Exploring the Spectrum Part III

This is a petri dish of the thysarum polycephalum, a slime mold that makes an ideal organism for cellular research.

Ordinarily it grows on decaying wood out in the forest, but growing it in the laboratory is a different matter.

First a plasma is made and put in jars that are shaken in this machine so that it is thoroughly mixed.

Now a small amount is placed on some absorbent paper in the petri dish, and a nutritive solution is added.

Here in time lapse photography you see the growth taking place as it spreads out over the absorbent paper.

Here is a close up and you can see the actual slime mold beginning to grow.

It spreads out with these fan -like protrusions in all directions.

Normally the spores are carried by the wind to other locations, but here in the laboratory thysarum polycephalum will just keep on growing in one location.

Here is a microscopic picture showing streaming of the protoplasm.

Dr.

Harold Rush and his colleagues at the McCardell Laboratory at the University of found that in order to make it sporulate it had to be placed in this light chamber for a matter of about four hours.

This light treatment causes these spore heads to form and then they grow larger and larger.

And here you see this pulsing type growth through time lapse photography.

It cannot be seen at normal speed and it just keeps on growing like this.

A group of researchers at the University of Minnesota tried to grow thysarum polycephalum in their laboratory and were unable to make it sporulate even though they very carefully followed the protocol established by Dr.

Rush and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin.

They made a similar light chamber in the same number and size of fluorescent tubes, but the thysarum polycephalum would not sporulate.

That is until they discovered cool white fluorescent tubes were used at the University of Wisconsin and they had used warm white tubes at the University of Minnesota.

Cool white has more energy in the yellow -green wavelengths and warm white has more energy in the orange -pink.

This emphasizes that different biological responses react to specific wavelengths of light energy.

And then it quiets down and the spore heads begin to mature and turn a darker color.

It's really dark now, fully matured and ready to burst open and release the spores.

Light is not the only factor affecting growth.

Here is one of the county agents in Kansas showing a comparison of good wheat grown on one side of a highway with some very poor wheat growing on the other side of the same highway.

Both fields were planted with the same seed by the same farmer at the same time, but the wheat from the good field had crop rotation and fertilization.

They both had the same amount of natural sunlight.

The unfertilized wheat is stunted in growth and seriously infected with disease.

Here is a gardenia plant and notice how yellow and sickly looking the leaves are.

This is usually due to a lack of iron, but fertilizer containing ordinary sulfate of iron didn't do any good.

When I gave it chelated iron, watch what happened.

It started new, healthy, vigorous green growth.

The pulsing up and down motion is the result of the day and night period.

With chelated iron, it just takes on new life, puts forth more green leaves, and now watch the buds develop.

The advantages of natural fertilizer compared with chemical fertilizer has always been a very controversial subject.

Here you see chemical fertilizer being applied, and now the natural organic fertilizer.

Here is soil in a box with a glass front.

It is divided into three sections.

The center section is plain soil and the arrow points to a corn seed.

On the left, a popular chemical fertilizer has been added to the soil.

You can see a spot of full strength chemical fertilizer.

On the right, organic fertilizer has been added, and you can see a dark spot of full strength organic fertilizer.

As the soil is watered evenly across the top, you'll notice that it penetrates down a little faster on the left side with the chemical fertilizer.

The organic fertilizer absorbs more moisture and is a little slower in penetrating down to the deeper depths.

We're going to watch and see if there's any difference in the growth of the roots from the same seed.

Plain soil is in the center, chemical fertilizer on the left, organic fertilizer on the right.

Here is a close -up of the seed, and you'll notice the roots starting downward and the shoot going upward.

In this particular picture, all the roots seem to go a little to the left, but they go right on by the spot of full strength chemical fertilizer.

There's no tendency to turn toward it or away from it.

Over on the right -hand side, you see how the roots have developed and gone right through the organic fertilizer, but there's no noticeable turn toward either fertilizer, and the roots will go right through the full strength chemical fertilizer.

The conclusion is, fertilizer does not alter the pattern of root growth.

Other pictures I have taken show that roots do not turn toward water or moisture in the soil either.

This is a soil test to show the bacteria in the soil and that fertilizer can be applied in the fall of the year, when working conditions are usually better and the ground is not so muddy.

I brought some fertilized soil into the laboratory and made up a slide, here being placed in the microscope with the time -lapse equipment.

And through time -lapse photography, you can see the bacterial activity that's in the soil.

Then, as the soil temperature diminishes during the wintertime, you see all this activity just comes to a standstill as everything freezes solid.

Covered by the snow during the wintertime, it's locked in the ground.

In the spring of the year, when the soil temperature rises and reaches just the right temperature, there are all of a sudden numerous little explosions of soil bacteria, as one after another of these colonies burst, releasing the bacteria throughout the soil.

Under a high -powered microscope, you can see what each of those little white specks look like.

Here is another experiment showing the importance of temperature, an x -ray picture of a spot of TB on the lung, which might be compared to a black spot on a rose leaf.

Here is a rose plant.

Notice the leaf on the upper right -hand corner has two little scars where it was scratched and where black spot spores were applied.

Through time -lapse photography, you can see the rose bud open.

Dr.

O .J.

Agstey, a biologist from the University of Nebraska, was helping me with this project.

Through the microscope, you see some black spot spores.

We worked for weeks trying to make the spores germinate, but with no success.

Finally, he had to go back to the university when fall classes started.

So we made 12 slides, placed one in each microscope to take time -lapse pictures, and put the remaining 10 in a refrigerator to hold growth back until I could get to them, one a day in each microscope.

The two that were put immediately into the microscope remained perfectly dormant.

No growth developed at all.

But those placed in the refrigerator with the thought of holding them back all germinated and grew very nicely.

Temperature is also a factor in the insect world.

Here you see a caterpillar as it starts to spin a cocoon.

And now, in the spring of the year, when things warm up, the caterpillar has changed to a butterfly that works its way out of the cocoon.

We'll watch it now as it works a leg out and finally can get hold of the branch and pull itself out.

You can see its wings beginning to stretch as it exercises them.

The cocoon, or chrysalis, is not solely for the purpose of self -preservation during the wintertime.

It is obvious that some insects must be chilled before they will complete the pupa stage.

It is known that many moths and butterflies will not emerge from cocoon or chrysalis if brought into the house too early in the fall.

It is thought that the reason is they dry out if kept indoors too long.

In discussing this with several just -planned, good old -fashioned nature teachers, I am told that if cocoons are placed in the refrigerator for a while when brought indoors early in the fall, there is no problem about their drying out.

The butterflies and moths will emerge perfectly.

Early in the summer of 1948, Northwestern University Medical School was interested in a project of time -lapse studies of the growth and division of cancer cells.

Tissue culture slides were prepared from rat tumors.

Dozens and dozens of slides were prepared and carefully transported in heated thermos jugs, but not a single picture showed any cell division taking place.

Serious consideration was being given to the question of how much longer it was worthwhile to carry this project further.

Then one day, the intern who was transporting the heated tumors jug in the back of the car carelessly allowed the cover to jiggle loose and come off.

The slides were cold on arrival, and we felt they obviously had been completely ruined.

But I put them in the microscopes anyway and started the cameras going.

The chromosomes within the cell lined up and split in two as the cancer cell actually divided.

It was hard to realize that after all these months of work, the picture of cell division happened on a slide that through carelessness had been chilled so that we considered it hardly worth photographic at all.

This was the first slide that showed any cell division.

Here you see a time -lapse picture showing the fungus that develops in the nasal discharge of a person with an ordinary head cold.

You can see the fungus growing in the sporeheads as they develop.

A little branch is growing downward.

Watch the end of it.

A new sporehead is developing there.

When the sporehead breaks open, the spores will carry the fungus to other locations.

As the fungus grows, these cells also appear in the nasal discharge.

This activity cannot be seen except through time -lapse photography.

The same type of active white blood cells appear to be nature's way of fighting the fungus growth.

A different type of fungus growth appears in the nasal discharge of people who have deep chest colds and laryngitis.

But again, the same type of active cells appear to also fight this fungus growth.

Now I'm going to show you some pictures of pollen.

I will take an ordinary slide with a stigma from one blossom and some pollen from another.

Then I add a media to stimulate active growth and cover it over with an ordinary cover slip.

Normally I would seal this with Vaseline, but just to save time, I'll look at it through the microscope to see if there's anything of interest.

If it does look good, I'll take it over to the microscope cabinet with the time -lapse cameras, put it in position, test the exposure with an electronic exposure meter, and then close everything up and start the time -lapse cameras.

Finally, I'll put the cover on so that it acts as an incubator to keep everything at the proper temperature.

Now here you can see through the microscope a stigma with a grain of pollen, but there's no activity because this stigma is dead.

Just no activity at all, even through time -lapse photography.

But here is a living stigma, and you can see the microscopic chemical particles that penetrate right through the outer membrane of the grain of pollen, activating the inner contents or protoplasm.

Here is a pollen tube growing.

It penetrates the surface of the stigma, and then through the pollen tube flows the protoplasm from the grain of pollen into the stigma, which in this case is a corn silk that may be anywhere up to approximately one foot in length.

Each kernel on the cob has its own single silk, and altogether they form the tassel.

Each silk must be pollinated individually for all the kernels to fully develop.

Here is a grain of pollen in a slide that was drying up, so I added a drop of distilled water.

The additional water and capillary pressure caused the grain of pollen to quickly burst open, and again through time -lapse photography you can see the contents are very active.

In this picture you can see a light flare that was caused by the microscope light not being properly adjusted.

Photographically speaking it is a very poor picture, but watch what happens.

Could the increased intensity of any particular wavelength be in any way responsible for the increasing activity of this cell as seen through time -lapse photography? However also note the little droplets of fluid forming on the grain of pollen to the right of the very active cell.

I will explain more about this later.

Here is another grain of pollen, ragweed pollen, and you can see little droplets forming.

This is in the nasal secretion of a person who is ordinarily subject to hay fever, and the chemical reaction with the individual's particular body chemistry appears to be just what's necessary to activate the grains of pollen and cause them to give off these little droplets of fluid.

These in turn may be what causes the irritation rather than contact with the outer shell of the grain of pollen itself.

Here are several grains of pollen.

Normally a pollen tube will grow straight outward from the eye of each grain.

The one you see in the center of this picture just happened to be in line toward the stigma and grows straight to it.

However note that the grain of pollen on the upper right part of this picture starts out growing toward the upper right corner, but watch how it turns in a wide arc and also grows toward the stigma.

Here is another picture of a grain of pollen right on the stigma and actually making contact with it.

You can see the pollen tube starting to grow upward.

The pollen tube immediately makes a very sharp turn completely around and back toward the stigma.

The question is what makes pollen tubes change their direction of growth toward the stigma when the roots of plants do not alter the direction of their growth toward either fertilizer or moisture? This picture shows some aphids on the leaf of an orange tree shortly after radar equipment was installed at a nearby airport a number of years ago.

I noticed that every few seconds all the aphids would tense up in unison and do sort of a little dance as you see in the picture.

Upon further investigation I found that the interval of time between the activity of each dance coincided exactly with the rotation of the radar rotor device at the airport which was a distance of approximately 14 miles.

While this distance is vastly greater than the total area of the microscopic picture of the pollen tubes, it is nothing compared to that involved in communicating with satellites traveling to the moon, Mars, Jupiter and beyond.

Here is a time lapse picture of the coils of a tungsten filament taken over the full burning life of an ordinary incandescent light bulb.

The surface of the metal in the coils is very smooth when it is new but begins to crinkle and get rough from the extreme heat as the light bulb is used.

These rough spots can act as point emitters and give off radiation in addition to the normal output of visible light.

One of the major light bulb manufacturing companies has published in its literature to dealers that it uses extreme care in its manufacturing processes to make certain that the surface of the filaments will be perfectly smooth so this will not happen.

However, no matter how smooth the surface of the filament of a new bulb, this picture shows how the heat from the normal usage of the bulb will produce this crinkling and crackling over the normal lifetime of the light bulb.

This is a sporocarp that grows on an aquatic plant known as the myceli quadrifolia or clover leaf fern.

The sporocarp drops into the water, swells and births open, releasing true egg masses.

A gelatin material dissolves, releasing a few eggs at a time.

Here you see a small egg that is drifting away from the egg clusters.

This is a sperm case as seen through a high powered microscope.

It also births open in the water, releasing the sperm that begin to get up their own power and swim directly toward the egg.

And here you see a dish type antenna right at the end of the egg that attracts the sperms.

They make contact and then go into reverse and back away.

Here you see a group of sperms all fighting for position to make contact with this radar -like antenna dish.

Clumping of the red blood cells in the muscular system has long been considered a major problem by many scientists.

Such clumping blocks the flow of blood in the very small capillaries where oxygen and nutritive material in the blood pass into the body tissues and carbon dioxide and waste matter are absorbed into the bloodstream.

This microscope slide shows clumping of red cells in human blood into long chains after five minutes of exposing the blood directly in front of a video display terminal, model Ikigami EM125A.

After five minutes of exposing the blood directly in front of an ultraviolet light source of radiation shielded full spectrum outlight fluorescent fixture, model 2020, and using dark field microscopy the long chains of red cells in the man's blood break up.

These pictures were taken using a phase contrast microscope with an orange -red filter in the light source.

They are part of a research project originally intended to study the effect of adding various tranquilizers into the growth media of tissue cultures of the pigment epithelial cells in the retina of a rabbit's eye.

However, the study revealed that the color or wavelength of the microscope light source caused greater side effects and abnormal growth responses than the tranquilizing drugs being tested.

More information is presented on this subject in the article entitled Color and Light, Their Effects on Plants, Animals, and People, published in the International Journal of Biosocial Research, Volumes 7 through 10, that are recommended as a study guide in connection with this film.

Specific mention is made of the research work by Dr.

Peter Langerhans with reference to the fact that he found it necessary to use a gold -colored stain in order to see the cells that now bear his name.

The article also gives similar information regarding Professor Kim Bong -Han in reporting that he had to use an orange -colored stain in order to see cells which he refers to as Bong -Han corpuscles.

The fact that the activity you see in these pictures happened to show up like this when I used an orange -red filter in the light source may be of particular interest.

When I used a blue filter, you can see a similar but slightly different activity in what also appears to be a different type of white blood cell or leukocyte.

There are a number of different types of leukocytes.

Here you see what seems to me is the immune system running in high gear with all systems go.