Naughty nomenclature + Deconvolve This!

Taxonomy can actually be fun sometimes:

Tubifex longipenis

heehee... somehow there's this public image of academics being all mature and serious. In reality, those are rather hard to find...


Recent disappearance was due to leeching off a 2wk 3D live cell microscopy course that happens at UBC every year; they were nice enough to let local students attend lectures... and even leech off the food a bit... Great course, highly recommended for those who think microscopy is just putting shit on a slide and looking at it. Microscopy is a high art and a rather sophisticated science. Course is likewise quite recommended for those who realise that already...they have pretty toys cutting edge microscopes to play with test out for your research purposes.

So yeah, practice safe microscopy -- always use deconvolution on 3D data*! ^.^

Also, physics (and even chemistry) becomes surprisingly interesting when presented by the right people in the right context! Or maybe I'm just crazy... (but so are the course faculty and many students so no one noticed...)

*There is a debate on whether deconvolution works at all on plant material, which is rudely autofluorescent and absurdly packed with spherical aberrations sufficient to utterly destroy your PSF into a disturbing calculation-intensive mess. Our stuff is apparently notoriously shitty for decent microscopy, especially in confocal and multi-photon. And guard cells are among the worst in plants... so decon may not work there (Sorry, Prof. Pawley! >_> )