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Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater

#151

Post by pvaldes »

bennyelv wrote: post #10

I wonder that the commercial model is for endeavours such as this? I guess you collect royalties from people who want to publish the photos, but although you get a one-off wow factor I don't see there being a big market for these kinds of photos. Is it a hobby/pursuit or can you actually make a living doing this kind of thing? P.S. It's a fascinating thing and I love it!

To start, you need huge amounts of diesel to produce this work. Expensive technology. Hours or weeks of work identifying this things...

Re: Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater

#152

Post by pvaldes »

Waterluvian wrote: post #94

Maybe I missed this in the article. How many single drops of water have life in them? Like what’s the hit rate?

The animals are captured one by one and placed carefully into a drop of water for viewing in an (inverted?) microscope. Is not a random sampling. You can spot all of those animals with the naked eye.

Re: Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater

#153

Post by tlavoie »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #19

I wish there were a way to "productize" this, or automate it at least. I'm imagining some sort of aquarium-like tank you stock with ocean water that is able to maintain the microscopic life, allow them to flourish. Meanwhile, some sort of slow or periodic pump draws aquarium water into an attached, miniature "photography studio" where an appropriate camera+lens feeds a constant live stream to a display or to the web…

I don't know the company, but there was one sold in a local toy shop some years ago. The idea was that this was essentially one "slice" of a pond, think of a very thin aquarium tank that was in the window. It had been seeded with a variety of small plants, algae, tiny critters and the like.

Meant to be a closed system, where it was all what was inside the glass, plus the sunlight from putting it in the window. Very cool, you could see tiny things swimming around in there.

Re: Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater

#155

Post by zokier »

Waterluvian wrote: post #94

Maybe I missed this in the article. How many single drops of water have life in them? Like what’s the hit rate?

If you count bacteria etc single-cell organisms, then I'd assume close to 100% naturally occurring water has some amount of life in it.

Re: Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater

#156

Post by pvaldes »

toephu2 wrote: post #79

Are there or were there ever copepods on Mars?

Nope. Life is exclusive from earth at this moment. No fossils or live animals, fungi or plants of any kind in Mars.

But if there is still some subterranean water at the correct temperature in a deep Mars cave... who knows? They can stand huge pressures and extreme environments very well.

Re: Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater

#157

Post by zokier »

toephu2 wrote: post #79

Are there or were there ever copepods on Mars?

We have not found any evidence of life of any sort on Mars, much less of multi-cellular life. I imagine that even the most optimistic pan-spermic ideas would involve far more primitive/rugged life-forms than crustaceans.

Re: Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater

#158

Post by officeplant »

icambron wrote: post #67
manbash wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you could have been born as" and the so-called "life-lottery" are a matter of philosophical and belief-system debate. The "you" (or: self) is a concept, a perception. I am just me, and couldn't have been something else, or born in another timeline, or to different parents.

To elaborate this point a bit: the "lottery" concept requires you to believe there's like a queue of souls and they each get allocated to different bodies, and you're lucky you got a fancy one instead of a microscopic shrimp. A different -- and to me, more plausible -- way to look at it is that "you" are an emergent property of a specific complex organism. How you actually emerge is a fascinating and difficult discus…

I'm gonna be reborn as microplastics and live eternally.

Re: Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater

#159

Post by dang »

dekhn wrote: post #145
dang wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"religions present such a myopic view of life and what it means to be alive on Earth" etc. is generic religious flamebait. We don't want that on HN, because it leads (in the general case) to horrible threads that are as nasty as they are predictable. I'm sure that's not your intent, but we have to go by the effects these things generally have. You may be right about connections to the article (I haven't checked) but…

I'm gonna have to disagree here, I don't think the single line from the comment passes the threshold for flamebait. The comment wasn't offtopic, and the conversation it led to was both interesting and not really a flamewar. I don't often see comments replying to dang's moderation (from people other than the ones he's moderating), and generally, I think dang's influence is beneficial, but I would like to see the moder…

Pejorative generalizations about religion are obviously religious flamebait. This isn't a borderline call. If this thread didn't erupt into a nasty conflagration, that's only by chance, the same way that not every lit match dropped in a dry forest starts a forest fire. It's still not cool to drop them.
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