Good morning everyone,

I hope you are well! The theme for today's Fem Fri comes from me staring into space and thinking about what today's Fem Fri should be. It's about staring.

Because if apparently if you stare at another person for not really all that long at all you start to hallucinate. Jenni Avins did this and I'm not sure I want to:

Then she told me why she laughed halfway through our sitting. "You started to look like a weird little animal!” she said.

“You were a lion!” she yelled. “A lioness,” she corrected herself.

https://qz.com/484146/staring-into-someones-eyes-for-ten-minutes-is-like-tripping-without-the-drugs/

June Almeida (who was also Scottish!) did a lot of staring in her life, in this case down a microscope. She didn't have a degree but her innovations are the reason we can see viruses clearly under a microscope:

The microscopy technique Almeida developed was simple, yet revolutionary for the field of virology […] Since electrons have much shorter wavelengths than light, this shows scientists an image with much finer, smaller detail. The challenge is discerning if a tiny blob is a virus, a cell, or something else. To solve the problem, Almeida realized she could use antibodies taken from previously infected individuals to pinpoint the virus. Antibodies are drawn to their antigen-counterparts—so when Almeida introduced tiny particles coated in antibodies, they would congregate around the virus, alerting her to its presence. This technique enabled clinicians to use electron microscopy as a way to diagnose viral infections in patients.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/june-almeida-discovered-coronaviruses-decades-ago-little-recognition#close

Finally, how about staring through some actual emeralds for a bit:

Each of the lenses are flat-cut with a bevel around the upper surface, and together they weigh 27 carats. They’re perfectly matched in saturation and color, which means they both came from the same original emerald — and therein lies the awe. Emeralds are incredibly easy to fracture, so it would take incredible skill, patience, understanding of the stone and some serious mental freaking fortitude to slice into an emerald which, in order to produce those two perfect lenses, must have weighed over 300 carats.

https://dearest.substack.com/p/emerald-eyeglasses-elvira-and-other

Love,

Alex.