Little green and purple things

So many blogs and so little time. It's quite fun to see what fascinates other people enough to blog about it, and the more so when the blogger is biological and actually includes green (and purple) things. Phil often has won plant ID quizzes and a link is provided to his Digital Botanic Garden, but while my intentions have been good, his tiny, tiny things blog (Beyond the Human Eye) has never been mentioned. My bad. To start out, you may want to see why certain flowers are purple. The image is of petal cells before a sweet treatment. The Phactor loves microscopy, but his aged equipment, while optically just fine, is stuck in the now totally dead film era and no $$ are forthcoming to fix the problem and go digital. And speaking of microscopy and looking at the wonderous little things that abound (remember - mostly unicellular) the Skeptic Wonder provides a window on these little known and under appreciated beasties. This one features cryptomonads, little solar-powered, armoured battleships that have a distant common ancestry with the brown algae.