Saddest Thing Ever Is Reading An Academic Paper About A Threatened Or Declining Species Where You Can

Warrior Cat CrowdStrike has dealt a blow to the Clan of Microsoft today.

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:

Woodpeckers are insane creatures if you stop to think about it like honestly the aye aye freak finger is conceptually more sane than evolving to smack your head on trees. Glorious animal

my coffin shaped locket is the perfect size to fit one singular ibuprofen

Flamingos huddled together in the bathroom at Miami Zoo during Hurricane Andrew on August 24, 1992.

weird question, vibes based

I saw a cicada molting this morning, and was so worried she’d get eaten by a bird (usually they molt at night for safety, she must’ve got up late). when I came back to check, she’d fallen from her perch, so I brought her inside to finish hardening.

(Neotibicen linnei)

Lady on Facebook: do hawks really avoid black chickens?

This guy:

I can't breathe what the fuck 😂

i love gaboon vipers why do they move like that