[HN Gopher] Diatom Arrangements
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Diatom Arrangements
Author : trebeljahr
Score : 197 points
Date : 2024-09-19 11:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.trebeljahr.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.trebeljahr.com)
| trebeljahr wrote:
| I've been working on making a little website on diatom
| arrangements (single celled microscopic algae art pieces) over
| the last 2-3 days and felt like sharing it.
|
| Here's the result :)
| breck wrote:
| What a beautiful web page. Thank you.
|
| And a beautiful site.
|
| I loved your "Principles" page
| (https://www.trebeljahr.com/principles). Extremely intelligent.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| That's really cool. I have bags of their skeletons that are
| about 13 million years old that I used for pest control. I
| never really gave it much thought what they looked liked until
| seeing your site. All the drawings of them I've seen prior were
| black and white and just showed some shapes but no color.
| pimlottc wrote:
| For those who don't understand, they are talking about
| diatomaceous earth [0]. It's literally fossilized microbes.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatomaceous_earth
| snarf21 wrote:
| A friend of mine has designed an award winning board games about
| this Victorian practice. Check it out here:
| https://ludoliminal.com/diatoms
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Wow! What a pretty game. Thanks for sharing it.
| svara wrote:
| Wow! Will need to find high res versions to print.
| Shalomboy wrote:
| This is stunning work you've put forwards. Diatoms remind me of
| looking at snowflakes, but so much more alien feeling. The ocean
| is such a mysterious place.
| jonah wrote:
| I've always loved photos of Diatoms and it's so neat to see so
| many all in one place. The variety is boggling.
| jcims wrote:
| This is great!!! Diatoms are one of those cool little facets of
| nature that I would hazard most people don't know about.
|
| My favorite images of them are from electron microscopes. They
| look like biological crystals or something.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=diatom+sem&udm=2
|
| I used to have a link to a collection of them but can't find it.
| Yes this is a pinterest link lol
|
| https://www.pinterest.com/pin/beautiful-sem-image-of-a-diato...
|
| While you're at it, check out snowflakes under a SEM.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=snowflake+sem&udm=2
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Along a similar vein (though not diatoms), I must recommend Art
| Forms in Nature by Ernst Haeckel.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I think a lot of people are familiar with diatomaceous earth,
| though maybe not what's in it.
| jcims wrote:
| Yep!!! I'd heard of it for years and it blew my mind when I
| realized they were connected.
| boneitis wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. Despite some prior encounters with
| diatomaceous earth over the years, I never paid much thought to
| what I had been handling until I saw some diatom art a few months
| ago at the Exploratorium. I've been crazy about them ever since
| and suddenly want to know everything there is to know about them!
|
| I'm also tempted to copycat some of those YouTube microbiologists
| who collect water samples from random places and throw them under
| a microscope to look at diatoms, among other things. I could
| possibly convince my retired pathologist mom to gift me her
| microscope and repurpose it for exploring the microcosmos :)
| digging wrote:
| > I'm also tempted to copycat some of those YouTube
| microbiologists who collect water samples from random places
| and throw them under a microscope to look at diatoms, among
| other things. I could possibly convince my retired pathologist
| mom to gift me her microscope and repurpose it for exploring
| the microcosmos :)
|
| I'm a fan of them and have tried my hand at this a few times
| with a microscope I eagerly bought. I'll just say, it's harder
| than it looks. Not simply the observation, but the collection
| and preparation of specimens - it was pretty rare for me to
| find something more interesting than fast little living
| bubbles. But I did see one copepod with a bright red eye, and
| several _very_ cool varieties of rotifers, and some fascinating
| nematodes. If you 're more dedicated than I am, you could have
| a really good time finding and filming them.
| maxbond wrote:
| If you're looking for big stuff like copepods, it helps to
| get a filter (say, 50 microns). That way you can concentrate
| the larger microorganisms from several liters of water into a
| few drops.
|
| At that size, $20 pocket microscopes are pretty usable.
| vitovito wrote:
| I salvaged a museum kiosk about diatoms and emulated it at the
| Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/diatom_exhibit
|
| 34 diatoms can be browsed using the left and right arrows in the
| UI. The diatoms of Yellowstone Lake can also be viewed in a
| separate section by clicking the link in the lower right.
| mzs wrote:
| thank you
| hammock wrote:
| So cool. Have there been any breakthroughs inspired by diatom
| shapes, in for instance mathematics or engineering or applied
| sciences?
| akomtu wrote:
| They look so much like drum vibration modes.
| akomtu wrote:
| Edit: radiolaria is a 3d version of diatoms. If diatoms look
| like vibration modes of a 2d drum, then radiolarians look like
| vibration modes of a 3d ball.
| inside_story wrote:
| this is the stuff folks
| alok-g wrote:
| Anyone offering insights on how these get formed and the
| evolutionary advantages of the patterns? :-)
| dekhn wrote:
| diatoms are fairly easy to collect in the wild, from moss and
| other moist areas of your yard. https://www.mccrone.com/mm/the-
| collecting-cleaning-and-mount... http://www.microscopy-
| uk.org.uk/mag/artjun15/sb-Diatom-Arran...
|
| they are quite small and mostly transparent which makes good
| observation challenging.
| hinkley wrote:
| I was yesterday years old when I learned that dynamite is
| nitroglycerin stabilized by diatoms. The little pockets keep the
| nitro from getting surly.
| quantadev wrote:
| I always thought these creatures of microscopic silica formed
| hard glass-like structures as part of the fossilization over
| millions of years, but nope, I was shocked to find out those
| glass structures are their cell walls WHILE they're alive.
|
| They look like they'd form their shape like a snowflake does, but
| it's their DNA controlling the shape.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Why can't we model the math/code that generates their forms? I
| would love to have a random-diatom creating app. Better still
| to take it to the next level and generate an .stl file I could
| 3D print.
| quantadev wrote:
| You could create a company called Diatomics and sell them
| (the 3D prints). Would make great wall decorations. Would be
| cool to try to use AI to try to write a program to generate
| the 3D datasets. OpenAI-01 is so smart I bet it could create
| some diatom-modeling 3D code.
| hwillis wrote:
| Diatoms reproduce by separating the two halves of their shell
| and regrowing a new half. It seems to me that it would be
| difficult to predict the shape without an existing half
| shell. If anything, the shape is probably mostly determined
| by the shape of the existing shell; if a parent is damaged
| and a chunk is missing, you want to make a new half shell
| that seals up against that half instead of the shape it's
| "supposed" to be.
| quantadev wrote:
| I think you're right. The DNA does control the shell shape,
| but the way DNA works is always thru chain reactions
| (secondary effects) rather than something akin to a
| blueprint of any kind. So if you took out the DNA and put
| it in the "wrong half-shell" (using your concept), I bet it
| would be unable to complete the other half shell that
| looked symmetrical, and I bet it would die, because without
| the symmetry it cannot "complete" the shell, and the
| outside environment would therefore seep in, corrupting the
| cell internals, and it would die from that contamination.
| nick238 wrote:
| While biological structures are ultimately 'DNA-controlled',
| the translation of the ACTGs to codons to proteins to
| structures explodes in complexity. Even within that simple
| molecular (i.e. no microstructures, let alone macrostructures
| like the whole cell) realm, everything is influencing
| everything else all at once. Proteins will suppress or
| enhance transcription of others, alter how other proteins are
| synthesized, and so on.
|
| Once you have some molecules/proteins, they'll assemble into
| microstructures controlled by other proteins and small
| molecules that can push/pull on 'things', and they'll be
| influenced by the ambient conditions: temperatures, pHs,
| mineral contents which they're not fully in control of, but
| they're the progeny of ancestors that have been doing it for
| millions of years in the same habitat, and they've been
| trained and optimized to handle those varying conditions, so
| they get it right most of the time.
|
| The biology then interacts with physics and chemistry to
| kinetically grow faster here to make something grow outwards,
| slower here to make it grow inward, then you can start
| forming shapes.
| trhway wrote:
| you never know what you find in Wikipedia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatom
|
| " the entire Amazon basin is fertilized annually by 27 million
| tons of diatom shell dust transported by transatlantic winds from
| the African Sahara, much of it from the Bodele Depression, which
| was once made up of a system of fresh-water lakes."
| FredPret wrote:
| _Glass_ shells! So these things are basically living sand?
| xcf_seetan wrote:
| Lots of pictures of diatoms and other microscopic living things:
|
| https://www.photomacrography.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=14
| zem wrote:
| what an incredible art form!
| scghost wrote:
| Diatoms are fascinating. I recently learned about them from an
| excellent Journey to the Microcosmos video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ygty9HxhFK4
| 0xPMW wrote:
| I have looked at diatoms under a cheap microscope to diagnose an
| algae outbreak in my saltwater reef aquarium at home. There had
| to be thousands in my tiny sample. They had a red/pinkish hue
| that was really interesting to observe. After introduction of
| copepods and a UV sterilizer, the outbreak went away. These
| organisms are incredibly interesting along with other
| photosynthetic marine life.
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(page generated 2024-09-20 23:01 UTC)