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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  3mo ago (text post)   549 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for December 17, 2024

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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I picked up a used microscope a few weeks back. Got it off a former veterinary student on Craigslist who no longer needed it. It has 4x-10x-40x-100x objectives with a 10x eyepiece and it came with a bunch of accessories (slides, slide covers, dyes, tools), enough to keep an amateur microscope user occupied for a while. I just bought some slide mounting media (for making permanent slides) and immersion oil (for the 100x eyepiece, I learned that some high-magnification objectives are designed for a drop of oil between itself and the specimen being observed).

I have scraped off various samples from around the house to look at. They include:

  • Slime from the bottom of the kitchen sink (surprisingly not very interesting)
  • Wool fibers (pretty neat)
  • Moist soil from the garden (found several energetic critters in the sample)

I found a dead bee on my patio outside and brought it in with the intention of making a permanent slide, but while waiting for the mounting media to be delivered, my cat found it and ate it, so there goes that.

Next time I am out and about, I will try to gather some interesting samples (pond scum? tide pools? decaying plant matter?)

At some point I intend to get an eyepiece camera so I can connect it to my computer and take photos and video, which would be cool.

Anyone have any suggestions on other things I can do with this thing?

See if you can find any of those mythical dust mites that are supposed to be living in our eyebrows.

Pollen grains. Crumbs of various minerals, rust, graphite, chalk etc.

@George_E_Hale has already suggested sperm so I'll add on blood and tears. In the interests of science you could also test for the presence of sperm in precum and post-ejaculatory urine. You could also try chilling, freezing, and then reanimating them.

True story. At age 22 I lived in the Kgalagadi. As it happened, on the grounds of a junior secondary school with a science lab, to which I had the key. I spent a hell of a lot of time alone. I blame this solitude for what happened next.

I was curious if one could actually see human sperm using the microscopes there in the science lab, and one weekend when no one was around I managed (somehow) to acquire a sample of my own.

The answer is yes, the sperm are visible, if tiny. They also wriggle and move wildly, enough to have made me really realize the humbling wonder of conception and birth.

I am not making a suggestion, just relating a brief story. I've only ever told this to one other person, so let's keep this our little secret.

If it works with dead bees (my only microscope worked only with transparent media, I would try various vegetables and fruits. Skin, slices, mold.

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