongue, but I have no idea about the others except the third I’d guess to be some kind of crystal.

    I love these sort of pics – always interesting.

  16. I’d go for
    1. Flea.
    2. Virus.
    3. Bacteriophage.
    4. Taste buds.

    What’s my grade?

  20. What? No mother-in-law jokes?

    The only one I recognize is the virus. Whatever the third one is, that’s pretty cool for a naturally forming shape.

  21. Number 2 is actually an image of a model of a bacteriophage. (The model is most likely a computer-graphic model). No actual electron microscope photograph of a bacteriophage would show that resolution, or those colors.

    1. Yep. The dead giveaway is the “fuzz”… the depth of field. And the shadows. It’s an artist’s rendition of what a T4 bacteriophage would look like if light itself were somehow shrunk down and the whole thing suspended in an aqueous gelatin wonderland.

      Freely available from XVivo — apparently there’s a lot of tw*ts, tw**ting about it being a “real” image of a virus.

      1. Same thing with the false color on image #4. Color can be added to SEM images. I did get to see a Time of Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer at a lab at North Carolina State University. It did produce false color images of different surface materials on samples. But that’s only because the algorithms in the software are programmed to do it so that it’s easy to identify what the sample is made of.

        Some very cool stuff at NCSU!

  23. Flea, virus, not sure and shark skin? I don’t think the last one is a tongue, or at least no a human one.

  28. At least the T4 is an artist’s rendition, not a real EM micrograph. I mention this because it’s not clearly labeled as such.

    http://www.xvivo.net/?s=phage

    You can pick out EM micrographs because they have no depth… you won’t see out-of-focus planes… which makes me think that all of these might be CG.

  29. 1. Flea
    2. T-4 Bacteriophage
    3. amazing pic, but don’t know–ice crystal seems good
    4. Pretty sure it’s a tongue–maybe not human tho.

    I had some fun this summer looking at SEMs and stuff in the micro- and nanometer scale. Could look at them all day.

  31. Others have probably gotten all these, but: Flea, virus, snowflake, cat toungue.

  33. What does it mean when people type ‘sub’ in the comments? Trying to figure this out has been driving me crazy!

    1. It means we want to follow the comments, but in order to do so, we have to write something on the thread. We could also use >>> or זזז

        1. Exactly. I used to type (subscribing) every time I wanted to do so, but that became too onerous. 😀

      2. I used to think it meant that the person’s answer was below. Then I could never find the reply and I kept wondering why people would not just reply where they put sub. After a while, I caught on. 🙂

    1. Now I remember what #3 is. It’s a crystalline life form, brought back to Earth on a military satellite with tragic results in Piedmont NM in the early 70s. They managed to isolate it in an extremely advanced super-secret biocontainment facility and get some visualizations of its life cycle before it mutated, destroying the rubber gaskets, and nearly escaping. I remember seeing a documentary about it when I was a kid.

  36. Arghh, 1 out of 4.

    Not going to post spoilers, but if you want to know the answers just Google search the images.

  38. Flea, virus capsule, another virus capsule, not a clue.

    You are going to tell us the answers, right?

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