Shoulda' Been in Pictures
Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.
The CDC released the first photos of H1N1 this morning. FACT: If you tilt the computer screen at just the right angle and slightly cross your eyes, you will see a pig riding a sailboat.
Seriously, though, these are some gorgeous shots. I may spend the next 10 minutes before the coffee kicks in just listening to that amino acid sequence MP3 and staring at these photos.
the latest
latest episodes
The first one is particularly good.
On an unrelated note, I've just realized how lazy spell-check has made me. For "particularly", i typed "particlary" then corrected it.
Those are pretty great, all right. I wonder what the magnification is? Maybe it's been a while since I looked at this kind of thing, but the resolution is stunning in the second one. This type of virus is supposed to be 50-120 nm in diameter.
I don't see the sailboat. Shall I rage and set in motion the plot of Mallrats?
It's a schooner.
Pigs don't ride schooners, they use sloops. Slooping the hogs is a common chore on farms.
Looks kind of aggregated to me.
What exactly are we looking at here? These seem to be several cells clumped together---my high school biology taught me to expect maybe something that looks like the lite version of a single cell.
Or sailing pigs. Ah, I see it now.
I thought this would make an excellent Photoshop brush. I took the picture Maggie posted here, and painted out some of the edges to give it a more ragged look, and then I defined it as a brush preset. Turns out the H1N1 works well for painting blood corpuscles, coral reefs, hanging lilacs and a number of other fun items. If anybody wants to gank my brush, I've posted it over at my art blog and my flickr accounts.
http://art.lismitchell.net/?p=21
To be sure: is each ball a virus?
So, this is the SOB that's been kicking my butt for most of a week? Not just me, but my wife and daughter as well. While I'm not sure we have swine flu, whatever it is has been NASTY. I've gone years without missing a day of work, and whatever bug I caught has done it's job. A couple days ago, i thought my eyeballs might burst from my skull due to the pressure in my head. Add to that the flesh-tearing cough, and all the rest of the misery that goes with the flu. Now, it's still in my head, though not as bad, but it has been trying to increase it's grip on my respiratory system.
I've never had flu symptoms last for more than 4 days. This is day 5. I hope it's over soon.
The first one looks like Australia?
Horrible photographer! This photo doesn't look like a pig at all!
The 1918 flu pandemic, caused by another H1N1 virus, started with a mild, early wave in spring and early summer. The flu lab at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US estimates that the R0 of the 1918 virus in spring was only 1.45. That shot up, they estimate, to 3.75 when the virus began its lethal second wave the following autumn.
Much may now depend on how quickly the new H1N1 virus from swine adapts to people.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17072-first-genetic-analysis-of-swine-flu-reveals-potency.html
Swine Flu when Pigs Fly
To #7 and #9
Yes, each little ball is an individual virus. They're in the region of 100nm across and the particles in the second image are about 3cm across on my screen, so the magnification is something like 0.03m/0.0000001m = 300,000x. This is way past the resolving power of visible light, so I assume that the image is an electron micrograph.
The outer surface we can see is a lipid (fatty) membrabe stolen from the outside of the infected cell that these particles were budded from. The core of the particle is hidden inside, and is a densely packed mixture of viral proteins and its genomic material encoded on eight lengths of single-stranded RNA.
The little knobbly bits sticking out are the Haemagglutinin proteins, the "H" in H1N1. It's the main protein used to bind to and enter any cell it drifts into contact with (cool diagram). Because they stick out so much, they're also the main part of he virus that the immune system "sees".
Influenza virus (like most viruses) is pretty inefficient at making new copies of itself; it's very common to have non-functioning particles produced at high numbers. The weird-shaped particles visible in the first image are probably single, mis-formed and non-functioning particles.
If you squint harder you can see this
http://magicschool.tumblr.com/post/103319141/swine-flu-up-close-and-personal
Flu have also other faces......
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/04/swine-flu-portraits.html