pics

Some medical tools look crude even at regular size… they don’t call orthopedics bone carpenters for nothing!

It actually looks a LOT smoother and sharper than I expected. Look at microscope photos of razors and knives and they look like chewed up chisels.

I believe it’s damaged by piercing the skin, it’s pristine before.

Yet it emphasizes just how precisely tiny the tip of the needle is.

for this magnification it is actually pretty smooth

source: I have used an SEM at my university and never saw something this smooth even at higher magnifications

of course I didn't look at medical tools but this shows that they are crafted very precisely

certainty of steel.

Yeah.. take a few material courses in engineering...

It's not so certain a lot of the time...

The purity of the blessed machine

Glory to the Omnissiah

There are other reasons.

I can't believe it's that fine or how easily human skin can bend it. I guess our skin is a better protector than I'd given credit.

All these images are super interesting and I'm truly glad they got posted.

Holy shit. I noticed that too and thought that must be one of the ones that hurts going in, figured it was from when they draw the medicine into the syringe, or maybe even from taking the cap off.

In that last one, you'd probably be able to see the bent over tip with the naked eye. You'd certainly be able to feel it if you ran your finger over it. It would take some force and would be pretty painful to use.

I mean, calculus is a thorny issue in that it is mostly necessary for engineering, but is not usef for humanities. Not teach it, and STEM people will have jump of levels going college. Teach it, and humanities people will inevitably complain.

Personally, I think it is good to teach calculus just for the technical communication aspect.

Seriously. I'm in my 40s and this is the first time I've ever had any sense of scale for red blood cells. Very cool!

When I segmented 3D MRI and CT scan images before I used the contrast borders for help a lot. There were some algorithms for finding edges that you could tune by setting search radiuses and thresholds. There was also an option of growing an area by a certain amount of pixels outward, and then threshholding the result back down to only the brighter parts, that kind of thing. You had to be a little clever about how you'd combine it. And ultimately, sometimes I just had to add and subtract a few points manually.

Segmenting is more assigning areas to distinct objects (separating bones from the rest in my case), but you could totally use it as a basis for coloring, so I assume the process is similar here.

I actually thought optical microscopy worked just fine at this scale.

I know it's not the case for this photo, but if a 7 μm red bloodcell is reflecting red light (700nm, aka 0.7μm) under a bright white light, wouldn't the smallest discernable detail of the red blood cells be about a 10th of its width? Is that not roughly the detail we have in this image?

I'm making an assumption that the distance between discernable parts roughly parallels the wavelength's width. I could be wrong tho

Can't you just eat some real gummy bears? I think they even make big ones.

Would probably taste like a rusty nail, but gummy.

At very rough estimate, I would guess a 30 gauge needle. They have an outer diameter of .31 mm. A blood cell is about 7 micrometer across. It looks like you can fit more a smidge fewer than 50 cells across the thickest part of this needle. Cheers!

I'm assuming if the syringe was wet before being placed in the microscope, the vacuum of the chamber would cause most of the water in the plasma to vaporize. The remaining salts and compounds would be much smaller than the red blood cells. The density of the red blood cells would be much larger than any remaining plasma, so the bulk of your backscattered electrons will be coming from the cells and needle, making the plasma essentially transparent. This is a fairly low magnification image for SEM, but that's how you get such fantastic depth of field.