Science Porn

[Anomalocaris]

I don't get it. What's going on there?

The picture shows what happens when you put a frog in a magnetic field so strong that it actually magnetized the frog by aligning the water molecules in its cells.

Aligning the water molecules aligns the weak magnetic field around each molecule so they build up to a aggregated magnetic field. This field reacts against the outside magnetic field and levitates the frog. The frog is literally hoisted by the water in each of its cells.

The frog is not harmed in any way when it is magnetized this way, and de-magnetizes, falls to the ground and returns to normal the instant the outside field is switched off.

It is theoretically possible to do this with humans, but ring magnetizes sufficiently powerful and sufficient large to accommodate a human in the middle is hard to come by.

[SteelCurtain]

Microscope fun!!!

Grand Canyon? Nope. Microfracture in steel.


Beard hairs. Left is cut with a straight razor, right with electric clippers.


Moth's Wing.


The leg of a gecko.


Marijuana!

[FatAndFaithless]

That gecko leg is creepy as shit.

[Mystical]

Marijuana!

*feints

It even looks magical, those little THC crystals..


Here's one that's not so appetizing, but insanely awesome if you've ever seen the movie Tremors with Kevin Bacon:

[Anomalocaris]

Fly larvae with a small compound eye on each leg, and also on its antennae and mouth parts. Result of inserting a mouse gene which controls the formation of eyes in mouse embryo into a fly egg.

[Alex K]

Here's one that's not so appetizing, but insanely awesome if you've ever seen the movie Tremors with Kevin Bacon:

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Omg it's Barry!

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:r

Fly larvae with a small compound eye on each leg, and also on its antennae and mouth parts. Result of inserting a mouse gene which controls the formation of eyes in mouse embryo into a fly egg.

Am I the only one to whom this is the most viscerally creepy of them all? Must be the body horror aspect.

[Anomalocaris]

The sea has eyes in its stars:



The calcite crystals which form the lens for the eyes of the brittlestar starfish.

Until recently no one noticed this common starfish, or indeed any starfish or their close biological relations, had the wherewithal to see.

[Aoi Magi]

Wow this topic actually had me go through all of the pages one by one, multiple times. We are stretching our hands in space, yet we know so little about our own planet.

[Anomalocaris]

Evolution of half an eye right before your eyes:




This is the vent shrimp - rimicaris exoculata - which, as adults, live in the abyssal depth near hydrothermal vents, where it is almost completely dark. The infinitesimal amount of light available there are created by chemical reaction between minerals in the hot vent water, and are far too dim to be captured by the aperture for any camera eye or compound normal eye of any other creature.

Rimicaris larvae swim in comparatively well lit shallow depth and are thus born with normal shrimp compound eyes. When they mature they sink down into the abyss near hydrothermal vents where their normal eyes become useless, due to the dark, so the eyes are completely reabsorbed when the shrimp reach adulthood. As the picture shows, the adult rimicaris does not have any eyes.

Except not quite. The normal shrimp eyes are totally gone. But notice the patch of brown discoloration on the shrimp's back. The adult rimicaris evolved a totally new form of eye, not seen in any other animal, that is really, quite literally, half an eye. After it absorbs its normal shrimp eyes, rimicaris developed, get this, a naked, totally unprotected retina, on the back of its shell. That's brown discoloration.

It sees with its shell, literally. It is as if you took a normal eyeball, cut away the pupil and the lens, take the remaining backhalf of the eyeball, and lay it out flat on the shrimp's shell. This precisely how the brown patch, the retina on the back of rimicaris, works.

Why does it work this way? Because normal eye lacks sufficient aperture to capture enough of the few photons down at that depth to be useful. So the shrimp evolved a new eye with the maximum possible aperture, which is no aperture at all, Ie, a naked retina spread out flat to avoid castinga any shadows so as to capture every last stray photon. Half an eye, retina only, no lens, no pupil.

Half an eye, ideally adapted to the shrimp's environment.

Creationists who say the eye is irreducibly complex because anything less than a complete eye is useless, you can eat shit and die.

[Whateverist]

Cool stuff! Keep this thread alive please.