Category Archives: Science and art cover illustrations

Ode to the reseeding impatiens flowers

Rants, Science and art cover illustrations

For 36 years+ I have had pink impatiens flowers in my yard, first blooms appearing right around the first of July.  They were here when I bought the house and the previous owner pointed out these tiny sprouts and said to me that these are “reseeding impatiens”.  They come in various shades of pink from a deep magenta to a pale baby pink.

Over the years I have noticed that weather plays a huge part in whether these impatiens come back in droves or whether they are sparce.  At some point a few years ago I began collecting seeds thinking that perhaps in a warm december that the seeds would sprout and then succumb to the freezes in January.

The flowers themselves are the only flower in my yard which attracts migrating humming birds, and the bees and bumble bees seem to pay them less attention.  From August onward the seed pods form. They are are terriffic examples of biological engineering, and as they mature into little “impatiens-seed grenades” they pop with huge vigor spreading their 50-100+ seeds (within each pod) out onto the ground. This year I decided to count the seeds (so to speak) and there are about 222 seeds in each 0.15g.  (I will update with total seeds collected later in the fall)(about 80,000 by weight). The largest pod contained 108 seeds, this seems to vary with the year, and the number of insects, birds and other polinators.  The polinating species certainly express what all biology expresses…. do the least amount of work for the greatest reward.  This is seen by the position of the flowers on the plants with the biggest pods…. easy access means more frequent polination and therefore more seeds per pod.

I have noticed that there are differences in seed-producing vigor with the very pale pink impatiens having fewer seeds and smaller seed pods, and lighter color seeds than the very dark impatiens do.  The biggest pods seem to be on the medium pink variety.  I collect them all, every color.  I have sorted seeds by color in the past, but when I throw the seeds to the ground in early May it seems not to make much difference how I have sorted the colors and what color impatiens flowers spring forth.

Not the prettiest, or showiest variety of impatiens varieties, just plain and simple, but I enjoy them, their color, and the fact that they have persisted in my yard (sometimes with my help), for decades.

Images below show flowers with mature and immature pods, and pods I have collected (immature pods are small, narrow, and dont have a translucency, and dont look “pregnant”), and the seeds are shown collected in the last image.

Another thing i noticed is that if the flowers get wilty (which they do often) but are watered well, within a few hours the seed pods are bulging, ready to pop.

reseeding impatiens reseeding impatiens reseeding impatiens reseeding impatiens
reseeding impatiensreseeding impatiens reseeding impatiens

Temporary Lobulation in Cartilagenous Models of Long Bones

Science and art cover illustrations, Ultimate order, the cell

The first rhythm and order I think i found as a graduate student in anatomy (light microscopy of cartilege) was the order of the beginning of long bone development in mice.  Back then, (as in 50 years ago) many journals didn’t have cover images. At this time, dissolving all my records, publications, micrographs from the finite universe, I made this cover for one very lovely design in nature. I attach a very bad phone phot of the publication (not even I, its author, was willing to spend the highway robbery that some journal websites ask for an almost equally fuzzy scanned image of the original).

Here is my suggested cover, half century down the pike, and a free link to a terrible scanned pdf of the paper. cartilagenous models of long bones
Miller_Basom_McCuskey_Cartilage_1973

or HERE

My style purkinje cell: ‘its a joke

Good Grief!, Science and art cover illustrations, The cell: images

I must have drawn this quick sketch of a purkinje cell decades ago, while cleaning out junk I found it and decided it was artistic enough to be a post. Clearly, I have a fascination with this cell type, remarkable, for sure. I think about my cerebellum when i jog (for exercise), as some of my best ideas spring to mind during that jogging…. thank you to these magnificient cells, and here is my rendition. You can see the tips of the dendrites have a lot of human things going on… hearts, smiley faces, peace signs.  I wonder what mood i was in when i sketched it.  LOL.

artistic rendition of a purkinje cell

Bitplanes color transform in Corel Photopaint help visualize LUT peaks along the arms of SP-D

Methods to assess TEM and AFM images, Science and art cover illustrations, surfactant proteins A and D

Bitplanes-images were obtained as a filter in corel photopaint to visualize LUT peaks along the trimeric arms of SP-D (color>transform>bitplanes with slider) (original image by Arroyo et al).  It has become quite clear that there is a lot of image processing that can be done to AFM images, and with an honest approach, very little of it changes what appears in the original image.

This gif animation was made in GIMP using png files (exported from corel photopaint x5 and sized and edited in corel DRAW x5 to add the arrows that point to three distinct peaks along the collagen like domain of one of the SP-D trimers– in this case to the left of the glycosylation  and N termini peaks ).  While it is garish, the data are real. If you look at the LUT plot (made in ImageJ) from the same SP-D dodecamer in the previous post you will see the three peaks, in their typical increasing height (left to right) as those areas marked by arrows in this animation.

The tiniest (also previously undescribed) peaks that I am pretty sure exists can be seen like  “blips” on either side of the central N termini peak (on the more vertical hexamer).

Cicadas: brood X, “here’s to the cute cicada clinging to a tree who in the summer’s heat chirps his melody””

Science and art cover illustrations

June 11, I am ready for them to be “done”  ha ha. wikipedia says cicadas began about 250 million years ago. 
observations:

if they fall on their backs they must expend an enormous amount of energy to right themselves and sometimes are unable.

if they fall into a puddle it means pretty certain death because their wing muscles are not sufficient to break the surface tension of the water. I have rescued many from the cat’s water bowl and from shallow puddles in the sidewalk.

they can fly a little, haha, but not much. Most i have seen a cicada fly is about 40 feet. If one grabs them by both wings to move them to the side of the walkway and sends them air born, most just make a deep dive to the ground.  Presumably those are the cicadas that have performed their function and they have no energy reserves. (fun article on the science behind their wings)

i have seen them fly into stone walls and brick buildings. They must not have good vision, or visual processing capabilities.

Their legs are their strongest point, obviously for climbing up that tree. I did read that one website said they had 6 pairs of legs…. i tried to contact them to get them to edit it to 3 pairs (as insects have), but there was no good way to tell them.  Anyone looking at the belly up of a dead cicada shows very large legs, redish, folded neatly across their abdomens (the latter with red stripes).

I wonder if the males do the flying mostly and the females just go straight to the tree branches without venturing out.  The cicadas i toss into the air are mostly males as they chirp because of the disturbance.

i mowed grass today…. these bugs are big (thank goodness they are not the biggest cicadas (as noted below) but they are about 2.5 inches, its good they are not the loudest cicadas (as noted below) but the drone is still undeniable and kind of nice but after a long time (weeks and weeks) its a little annoying,

but they might be the dumbest… ha ha… per todays observation – any female cicada that thinks that my briggs and stratton lawn mower engine sounds like a handsome male cicada ready for mating is going to become a statistic of darwinian evolution…. survival of the fittest…. as they just fly into me, into the lawn mower and if they are down close to the wind tunnel created by the lawnmower blade they become new fertilizer for the grass… and thus dont propagate….

25 eggs (give or take) per slit, 300 eggs (give or take) per female – 12 slits per female

i have had so much fun thinking about these bugs, but ugg… ha ha… 4 more weeks and they are gone for another 17 years (well not gone, just underground preparing for their next emergence)

While these are interesting, loud, and sometimes annoying, i am grateful they are not the Emperor Cicada with a wingspan of 7 – 8 inches. YIKES. Or the Greengrocer cicada in australia which is touted as one of the loudest insects in the world.  Imagin billions of those in the air.

from the ancient literature here is an ode to the cicada: “and the tuneful Tettix sitting on his tree in the weary summer season pours forth from under his wings his shrill song”
which i have converted into a kid’s rhyme….

“here’s to the cute cicada
clinging to a tree
who in the summer’s heat
chirps his melody”

CorelDRAW process: 5 gaussian blur-color_transform 3-4-4

Methods to assess TEM and AFM images, Science and art cover illustrations, surfactant proteins A and D

CorelDRAW process: 5 gaussian px blur then color_transform 3-4-4 of several images from a publication that i have referenced many many times shown below. On these dodecamers of SP-D I have been using various image processing programs to figure out just the best way to amplify, and plot their peak brightness peaks along the collagen-like segment.  In that process (bad pun) i found the color transform in corelDRAW ( both x5 and 19).  It is a stitch, and the peaks along the collagen like segment are well noted…. at least as well as in any other image processing (or data processing as gwyddion calls it) program.  My picks for programs for processessing AFM images are the old versions of Photoshop  (yep, the old CD style) of photoshop 6 is just as nice as the new photoshop 2021, and the old version of CorelDRAW (x5 and including CorelPhotoPaint) is just as good as the new version (CorelDRAW 19 also including CorelPhotopaint)  and both are much more user friendly with many more options than either Gwyddion or ImageJ.  And sometimes with these highly developed (though NOT FREE) programs it can be just plain fun while it is informative.  (Thank you Arroyo et al. for the various AFM images from your publication  (smiley face).  Blue bar-100nm

Just a nice image of SP-D

Science and art cover illustrations, surfactant proteins A and D

Arroyo et al published AFM micrographs of SP-D, along with others, in fact, many images which I have been using to sort out whether it is possible to determine some of the structure of SP-D by determining the number of LUT peaks along the collagen-like domain. In the process of processing images, this one just turned out to be what i think is beautiful. It is a combination of photoshop and corel photopaint and I am thinking it looks like a poster that would nicely be framed and hung on a research office wall.