Garner, Kathryn. Fluorescent Fibroblasts (2012). Fluorescent microscopy.
Friend-of-Blog Kathryn is a molecular biologist and fine artist, and she’s kindly sharing this beautiful image of cardiac fibroblasts with us. (Thank you, Kathryn!)
Not sure what we’re looking at? Well, each of those structures is a highly magnified cell. The black circles at the center are the nuclei of the cells. The fluorescent green dye illuminates the strand-like structures which give these cells their name. Fibroblasts: fibrous cells. They form connective tissue, patching wounds and holding other cells together.
The image is scientifically, aesthetically and metaphysically appealing. Scientifically, it’s a really nice image that shows that the cells present are largely fibroblasts, and it demonstrates their characteristic stringy nature – what scientists call “morphology.” Aesthetically, it is pleasing, with the drifting cells resembling jellyfish or nebulas or -
O HOLY MOTHER OF DARWIN
DO YOU SEE THAT
DO YOU SEE THAT GHOST?!
IT IS HAUNTED IN HERE. THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING.
Pareidolia is probably my favorite cognitive bias! Broadly, it’s the charming human tendency to see meaning in random data. We particularly like to see faces in things that don’t usually have faces! The face of the Virgin Mary in a cheese sandwich! Not only that, but we can invent stories to justify random patterns. For example, we really understand this faucet.
You probably made an emotion-face to react to this faucet. Think about that for a second.
Wow, faucet, it’s – it’s gonna be okay, little buddy. Wow. Can we, uh, get 50 cc’s of joy in here?
Oh, chair! You always cheer us up.
I love this cognitive error. It’s something we have to look out for when analyzing scientific data or forming religions, but when we’re not doing that, how lovely to find this humor and empathy in the shapes and patterns of everyday life! How great that our species takes such pleasure from taking white-circles-with-black-dots-in-them, and finds it so amusing to put two of them on a thing. Like this.
Googly eyes. WHY ARE THEY SO GOOD.
NOW THE POTATOES HAVE FEELINGS. And I love this. It makes our experience of the world better, and Jesus-Toast brightens any day. (Of course, people who don’t see pareidolias are good too. Some people don’t!)
The Fibroblast Ghost is not just a pareidolia, though. Remember, I said this image was satisfying Biologically, Aesthetically and Metaphysically! You see… this ghost is actually the Ghost of Experiments Past, a.k.a The Gremlin of Nonspecific Fuckery. If you are a scientific researcher, you may recognize him in these following guises:
Do you see him now?
Yes, I’m sure we’ve all seen this Ghost before. We thought we were making him up! We thought that there was NO WAY that a turned-off piece of equipment could turn itself on at 3 am, self-destruct, and burn all the evidence. For years, we were convinced that our problems were somehow human error, and that the problem was us.
“Nice data. It would be shame if… something HAPPENED TO IT!!!!! WOOooooOOOooooo”
Now you know, Scientists. We can relax; Kathryn has photographed the Ghost. Now it’s only a matter of time before we chase him down, characterize him, and write a paper about him. “Errata on the Metaphysics of Experimental Labwork.” I can taste the Nature paper now.
Rumpelstiltskin, motherfucker.
UPDATE February 5: We are pleased to announce that Dr. Micol M has slimed our ghost.
From Kathryn: “It’s ok, a colleague on the fibroblast project exterminated it. We ain’t afraid of no ghost!”
If your experiments start working better now, you guys know who to thank….
That is the happiest damn chair I have ever seen,
Also, a severely traumatised looking faucet.
I know in New Scientist magazine they summarised the results of a study that found that people scan the front of cars the same way that they scan human faces (look for eyes first, then mouth, etc) instead of looking at them like normal objects. I thought that was pretty funny.
How very interesting! I’m actually very aware of me doing just that but I had no idea that it’s a general thing! It almost doesn’t happen anymore with these newer cars that somehow all look the same to me, but I had (and still have, somewhere in the garage) a bunch of toy cars which clearly had faces to me, so whenever I saw a “real” one of them on the street I’d be all “Oh, that’s the happy Passat!” or something like that.
Oh man, I might be imagining this, but I think I read a study on the Cuteness of Cars – I think that “cute” cars like Minis and VW Bugs are less likely to get into car accidents, or something, because people don’t like to hurt cute, rounded, chubby things. I MIGHT BE MAKING THIS UP. But I had completely forgotten about it; thank you for reminding me to look it up….
I’m also a real believer in house-faces. Like, THIS house is a mean house:
and THIS house is a nice house:
see its wide-open, trusting eyes? No? That’s probably a good thing.
And again, I’m cracking up here; thanks for that!
I knew the chair before but the faucet and the ghost were news to me – and I’m loving them! I also like how somehow everything seems to have a name (“Pareidolia”). Fascinating.
Also, your drawings. Oh man. I’m seriously in love with your drawings.
(Related to that: I scrolled through the blog just now and it seems like the new layout did something to some of your paint pictures? The Ragesaurus one and some of the illustrations to the search-term-post – they’re grey-ish with black stripes and really broad somehow. Just wanted to say that in case someone else is having smilar problems.)
Yeah, I thought that was just me, but I’m seeing some of the pictures like that too.
Oh, thanks so much for that, Myrin – I’ve changed the layout to hopefully fix that. <3
Guest post. Just sayin'.
Indeed, it’s perfectly alright now!
Also, this is my desktop background. Once I saw the ghost with the fiery stomach and the crab claws I have not been able to unsee it. Every. Damn. Time. I’m on my computer.
I’d love to (not about your site’s layout, though. Or paint pictures. I’m decidedly not qualified for that.). You probably didn’t see my comment on the last post about that, but would you like me to write about a specific topic? I’m really bad at finding things I want to write about so if you’ve got any wishes, sock them to me!
Oh this made me laugh so much! Thank you! (And I have woken up at 3 am and worried that something-or-other in the lab was shut properly. Now I know whom to blame!)
Ha, no worries, it was the Lab Ghost. You’re all good.
Yay lab ghost! And googly eyes!
I have a little ornament made of various semi-precious rocks in a family group with googly eyes on them. They’re so cute.
Also, fluorescence microscopy is what I do. I have some awesome pictures, and a video of a cancer cell dividing into THREE. Mitosis, it is broken!
That sounds amazing, actually!
Pareidolia — what a cool word. This is my favorite thing about humans, our need to make stories from randomness. That’s where we get our dreams at night, because our sleeping brains keep telling stories even in the absence of conscious stimuli.
I read an interesting NYTimes magazine piece long long ago how our cognitive biases prime humans to believe in a god. We see emotionally expressive faces in random shapes, we find causal patterns in random series of events, and when we see something rustle from the corners of our eyes or hear a strange noise in the night we feel intuitively that there’s something out there. They quoted this fringe-ey creationist scientist who claimed that these cognitive biases actually supported the existense of a divine creator who would want his creatures to feel his presence. Of course our Rodentiae ancestors wouldn’t have made it very far past predators’ breakfast if they assumed that ominous nighttime noises were just trees rustling in the wind!
Thank you for the sensible critique. Me and my neighbor were just preparing to do some research about this. We got a grab a book from our area library but I think I learned more from this post. I’m very glad to see such magnificent info being shared freely out there.
[Elodie's Note: I thought it was terribly amusing that Spambot and its neighbor went to the library and checked out a book about the Ghost of the Laboratory.]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/shows/ooglies
Enjoy – I LOVE this show!
WHY WOULD YOU SUGGEST THIS??
I watched one episode or so on Youtube and there were grapes which were murdered by melons jumping on them and a mixer luring poor little fruits into it by pretending to be a golf links! *traumatised*
I’m so sorry for your trauma… I clearly have a wicked and tortured sense of humour. Actually, in truth, I watch my littles laugh their socks off from between my fingers… I also feel for the murdered grapes. Yet I still watch again… *guilty, yet amused*
BENEDICTE, YOU ARE EVIL! I think I saw the same episode that Myrin did, and it was pretty amazing/upsetting/hilarious.
Man, Britain is a dark place!
Oh, and as a supposedly French girl, how I love the dark… My heart, my soul are British
Oh dear God, the lab ghost. You mean that was the reason that I would forget to put the probe in 8 plates worth of PCR mix? (For those not in the know, that meant an extra twelve hours of work. Yeuch)
I shall begin constructing the lab ghost trap IMMEDIATELY
I believe that constructing a trap similar to a Drosophila trap (a mostly-empty wine bottle with a funnel in it) will have good results. The trouble will lie in getting the mostly-empty wine bottle….
Long ago when I used to spend a lot of time doing tissue culture and photographing glowing cells too, I used to grow a cell line called ghost cells! If only I could go back and check them now – but given the evidence u present here I feel pretty sure they must have all been wee poultergeists mocking me thru the microscope. My hubby used to be a parasitologist and he reckons that giardia are the cutest protozoa under a microscope. We were made for each other.
oh my goodness, what a beautiful life story! you must tell us of your romance sometime….
I did not realize quite how cute Giardia are. As long as we can agree that the overall cutest microscopic animal is Planaria….
Look at him! He just wants to go on an adventure!!
I can only “see” about 50% of pareidolia — I can usually see ones that look more like faces, with eyes/nose/mouth, and can’t usually see the ones that look like, say, Mary or Jesus. Odd, that.
You know, that’s interesting. I was just reading a paper about people with dementia and how it affects their ability to see pareidolias, and I can’t really say that I think it’s a disability or a massive evolutionary advantage or anything like that. There’s a lot of “oooh, we’re hardwired to see faces because biology barf” which is 70% true and 30% EVOLUTION IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL OF YOUR FEELINGS.
A large component is certainly people seeing what they want to see, or using an abstract image to tell a story that you already like to believe in (funny how it’s always Mary, and never, you know, ME.) The religious ones are more abstract, to be sure. And there’s definitely the purely humorous, whimsical ones like picturing animals in clouds that are really subjective because the original object doesn’t look like anything… Pareidolias certainly aren’t a common, shared experience.
My husband has a stuffed marmot that sits on the bookcase, and he apologizes to it if he knocks it over. I recently threw something towards the bookcase that hit the marmot in the face, and so I had to pet its head and put it back nicely. We’re both scientists and vaguely atheists; we’re clearly not ascribing sentience or sacredness to the marmot. It’s just that it’s struck us as a particularly cute object, and on a personal level, we people don’t like to “hurt” cute things. It’s not that we’re more empathetic or imaginative for apologizing to stuffed animals. It’s not that anyone’s brain is wired wrong. It’s that, in our house, we have rated the marmot as Officially Cute.
In your house, you have rated Mary’s-face-on-a-toast as Officially Not Important. I wouldn’t say that was odd at all!
<3
Oh my, I am hoping my html works….
funny how it’s always Mary, and never, you know, ME
WELL, speak for yourself
But yeah, you’re probably exactly right — my partner and I are both atheists, so “seeing” Mary or Jesus just….doesn’t occur to us. Frankly, I’m much more likely to see a vulva in a picture of Mary than the other way around….
Oh Ethyl, that’s evil! I will never be able look at an icon of Mary and keep a straight face ever again!
Frankly, I’m much more likely to see a vulva in a picture of Mary than the other way around….
Well, in certain cases you’re supposed to, since she’s portrayed with a folded hood and almond-shaped mandorla… so I wonder if that means you’re seeing a meta-pareidolia?!
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