Dreaming of ice

Winter at last! Besides the snow and cold, there's lots of ice. With proper footwear and care, ice is a lovely substrate. I spent many years walking on sea ice with Yaktrax on my sneakers, or CCM Tacks on bare feet playing ice hockey. (Aside: The former got me much further in life than the latter.)

While walking in the parking lot at work, I noticed dozens of curiously-shaped ovals, circles, and irregular ellipses of white adorning the pavement. They were crusts of salt that outlined the location of briny puddles from motorists driving on salted roads.



A dried salty puddle (left); Explorers Cove shoreline (right)



Close inspection of these white lines brought back memories of the Explorers Cove shoreline as seen from a helicopter. Even in a parking lot one can find unexpected dreamscapes.

A few blinks, though, snapped me back to reality. The underground parking lot with surprising outlines of white now feels dank and ugly. Sadly, looking at these salty shapes now ignites images of respiratory linings discolored by tar and other products of tobacco smoke.

Sometimes an eye for detail is a damnation.

Square Trees and Lilliputian Architects

Trees at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza in Albany are trimmed so that they mirror the monolithic architecture of New York State's government complex.

This spring, I've watched a particular cubic tree leaf from one of the few windows near my lab. I suppose that some might think it "cruel" to shape a tree this way; if so, you should see what artist Natalie Jeremijenko has done to her trees at Mass MoCA, or simply think of what every bonsai goes through.

Getting back to the plaza, I wonder if the "tree foraminifera" that we study would build similar monoliths if offered bricks and blocks? This is a serious scientific question: I've long held the notion that we could "train" cells to construct tiny devices. (The alternative concept that most engineers have adopted, i.e., self-assembly of components, is one of the bottlenecks, if not fallicies, of nanotechnology.) Tree foraminifera are magnificant sculptors and build micro-scale shells for a living. Why not teach them how to assemble our miniaturized goodies?

Notodendrodes antarctikos - a "tree foram" from Explorers Cove, Antarctica (photo courtesy Shawn Harper)

Since this post considers the concept of scale, we should be cautious when thinking about working at the level of foraminifera. These single-celled giants are voraceous carnivores; given the chance, they would probably trim our body parts so that we conform to their arborescent aesthetic.

And then eat us!