Bloodletting for curiosity…

Mar 26, 2019 • 9:34 AM UTC

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140x Magnification

Microorganisms

Ronak Hati

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While washing some slides, I ended up giving myself a cut to the finger by mistake. The drop of blood that came out and also the slides reminded me about Field staining I performed during practical sessions at college.
This made me prepare a wet mount of that drop (usually smears are made). And this drop of blood won’t spread at all whilst under the cover slip! So in the end I added some water from the sides, and observed this under foldscope.

Magnification 140 × 6.0x
Also some dance moves shown by the RBCs, as commanded by my hand. You can actually make out the shapes of RBCs as they are being rolled around.
Also tried observing them under darkfield, they look as pretty as stars twinkling in the sky but couldn’t manage to get a good picture.

And when I just left the foldscope as it is, I observed the RBCs vibrating, or moving at the same place. Is this because of Brownian motion of water molecules which bombard against the RBCs causing them to behave that way?
Also one more important thing! I found RBCs to be birefringent!
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Bazinga, they weren’t birefringent when I observed them using polarizing filters… They would look beautiful if they were…
Have a good day and thanks for reading,
Ronak