{"id":9215,"date":"2024-10-29T19:14:38","date_gmt":"2024-10-29T23:14:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/mesmerizing-photomicroscopy-of-earths-oldest-life-forms-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-10-29T19:14:38","modified_gmt":"2024-10-29T23:14:38","slug":"mesmerizing-photomicroscopy-of-earths-oldest-life-forms-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/mesmerizing-photomicroscopy-of-earths-oldest-life-forms-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Mesmerizing Photomicroscopy of Earth\u2019s Oldest Life-forms \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

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\"Beautiful<\/a><\/p>\n

For as long as humans have been alive, we have mistaken the limits of our sense-perception for the full extent of reality \u2014 thinking our galaxy the only one<\/a>, because that was as far as we could see; thinking life impossible below 300 fathoms<\/a>, because that was as far as we could reach \u2014 only to discover, as we wield our minds to develop prosthetic extensions of our senses, scales of complexity infinitely wider and vaster than we had imagined, full of wonders we could not conceive with our self-referential imagination. <\/p>\n

\u201cI have observed many tiny animals with great admiration,\u201d Galileo reported<\/a> after converting his telescope into a compound microscope to reveal a cosmos inside the world, an exponent of life never before imagined. <\/p>\n

\u201cI examined water in which I had steeped the pepper,\u201d the artist turned scientist Robert Hooke wrote a generation later in his pioneering 1665 book Micrographia<\/em>, \u201cand as if I had been looking upon a Sea, I saw infinite of small living Creatures swimming and playing up and down in it, a thing indeed very wonderful to behold.\u201d <\/p>\n

Within two centuries, Darwin had drawn a link of kinship between us and these tiny wonders. \u201cEach living creature,\u201d he wrote, \u201cmust be looked at as a microcosm \u2014 a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Today, we know that there are more bacteria in your body than there are stars in the Milky Way, more in a single teaspoon of soil than there are people living in Europe. In the body of the Earth itself, there are microbes<\/a> that breathe rock rather than oxygen and live for millions of years \u2014 a mysterious intraterrestrial universe that may have sculpted the continents we live on. Microbes touch every aspect of our planet\u2019s history and health, from climate change to the origin of life. They are the golden threads in the tapestry connecting everything alive.<\/p>\n

Centuries after it enchanted the early microscopists, their strange and subtle wonder comes aglow magnified by our modern tools and thinking on the pages of
Beautiful Bacteria: Encounters in the Microuniverse<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) by synthetic biologist Tal Danino.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Multiple colonies of E. coli<\/em> cultivated in a petri dish<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Against the backdrop of bacteria\u2019s billions of years of evolutionary history, here is a young art (photography, born in 1839<\/a>) drawing on a young science (bacteriology, established in the 1860s) and using an even younger canvas (the petri dish, devised in 1887) to capture the primordial, eternal beauty of Earth\u2019s first life-forms.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Samples of Proteus mirabilis<\/em> and Paenibacillus dendritiformis<\/em> isolated from soil and printed on handmade washi paper<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Part artist and part futurist, Danino runs a lab working on microbial programming that aims to turn these ancient organisms into futuristic aids for human life, ranging from living environmental sensors to bespoke probiotics that target specific diseases. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Two of 100 samples of bacteria collected from different women<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Centuries after the pioneering microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek used saffron to stain the cells he was observing in order to reveal their intricate structure, Danino\u2019s dazzling array of samples \u2014 bacteria from the sands of Venice Beach in California and the rocks of Breakneck Ridge in New York; bacteria from a man\u2019s foot, a woman\u2019s bellybutton, and a baby\u2019s hand; bacteria from the soil of South Korea and of New York City \u2014 are stained with vibrant dyes that render their enchantment partway between expressionist painting and psychedelic vision. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
A strain of bacteria isolated from a cracked probiotic capsule<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Multiple bacterial colonies in two different communal samples, stained, dried, and embedded in resin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Complement Beautiful Bacteria<\/em><\/strong><\/a> with artist Rose-Lynn Fisher\u2019s photomicroscopy of tears cried with different emotions<\/a>, neuroscience founding father Santiago Ram\u00f3n y Cajal\u2019s stunning drawings of brain cells under a microscope<\/a>, and the mesmerizing microscopy of tree tissues<\/a>, then revisit the haunting science of mental health, free will, and your microbiome<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For as long as humans have been alive, we have mistaken the limits of our sense-perception for the full extent of reality \u2014 thinking our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9216,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9215\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}