Skeptic Wonder has joined FoS! (and new header!)

In case you haven't yet left the comfort of your feed reader and noticed the changes, Skeptic Wonder has moved from Blogger.com to FieldofScience.com, hereafter known as FoS. The founder, Edward, has invited me very kindly and thus persuaded me to join. I feel quite honoured to be among the wonderful bloggers here, and hope I can pull my weight. Thank you, Edward!

Please let me know if anything's not working as well as it should, or if some element of formatting is tempting you to throw a sharp heavy object against the monitor. Or even if it only bugs you slightly. And, of course, speaking of which, various bugs too. The blog looks a bit funny via Safari on a Mac for me, does anyone else have the same problem? Or is that computer generally fucked? Via Firefox on PC seems fine though...

To celebrate the move, I finally set out to take care of a problem that has plagued this blog since conception, namely the long overdue customised header. I have spent many mL of brain juice pondering how to make the header several months ago, and never quite got anywhere. Today, I scrapped all prior planning and simply assembled some of my own micrographs together, intended to represent the eight major eukaryotic supergroups:

From left to right: Opisthokonta (nucleariid), Amoebozoa (Cochliopodium?), Excavata (Trichonympha), Archaeplastida (Eudorina?), Hacrobia (centrohelid Raphidiophrys), Rhizaria (euglyphid), Stramenopila (bicosoecid) and Alveolata (ciliate Cyclidium).

Ha, I have images for every supergroup! Would be nice to have one for each subgrouping, and then refine further and further until I get the whole tree covered. And then my plans for world protist domination shall be complete, bwahaha!

I've posted the Trichonympha image before, but haven't shared the whole stack. Admittedly, the poor creature is kind of bloated and dead, but I think the piece of undigested xylem lignin helix makes it all worth it:

I don't have any half-decent pictures of other parabasalians. Yet.

Also, the full picture of what I think may be Eudorina:

It's one of my earlier micrographs, and thus the DIC sucks badly. The colonies are still adorable though!

The other images hang out elsewhere on the blog, except for the euglyphid, which will be blogged about eventually soon. I've got more where that came from.