♡ BLOOD ♡ : It is in our heart.

Originally shared by NATURE

♡ BLOOD ♡ : It is in our heart.

Scanning electron micrograph of human blood showing red cells, white cells, platelets (green-yellow) and fibrin (light brown).

This entry was posted in Rajini Rao. Bookmark the permalink.

13 Responses to ♡ BLOOD ♡ : It is in our heart.

  1. Rajini Rao says:

    robert aston , the white ones are the white 😉

  2. Rajini Rao says:

    Dear robert aston , you are confusing with sickle cells…as in anemia, it’s a disease 🙂

  3. Yasmeen A says:

    wow thats amazing! we never really know what’s inside our heart until we really see it, huh? 😉

  4. SEM pictures look misleadingly like photographs. Can you describe in one sentence or two what we are seeing? My guess is that the blood is dried and coated in gold, distance from a scanning plane is measured in each point and a 3D image is generated with artificial colors and lighting.

    This is just going by Wikipedia. Thanks for confirming or denying my assumptions!

  5. Rajini Rao says:

    Yes, Wiki has the gist of it. Not sure what you mean that they look like photographs? They are high resolution micrographs, in this case using electrons as the beam instead of light. Many different fixing and staining methods (Don’t know which precise one was used here) that show every nook and cranny of the specimen. The color is pseudocolor, that is one can choose it to be anything one wants, but the shadowing is directly from the specimen.

  6. Well they look like deceivingly like macroscopic objects and I would be prone to believe that this is what blood looks like through a super strong magnifying glass :).

    The shadows are not computer generated then? But is there a “light source” other than the electron beam? And isn’t the electron beam coming from the point of view?

    The shadows do not look computer generated (especially considering the older micrographs) but I still don’t see where they come from.

  7. Rajini Rao says:

    The topology of the specimen is being read by the beam of electrons, that’s why it looks so life like. Here is another definition: an instrument similar to an electron microscope in that a beam of electrons is used to scan the surface of a specimen. The beam is moved in a point-to-point manner over the surface of the specimen. These electrons are deflected, collected, accelerated, and directed against a scintillator. The large number of photons thus created are converted into an electric signal that, in turn, modulates the beam scanning the surface of the specimen. The image produced appears to be three-dimensional and lifelike.

    Here are some more spectacular SEM images that were in my stream earlier: https://plus.google.com/u/0/114601143134471609087/posts/gxNoPw7ez5v



  8. I read about blood cells in school red cells, white cells and platelets and this is the first time i see it in picture

  9. Thanks! Between your description and more Wikipedia I think I see it now. The beam hits a point and the scintillator measures the amount of secondary electrons emitted. But not just those emitted in the direction of the scintillator — there is a cathode there that attracts all the secondary electrons. However if the point under the beam is in a nook or cranny, many of the secondary electrons will hit a wall on their way. So nooks and crannies appear darker!

    This is the inverse of illumination on a cloudy day, where light is coming roughly uniformly from every direction, but less of it will find its way to a nook than to an unobstructed flat surface. But whether the electrons/photons are coming or going, the resulting image is the same.

    Additionally I think the scintillator is off-center from the sample, which gives the appearance of some directionality of the lighting. Like a room with a window on a cloudy day.

  10. Mark Herndon says:

    Wowza that is some serious detail from that electron micrograph.

  11. Neil Tsubota says:

    Great Photomicrograph !

Leave a Reply


WordPress.com Logo


Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s