atomic-jotunn:

The weird thing to me about that crab cycle meme is that crabs have these weirdly complicated life-cycles, in which they change shape an entirely excessive number of times. So really…

bananapeppers:

handsomejackofficial:

handsomejackofficial:

I’m so mad that a t4 bacteriophage actually looks like that and that it’s appearance isn’t made up

this is how they look in all the models

this is how they actually look

like they really fucking look like that. in real life

was the enterobacteriophage T4 body plan as rendered by many scientific illustrators (including Mike Smith, the medical animator responsible for the 2nd image—it’s not a photo) not based on actual imaging of the T4 thru electron microscopy in the late 1950s through ’70s [opened-access: Sci-Hub] and subsequent actual imaging thru EM and other technologies? scientific illustrators of the T4 weren’t (and aren’t) clairvoyant. they used reference images.

i mean, the context i saw this in was more relating to the disconnect between cartoons of proteins and what we think the actual structure is like based on x-ray crystallography– if you’re used to seeing highly simplified non-spacefilling schematics of proteins, for instance, that are meant more to illustrate the structure-function connection in the protein than the less visually apparent/blobbier actual shape would, i can see it being surprising or exciting that something on a somewhat similarly small scale actually looks just like the function-illustrating schematic. i don’t think it’s “we didn’t just make that up” on the level of not expecting that illustrators would know what they look like, it’s “we didn’t just make that up to explain the function and structure better than a realistic depiction might, that just is the realistic depiction, and it looks like an hg wells martian, how delightful.” (to be fair: most proteins are about 100x smaller than a t4 bacteriophage so we’re operating on a pretty different scale here, and some proteins do have visually distinguishable function and structure from a more realistic image, but this was where i came from on the level of initially agreeing with the sentiment of the post.)

on the other hand: yeah, that’s….. super not a microscope image of a bacteriophage.

reallyreallyreallytrying:

i’m so sick of scientists writing things on a clipboard while i perform activities

pipistrellus:

Hey…. u ever miss trilobites

palaeofail-explained:

argumate:

can epigenetics explain the early 2000s denim trend