A Shiny New Microscope

It all begins with a microscope and some professionally prepared biological slides. The microscope is a beauty: it is binocular, with built in LED light source, coarse and fine focus controls, X-Y controls of the stage, five objective lenses from 40x up to 1000x, plan lenses, and special attachments for dark field, and phase contrast imaging. In addition, there is a trinocular output designed for connecting a camera. Naturally, there is a digital still/video camera that attaches the microscope to a computer on which images are recorded.

And of course, regardless of my skill set in finding interesting samples and preparing slides, how can I say no to a complete set of professional prepared biological slides? These are a real doozy, containing plant, animal, mineral, bacteria, etc. It’s a blast just to wade through them.

But, then, a thought…what if I am to document these, put them on a web page, and make my notes and photos available to every other science freak out there? Thus begins an exciting, yet amazingly time consuming, endeavor, sitting in a little makeshift lab in the basement, putting a slide on the scope and photographing whatever looks interesting, jotting a few off-the-cuff notes, etc.

 

How Does "The Magic" Happen?

OK, yes, I've been incredibly bored of late, and I really like making Flash animations, sSo I created an animated diagram of the process. How does this work? Well, it's not rocket science. Watch the flash animation below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kingdom Taxonomy

So, did I mention that I like making Flash animations? Here is an animated pie chart diagram designed to show the relative proportions of the kingdoms. Nothing to click, but use your mouse to see who belongs where. BTW, it's similar to the animated mushroom part diagram. What can I say, I like to make things glow when you mouse over them. I have some other applets listed on my biology web applet page. Also, don't forget to check out the chemistry web page which has several other fun science web applets and diagrams. These don't represent any sort of definitive say on sciencve but rather just document the latest thing I've learned.

 

How The Pages Are Organized

So, check out the website. All the pages have a similar structure. On the left, iconic buttons link to pages that show collections of similar slides. For example, the dog page has slides made from samples of a dog’s cardiac muscle, skeletal muscle, smooth muscle, taste buds, trachea, esophagus, duodenum, ileum, jejunum, small intestine, squamous epithelium, stomach, rectum, ureter, spleen, and pancreas. There are separate pages for Insects and for certain insect parts such as wings and eyes. Animals appear at the top; plants, below. On the right, there is a complete listing of all the slides done so far. These are in roughly alphabetic order. There is also links to a few flash applets, most notably, the periodic table. BTW, if you got to this page via a different address, the simplest URL to it is BIOLOGY.TOUCHSPIN.COM.

 

World's Greatest Periodic Table

Oh, and don't forget to check out my sister site that deals with chemistry, CHEM.TOUCHSPIN.COM. On it, you'll find what is arguably the best periodic table on the web and certainly the most interactive. Among other things, it dynamically colorizes the elements to represent individual characteristics such as melting point, molecular volume, ionization level, elctircal conductivity, (many, many more). It allows several illuminating views on the periodic table. It has a an automatic graphing tool that shows particular characteristics versus their AMU in a manner that strongly demonstrates the periodicity of the table. Many other features. Check it out.

And, in the highly likely event that you discover errors, please let me know so I can make corrections. I got into this because I like to learn, and that hasn’t changed just because I’ve published the web page.