Sometimes it's just fun to look at stuff.

Sometimes it's just fun to look at stuff. Like, say, paints that your local artist is using. Of course it's even better if you record your observations.

Here's a paint that is enhanced by the addition of tiny glass beads. When you paint with this stuff, your art work will be shiny like a roadside safety reflector.

So, what's it look like at low magnification under the stereomicroscope?

And what if we wash off the goopy paint part and isolate just a few of those beads in a drop of water under a compound microscope at about 100x?

How did the manufacturer manage to make those beads so smooth?

And

Colored mica flakes, blue and pink, give the remarkable shifting iridescence characteristic of "interference paints" made by Golden Acrylics Corp. Here you see the mica flakes in a paint sample, highly diluted and magnified 400x.

Science news this week was the story of a remarkable type of caterpillar which is a parasite on ant nests. You might know that ants communicate by smell, but did you know that ants communicate by sound too? The caterpillar makes a particular sound which the ants recognize as "I am your Queen Ant. Feed me now!" - - and lives a happy life of ease in the anthill, growing fat on the labors of enslaved worker ants.

If my migraine doesn't recur, I'll try to get back to the Miss Stone story later today. Now that I think of it, Miss Stone might have been a migraineur too.