Images and Imagination
Electron microscopist and researcher Louise Hughes shares an image of a cell with mitochondria appearing as grumpy or sad faces. Do you see faces in the clouds or everyday objects around you? It’s known as pareidolia. Carl Sagan suggested that it may have been to our selective advantage to quickly recognize faces around us. Some people suffer from prosopagnosia or the pathological inability to recognize faces. Note that microscopy images are false colored (although mitochondria are indeed a related brown in color due to iron containing cytochrome proteins!).
More on pareidolia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
Chosen for #SoG+CuratorsChoice by Rajini Rao who loves art in science.
Originally shared by Louise Hughes
Faces in EM images are a fairly common feature. It has something to do with how we try to interpret what we are seeing.
This image shows general cell ultrastructure with mitochondria (two with unhappy “faces” in the cristae structure), Golgi bodies and endoplasmic reticulum. It was taken using transmission electron microscopy, has been inverted and coloured. With a width of 25cm this image would be at 70,000 x magnification.
Science on Google+ 
Life reaching out to life..i wonder how the color was chosen and formed
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Mark Thompson The colour was applied later by applying colour to the grayscale image. I have this image in a range of different colours, this one showed the faces the most clearly. 🙂
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Golgi apparatus.
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The more we learn about how our brain works, the more we realize how much we don’t know. Which can be applied to other topics.
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Science on Google+ I could use a mitochondria resuscitate…lol…xox
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