Wanna talk about your hobbies or post about them? Here's your spot! From mini painting to cross stitching to crocheting.
Some time ago I mentioned to my partner that I've always wanted a microscope as a hobby π¬ they saved some money and got a cheap one for me recently, and I'm having so much fun!
Pictured is the thin peel that's intimate with the garlic clove, stained with eosin (I think) and magnified x1200. It's great because it's already 1 cell thick π€
What are some tips you guys have for a beginner? I'm looking into buying methylene blue for staining too.
thats cool, are the little pink dots the nucleus of those cells? You should do a DNA extraction on some strawberries and see if you can look at that.
I think so!
Cool, I'll try that for sure
Barking up a completely different tree than most comments here, it might be interesting to look at some electronics, like the inside of some integrated circuits. This would be a whole process and require a lot of nasty chemicals (nitric acid is particularly dangerous) though. This is probably a bad idea actually.
I know you said in another comment
I didn't try looking at pond water or similar with it to find living things, only plant life so far.
But you really really should. Maybe I'm biased but to me, that is one of the greatest joys of using a microscope is watching the teeming activity of creatures that have always existed all around you but that you've never seen before. It's like walking into an alien forest and seeing the rich ecosystem there of fantastical beings and their interactions with each other, only these things have been all around you all your life, they're not alien, they're more common than squirrels, they just operate at a different scale than you do so you have no knowledge of them. It's like being a newbie bird watcher, but again, in a new dimension. You start to notice patterns, creatures of similar type but that are also clearly different, analogous to different kinds of birds, from various songbirds to corvids (shoutout to @[email protected] to birds of prey. You'll get to know types of diatoms that are (no offense) far more varied and exciting than the garlic skin in your OP image, and rotifers making convection in the water to suck up food, ciliates waving their (silly) cilia about, tardigrades (water-hexbears) all over the place. And then you can higher the maginification (depending on your microscope to some extent) and take a look at a whole new level - bacteria.
Experiment with different samples. See what you can find in different kind of environs. It's awesome to see anything up close, but ime there's much more of a sense of discovery when you spot lifeforms, especially ones that do stuff you get to watch.
Cool! I'll try with some seawater later.
These don't need staining, right?
See what you can find in different kinds of environs
That's an interesting idea, think I'll get a notebook to register each. This gave me the idea of making different kinds of terrariums with different conditions to analyze how their microbe ecosystems develop
Nope, no need to stain. I actually haven't really looked at seawater much to be honest, but you're definitely going to get a different set of lifeforms in seawater than you will from fresh pond water. Making comparisons between them might be a good thing to record in your notebook, which is a great idea btw. In the sea water you might see some tiny crustaceans like copepods but not likely to see rotifers for example. Could see tardigrades in either, though!
In either case, pond or sea, you shouldn't need to worry about staining anything. Most of these things have their own pigmentation, especially diatoms. The critters will tend to look semi-transparent or transparent but with very distinct edges, something like this so no, no need to stain. In fact you shouldn't stain anyway because it will likely kill the creatures in your sample so you won't see their activity.
As for the terrariums, awesome. There is a lot to be considered there, but what an amazing way to truly delve into those questions. If or when you do set something like that up, I hope you post about it here. I'd love to read about your findings.
I will! π
Very cool! Unfortunately while I am currently working with a microscope it's a dissecting mic (which I have far more experience with generally) so you already seem to know pretty much everything I do about the compound mic. I don't think I've ever even stained my own samples tbh;)
piss
Here's a pic: π¨
nice cell walls! i took a class in grad school for plant disease identification, which was more of a whirlwind tour than exhaustive. there's a lot to know for a specialist, and i'm more of a flex player in the plant sciences. i know enough that if i absolutely had to and had such equipment and some compendia at hand alongside some basic info about the plant (where it came from, what it is), i could probably make a really respectable guess.
anyway, as much as i didn't care for staring into microscopes for long durations, it was pretty cool to see life at that level. and if you want to play CSI for plant diseases, get yourself some diseased/disordered tissues. they're all over the place in the built environment if you look close and find those odd leaves that have something going on...chlorosis, necrosis, wilting, curling. not dead or completely fucked tissue, but some where you can look at the boundairy between healthy and fucked tissue, the places where the plant is trying to compartmentalize the problem and the pathogen is trying to keep moving. full disease/disorder identification is hard, but you can see neat structures, especially if it's fungal since their lifecycles/survival structures/spores are bananatown.
That's a great idea, thanks!
for sure! and just so you don't get frustrated trying to find a culprit, abiotic disorders (nutrient deficiencies, pesticide drift, etc) are notoriously difficult to diagnose under the scope unless you have a great context/history for the plant and location.
this probably isn't going to come up for you, but I remember being super frustrated looking for something for an hour that wasn't there and then the professor was like "lol it's pesticide drift, remember this moment".
also, the thing somebody said about puddle water is a great one. I had a class where they rigged up a camera feed to a sample of basically gut water from a ruminant (microbial digestion) and the entire slide was like a city of little zoomers and big behemoths all maneuvering around and collectively breaking down plant cells & interacting with each other. it was like TV. I could have watched that for hours. I am sure puddle water and other biologically active water is similar.
Yoghurt (spread thin!. H&E staining.
Pond water droplet, all kinds of creatures and shit
Looking at green pondweeds is beautiful, no stain no nothing.
props for the great use of the "PINCHING HAND" emoji (added to Unicode in 2019 apparently). π€
πwhen the pasta taste perfecto π
NEAT 
Can you see tiny bugs or little life forms with it?
Probably, but I'd rather stay clear of bugs π΅βπ« I didn't try looking at pond water or similar with it to find living things, only plant life so far. I'll post it if I catch something cool
Check if you can see your own sperm
glad to see this was already posted because i was gonna say it as a joke
That's a neat hobby.
π
