Mikrobiotch - 🔬🧪🧫🧬

(via Nikon Small World 2023 photo microscopy contest: Meet this year’s top 20 winners | Ars Technica)

Second place: a matchstick igniting by the friction surface of a matchbox.

Sunflower pollen on an acupuncture needle.

virus pattern from Macrovector_official (source). Stay safe everyone!

Scientists make 'disturbing' find on remote island: plastic rocks

A 'plastic rock' found by Brazilian scientists on Trindade Island,one of the most remote places on the planet.

There are few places on Earth as isolated as Trindade island, a volcanic outcrop a three- to four-day boat trip off the coast of Brazil.

So geologist Fernanda Avelar Santos was startled to find an unsettling sign of human impact on the otherwise untouched landscape: rocks formed from the glut of plastic pollution floating in the ocean.

Santos first found the plastic rocks in 2019, when she traveled to the island to research her doctoral thesis on a completely different topic—landslides, erosion and other “geological risks.”

She was working near a protected nature reserve known as Turtle Beach, the world’s largest breeding ground for the endangered green turtle, when she came across a large outcrop of the peculiar-looking blue-green rocks.

Intrigued, she took some back to her lab after her two-month expedition.

Analyzing them, she and her team identified the specimens as a new kind of geological formation, merging the materials and processes the Earth has used to form rocks for billions of years with a new ingredient: plastic trash.

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Etsy

MugeneArtShop - Etsy

Shop biology goodies for nerds by MugeneArtShop located in Boston, Massachusetts. Top shop for gifts. Buyers bought gifts from this shop and

gifts for microbio and paleo enthusiasts! :DD

A phase-contrast micrograph of a ciliate (Frontonia sp.) digesting blue-green algae (cyanobacteria). 

The cytostome (the “mouth” of the cell) is seen on the right side down.

image: Wiedehopf20 | Wikipedia CC

Conifer tufts

A quick little note about this bacterium, Nocardia! These are fascinating to me as, although they are a rod-shaped bacteria, they can form beaded, perpendicularly branching filaments that are acid-fast. They can appear morphologically similar to a different bacteria, the anaerobic Actinomyces, however Actinomyces does not exhibit beading like Nocardia does.

This is a Gram-stain of a bacterial embolus within a pulmonary vessel of an Australian marsupial species, and we were lucky enough to know what genus we were dealing with before culture was performed, purely based on the bacteria's morphology!

source

Question from one of my Mycograsshoppers on Patreon: “what types of potential pests might be attracted to the [mushroom] spores?”

My answer: “Good question mycograsshopper! Primarily fungal gnats :) thats my biggest concern. Technically mites, but thats less common, and also technically, I believe, a few choice flies and some beetles could be attracted if you kept your research area wide open to the outside long enough!!! Any creature that youd consider a pest for your mushrooms is termed “fungivore” and includes mycelium, spore, and fruit body-hunting pests💯”

lil chemistry moodboard for motivation 🧪🥼