Crapstallography

I spend a good amount of time at work wading through microscopy images of concentrated proteins soaking in salt syrups that should hopefully tease them into forming innocent pretty crystals (that I can mercilessly shot with X-ray guns but that part is another story). It takes just a glance to figure an image out. So with a few thousand conditions and a few images per condition the whole process takes just a few thousand times a few glaces.

Rarely do you get to see something that has crystal written across the image with zoom-in zoom-out effects. The image on the right is a UV light image of the same drop.

Less rarely, you get to see misshapen gunk that has meh written across the image with sound effects that say 'really'?

Then you can spend some time perfecting the syrup recipe until you have something that is workable.

What you see most of the time is either clear boring drops or drops that contain what looks like shredded snakes or alien foetuses.

This one actually looks like the alien from alien.

An that is the scary part. You wade through enough of these crap-drop images that you start seeing mind-game things. Like smiley faces.

Or flirty botched plastic surgery-lips.

Or hand-bags.

Spend enough time and you really start seeing crazy things. Like stars.

Or the Batman.

Must...focus...

I am headed out for some soup, sports and grounded sanity. Peace.