Small World Speaks

So I put a, if I remember correctly, a video of cells using DIC, which is differential interference contrast microscopy.

It's kind of a structural technique, so you don't get any molecular identity. You just know you're looking at cells. And so if you know what the parts of the cells are, you can tell.

And at the time, I was testing this idea that you could kill extracellular vesicles, just like you could kill a cell. And the field of view had the extracellular vesicles that I cared about at the bottom.

The video is really cool because the cells, like, round up and they gland these big membrane balloons that come off the sides of a cell and are very dynamic, and then they pop. They literally lose their membrane integrity and pop like little balloons, and they sit there like a ghost.

It's a very dramatic video. That's one of my favorite videos. It's, it's the least colorful video that I've ever submitted to the contest. It's just gray scale, right? But it's so dynamic, and it's cancer cells dying, which the narrative itself is pretty good because it's so easy to kill cancer cells when sitting on your dish, and so difficult to kill cancer cells inside of a body without killing the host, obviously.

And so that dynamic was, I thought, pretty interesting, just how easy it is. All I did was change the pH of the me- of the media very, very subtly, and the cells went through apoptosis, or programmed cell death.

And so that's probably my favorite video that I've put up so far.