Queck

as I’ve got older I’ve realised the literal worst or most life destroying thing can happen and then u wake up the next day and it’s like. Ok now what

why did no one tell me quantum computers looked like that

When you hear someone say they prefer standard curbing to cape cod curbing

A collection of Black Books of Hours

Black Hours, ca. 1475 (Morgan Library, New York)

Horae beatae marie secundum usum curie romane, ca. 1458 (Hispanic Society of America)

Black Hours of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, ca. 1466-1476 (Austrian National Library)

Saying "mosquitoes are annoying" after one bites me but shaking my head the whole time so the attractive single ecologists in my area know I understand their value in the ecosystem and that we would slowly die if they went extinct

I could strip the flesh from a cow in 30 seconds too just give me some 30% peroxide and some sulfuric acid. Piranhas are not special

When I find out someone loves animals in the wolves/cats/bears way I’m like oh nice same but when I find out someone loves animals in the orange-footed pimpleback mussel way I’m like holy shit holy shit same let’s stop what we’re doing right now so you can tell me about all the invertebrates you’ve ever loved with that sweet pure heart and curious mind you have

Scanning electron microscopy is awesome and I personally think the images it produces are gorgeous but objectively speaking I feel like it doesn't do any favors at all for the "scary" cultural image of insects, because I mean, here's a closeup of a carpet beetle in its true colors:

And here's an SEM image that comes up for carpet beetles on google:

And the thing about SEM images is that they aren't "photographs;" they are computer scans. They're 3-d digital models generated by scanning an object at the molecular level. Color is not preserved by this process, and if it were all the specimens would look like metal anyway (I'll explain this is in a moment), so images like this had to be colored artificially. This isn't done to recreate the true colors, but to make different body parts more visible as study material, resulting in scientific images of wacky blueberry fleas:

The subtly varying transparency levels of living tissues are completely lost as well, which is why the fine hairs of insects stand out more like cactus thorns in SEM imagery, and tardigrades look like opaque leathery things with no eyes:

...Even though a tardigrade actually has eyes, they're just under the surface of a crystal clear exoskeleton:

Another thing that probably contributes to the uncanniness of SEM images is also the fact that they can only show us embalmed corpses encased in liquid metal.

It's not possible to do this fine level of scanning "instantaneously" enough for it to work on anything that's still moving, so even when you see scanning electron images of animals in various lifelike poses, it's because they're preserved specimens that were carefully positioned, or they were live specimens basically "flash frozen" by a sudden dehydration process, mummified so fast they never knew it. Many specimens are then "sputter coated," meaning they're sprayed with a thin (like microns thin) layer of liquid gold, platinum or other fine metal in order for the electrons to perfectly bounce off of every subatomic detail and produce that perfect scan. So this is a live fruit fly:

And this is a fruit fly mummy with probably some sort of chrome plating: