Size of Life

by eatonphil • 7 months ago

2619 277 7 months ago

hartator• 7 months ago

Always awesome with by Neal.

MarkusQ• 7 months ago

Cool, but a little more thought on the content rather than the presentation would improve it. For example starting with an arbitrary segment of DNA double helix and saying how "tall" this arbitrary segment is, is just silly.

Instead, it should show how _wide_ it is. And for extra coolness, keep it in frame, coiling longer and longer as you go, and eventually have the same strand, which has been with us all the time, as a specific example (e.g. human chromosome 7 or some such) by _length_

nh23423fefe• 7 months ago

double clicking makes the animation jitter. ive had to deal with matching derivatives of smooth slopes in rendering as well. the animation seems to be finite time (and so variable velocity) and mashing click is just updating the final point without matching the current derivative.

yunwal• 7 months ago

I don't understand how the location of a 377 foot tall tree could be kept secret. Wouldn't that type of thing be visible in satellite imagery at the very least?

1970-01-012• 7 months ago

It's not sticking straight up from the ground in Kansas. Hyperion has many siblings nearby and is on rocky terrain which conceals its overall height.

micromacrofoot• 7 months ago

There are a lot of 300 foot trees in the general vicinity, so you'd need to actually measure to be precisely sure

Petersipoi• 7 months ago

It isn't a secret. The location can easily be found if you Google it.

1970-01-012• 7 months ago

It is literally a secret. The location cannot easily be found with Google. Go ahead, try and find it.

efilife• 7 months ago

were you able to? I wasn't

http://famousredwoods.com/hyperion/

Nevermind!

housecarpenter• 7 months ago

From Wikipedia:

"The exact location of Hyperion is nominally secret but is available via internet search.[12] However, in July 2022, the Redwood Park superintendent closed the entire area around the tree, citing "devastation of the habitat surrounding Hyperion" caused by visitors. Its base was trampled by the overuse and as a result ferns no longer grow around the tree.[13]

Measures to protect the Hyperion tree were officially implemented in 2022 when the National Park Service (NPS) closed public access to its location in Redwood National Park.[14][15] Anyone who gets too close could face up to six months in jail and a $5,000 maximum fine.[13][16][17]"

jphoward• 7 months ago

It seems to be like some of the scales slightly off?

If you are looking at the ladybird (ladybug) with the amoeba to the left, the amoeba isn't an order of the magnitude smaller - it would actually be visible by the human eye (bigger than a grain of sand)? Indeed, the amoeba seems the same size as the ladybird's foot?

Similarly, this makes the bumblebee appear smaller than a human finger (the in the adjacent picture), which isn't the case?

elicash2• 7 months ago

I came to the comments to express surprise that amoebas were so large. It appears they vary wildly in size (as small as 2.3 micrometers... but up to 20 cm, or nearly 8 inches).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoeba#Size_range

adrian_b3• 7 months ago

It is not right to call the xenophyophore that is on the last row, and which can have a size of up to 20 cm as an "amoeba".

Only the next row above it, with Pelomyxa, is indeed an amoeba and one that is very frequently encountered and which usually has sizes not much less than 1 millimeter and sometimes it can reach a size of a few mm.

The true amoebas are much more closely related to humans, than to xenophyophores (giant marine unicellular living beings) or to plants.

Besides the true amoebas there are also a few other kinds of unicellular eukaryotes with shape-shifting cells, e.g. foraminifera, radiolarians and others, but already in the first half of the 19th century it was recognized that those other groups change their shapes in a different way than the amoebas, so they were classified separately, even if the term "amoeboid cell" has always been used about any cell with variable shape.

The true amoebas are related to the group formed by animals and fungi, and there are some amoebas that have a simple form of multicellularity, so it is likely that some of the mechanisms needed for the evolution of multicellularity have been inherited from a common ancestor of animals, fungi and amoebae.

The multicellular or multinucleate amoebae that belong to Myxomycetes (one of the kinds of slime moulds) can reach much bigger sizes, e.g. a diameter of up to 1 meter, because they do not have the size limitation that exists for simple unicellular eukaryotes.

earlyriser• 7 months ago

On the other side, wasps could be so tiny. like you could put thousands of them inside an amoeba volume.

"Megaphragma mymaripenne is a microscopically sized wasp. At 200 μm in length, it is the third-smallest extant insect, comparable in size to single-celled organisms. It has a highly reduced nervous system, containing only 7400 neurons, several orders of magnitude fewer than in larger insects."

selcuka• 7 months ago

I got surprised by that too, and while comparing its size to the next organism (Tardigrade) I learned that every member of the same species of tardigrades has the exact same number of cells [1], which was even more surprising for me:

Eutelic organisms have a fixed number of somatic cells when they reach maturity, the exact number being relatively constant for any one species. This phenomenon is also referred to as cell constancy. Development proceeds by cell division until maturity; further growth occurs via cell enlargement only.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutely

glenstein• 7 months ago

I'm seeing the amoeba as approximately the size of the heel segment of a ladybug's leg. I consider lady bugs pretty small in an intuitive sense, their legs quite small and the smallest end segment to be especially small. I think that leaves an amoeba on the fringes of distinguishable perception which seems right to me, unless I'm overestimating their size.

ModernMech• 7 months ago

The tardigrade vs. ladybug gave me pause. So a tardigrade is about the side of a ladybugs eye?

adrian_b3• 7 months ago

Actually the tardigrade used as an example is quite big at 500 micrometers.

Most tardigrades are not much bigger than 100 micrometers.

Tardigrades, together with nematodes, rotifers, mites and a few more rarely encountered groups are among the smallest animals and they are smaller than many of the bigger among the unicellular eukaryotes. That is why they have been discovered only after the invention of the microscope.

The tardigrades have evolved towards smaller and smaller sizes very early, already during the Cambrian. It is interesting that they are segmented animals, like their relatives the arthropods and the velvet worms, but they have very few segments, because in order to achieve such a small size they have lost all intermediate segments, so the segments that now form their body were originally the segments of the head, and now they are followed immediately by the original segments of the tail, without the original body that connected the head to the tail. Thus they have been miniaturized by losing their body and becoming a walking head (the legs of the tardigrades are what in arthropods have become appendages of the mouth, e.g. mandibles and maxillae).

teo_zero• 7 months ago

But if scales were perfectly respected, how could you see both a neuron and a human on the screen?

prmph• 7 months ago

Cool visualization, but I also noticed the switch from SI units to imperial. From micrometers to inches, which was jarring and hard for me to compare.

I'd suggest keeping the SI unit , or at least having both once we get to the level of inches.

s1mon• 7 months ago

I found that jarring as well. There's a toggle in the upper right to switch to metric.

Even with setting it to metric, it progresses through units based on the scale. I realize that scientists love to work in scientific notation, and progressing from nanometers to micrometers, mm, cm, and finally meters sort of follows that kind of logic. I wonder how it would feel if the whole thing was in constant units or at least there was an option for that.

dartharva2• 7 months ago

The T-rex appears taller than the giraffe, but it isn't and the scale in the website itself shows it.

macintux• 7 months ago

A highly social, relatively hairless bipedal ape that was once a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but has adapted to create websites

smallerfish2• 7 months ago

I like it, but the switch from metric to inches is confusing, and I think introduces a bug - there's no way a sea snail is 5-6 neurons high.

robotresearcher• 7 months ago

Some of your neurons stretch from your brain to your big toe. 1.5m, or more in a tall person.

smallerfish2• 7 months ago

Correct, but not the one on the site.

yesitcan• 7 months ago

There's no way a tardigrade is half a sea snail.

Mogzol2• 7 months ago

You can change the units in the top corner. It defaults to metric for me, but if your browser language is "en-US" you get imperial by default.

siavosh• 7 months ago

Wonderful. The music, illustrations, and sliding sound effect reminded me of the game Braid.

luqtas• 7 months ago

the slinding at some point made me wonder what if i was playing Tinder

hmokiguess• 7 months ago

This was awesome! Also, I couldn't stop my child brain from anticipating "your mom" at the end.

yoyohello13• 7 months ago

I always click when I see neal.fun.

mda• 7 months ago

I like the stuff un the sute but the number if partners and affiliates in the consent window is very off putting.

troupo• 7 months ago

It's only 141 TCF vendor(s) and 69 ad partner(s), with no way to reject all, and you have to manually click on every "vendor" to remove consent.

It's the second or third time I see this "managed by Google compliant with IAB" (note: not with GDPR)

thn-gap• 7 months ago

This is super infuriating. I wish there was a way to offshore the effort and work needed to toggle each option off to the culprit website. Perhaps when website A presents you with such hostile prompts, take their contact email, and subscribe it with automation to each of the vendors. I'm just too tired of this shit.

jakozaur• 7 months ago

I wish Neal would do behind the scenes, how he built this art. I wonder whether LLM assistants like Claude Code make such an interactive show more feasible.

He previously did a game "Infinite Craft" which leveraged Llama models. However, I was only able to find an outdated blog from 2019.

jonahx• 7 months ago

I think you'd notice a pretty big difference in an LLM clone of this site. The art, music, and other small wouldn't be as consistent or hang together as nicely.

benatkin• 7 months ago

If I could download the LLM clone, and share it, I think I'd prefer it. This is just a website that could at any moment disappear, it isn't like a book.

Bnichs• 7 months ago

Reminds me of the video game Everything. Its a really cool game where you explore the various scales of the universe. It has its quirks (somewhat phoned in graphics like animals walking) but the concept and execution are great IMO, would love a sequel. Also bonus points for featuring Alan watts as a core character.

Magi604• 7 months ago

The visual scale seems off, especially on the smaller end of things. Also, are Velociraptors really that small? Jurassic Park lied to me.

psunavy03• 7 months ago

Spielberg took a Deinonychus and called it a Velociraptor because it sounded cooler.

mkl• 7 months ago

No, Michael Crichton did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinonychus#Cultural_significa...

travisgriggs• 7 months ago

A highly social, relatively hairless bipedal ape that was once a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but has adapted to create websites.

Definitely worthy the scroll!

8cvor6j844qw_d6• 7 months ago

Makes a good profile description on certain websites.

dim13• 7 months ago

Also: Banana - Although not technically living, it does make for a good size comparison.

mihaaly• 7 months ago

It had to be added:

Tyrannosaurus rex. One of the largest land predators ever, it had teeth the size of a banana

lrpe• 7 months ago

Are there supposed to be pictures? I passed a human silhouette, but that was it.

vadepaysa• 7 months ago

Beautiful! I love the human feet always visible in the background! It helps me set perspective.

bitpush• 7 months ago

Velociraptor Smaller than usually depicted, the Velociraptor was actually only about the size of a turkey.

This is an interesting fact.

mkmk• 7 months ago

Nice that the back button works.

thundergolfer• 7 months ago

Pretty glad the 9 foot long Arthopleura centipede went extinct 300 million years ago. No one wants to deal with that thing.

kkylin• 7 months ago

We've still got this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_aphroditois

Thankfully they don't live on land.

swiftcoder• 7 months ago

That's fresh nightmare fuel all right

hermitcrab4• 7 months ago

Not really bothered by snakes, sharks or spiders. But those things (and cave centipedes) look terrifying.

adrian_b3• 7 months ago

It was a millipede, not a centipede, which probably ate fungi or decaying plants.

So it was not a dangerous predator, though it could have been poisonous, like many modern millipedes.

milancurcic• 7 months ago

Neal delivers. I recently learned that viruses are not considered living being, but I'm nevertheless happy they're included here because they're both relevant and interesting in this context.

cainxinth• 7 months ago

Viruses are to life as LLMs are to reasoning: they often behave like their category expects but not for the same reasons as the genuine article.

seemaze2• 7 months ago

..er, a parasitic threat to life and happiness that become an endemic drag on global well being?

paddleon• 7 months ago

as a former virologist, I love the thought that LLMs are the virus of reasoning :)

rssoconnor• 7 months ago

Not that I'm qualified to reply, but I think this is debated. I seem to recall reading in "Immune" by Philipp Dettmer that there is an argument that a virus is analogous to a spore stage of life, and the virus begins "living" when it plants itself inside a cell full of "nutrients", sheds it's skin and begins consuming and replicating.

dJLcnYfsE3• 7 months ago

It is always going to be controversial but after discovery of prions - needle shifted to "self-replicating means nothing and viruses are also dead". Then scientists also found viruses large enough that they get infected with other viruses, and parasitic cells that are missing most parts required for metabolism, so it is getting more fuzzy again.

alkyon• 7 months ago

They do have genes and are subject to natural selection so to say the least they are a clear borderline case.

dsego• 7 months ago

I was taught in school they were something in between.

dartharva2• 7 months ago

Hey, if they originated naturally and interact with the environment and reproduce, they are living beings. Mere human taxonomists can't just "classify" away the fact.

margalabargala• 7 months ago

Are crystalline structures alive?

kruczek• 7 months ago

You are doing the same classification. It all depends on the definition of what a living being is.

4ndr3vv• 7 months ago

MRS GREN would like to have a word with you :)

someNameIG• 7 months ago

From what I remember from undergrad the reason they're not life is that they lack their own metabolism, they use the metabolism of host cells. And metabolism needs to be a constant thing, they don't have any when outside a cell.

ncgl• 7 months ago

Great use of sound!

Jordan-117• 7 months ago

Reminds me of the classic Scale of the Universe flash toy by Cary Huang (now available in HTML 5!):

https://htwins.net/scale2/

baxtr• 7 months ago

If you’re interested to read something on that topic I highly recommend the essay "That's About the Size of It" by Isaac Asimov (in his book "View from a Height").

He argues that human perception of animal size is skewed because humans use themselves as a benchmark.

He takes a logarithmic approach to illustrate where humans actually fit within the overall scale of the animal kingdom. We are way larger than we think we are!

jiggawatts• 7 months ago

We are megafauna predators! We’ve wiped them almost all out, which makes it less obvious, but that’s our ecological niche.

kej• 7 months ago

Reminds me of https://scaleofuniverse.com . I think confining it to just living things removes the perspective of "Wow, we're really small compared to the rest of the universe".

abustamam6• 7 months ago

Somewhat related!

https://youtu.be/XRdh8gmVR90?si=PvgoXrgjV62tsUy6

creatonez• 7 months ago

There is another visualization from the same author, that starts at an astronaut and ends with the observable universe https://neal.fun/size-of-space/

seemaze2• 7 months ago

Just delightful, thank you Neal.

shmoe• 7 months ago

An obvious benefit of "humans adapting to create websites"!

cs702• 7 months ago

Beautiful. It's clearly a labor of love.

The authors deserve our support. Buy them a coffee via the provided link.

Thank you for sharing this on HN.

setgree2• 7 months ago

He has many other cool visualizations!

Space Elevator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640226

Deep Sea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21850527

abustamam6• 7 months ago

Deep Sea one is scary for some reason. It just gives me shivers to think about how deep the sea is, and what horrors lurk down there. I know that I'll never encounter such a being, but still kinda creepy.

simonw• 7 months ago

He was also responsible for one of the worst web pages ever created: https://neal.fun/stimulation-clicker/

(It's utterly brilliant but monstrous.)

echelon• 7 months ago

I love Neal's work so much. He's constantly making some of the coolest stuff on the web. I'm utterly delighted every time I see his domain on the front page of HN.

I hope he never stops making these art pieces - everything he creates brings joy, regardless of whether it's educational or funny or whimsical. I'm in awe of his creative output, his manner of communication, and his ability to steal hours of our time playing ridiculous little games that make us question the fundamentals of life and society.

He's right up there with XKCD in my mind.

This is probably the only time I'll use my super pedantic mode on Neal's work, and it's only because I love biology -

DNA
The genetic instructions for life
3.5 nanometers tall

DNA has a lot of dimensional metrics. It gets complicated. The people that study this stuff really care because it's essential for how our enzymes work, and small differences in spacing tolerances would totally break all of the machinery.

This "3.5 nm" figure is roughly the height of one turn of the helix for one form of DNA (B-DNA). The figure is showing multiple turns in the cartoon illustration.

In theory, you could create a polymer of infinite length (or height).

B-DNA is 34 Å per turn, with 10.5 bp per turn (table 1) :

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK6545/

Blue Whale
King of the animal kingdom, it is the largest animal to have ever lived. It can eat up to 40 million krill per day during peak feeding season.

Please fix this one, Neal! We don't know that the blue whale is the largest animal to have ever lived (even assuming we know we're just talking about earth).

Blue whales are perhaps the largest animal to have ever lived on earth. But we simply do not know. The fossil record is woefully incomplete.

We even have new papers coming up all the time that challenge this:

https://www.science.org/content/article/whale-whale-may-be-b...

Then refutations:

https://www.science.org/content/article/have-blue-whales-reg...

This is undoubtedly the last time the claim to largest will ever be challenged. Even if we dug up no new fossils, the estimations of previous finds change all the time as we learn more.

Also - what does "largest" mean? Mass? Length? Surface area?

It's okay to say that they're the largest (by some metric) that we know of. But it is not correct to say that they're the largest to have ever lived - at least as far as we know or could ever know. And by setting an absolute, inquiring minds memorize the point and stop wondering.

It's very probable that we'll never know the definitive answer to this.

abustamam6• 7 months ago

You really can't go wrong with any of Neal's fun projects!

p1nkpineapple• 7 months ago

Absolutely loved that the intensity of the music is synced with the swiping. Fantastic job as always!

wpwpwpw• 7 months ago

beautiful illustrations, beautiful site

crubier• 7 months ago

My kids will LOVE this

inciampati• 7 months ago

Very beautiful. Love this.

If it helps, AFAIK (I do atomic force microscopy of DNA), DNA's height is closer to 2nm than 4.

alyxya• 7 months ago

Minor thing that bothers me is that I can't scroll through the things like in the deep sea or space elevator.

chrismorgan• 7 months ago

The dynamic soundscape is delightful, as it subtly adds instruments and musical texture as you progress. And going back down the scale regresses it to simple again. Smoothly done.

It reminded me of Operation Neptune (1991): each level starts with just one channel, probably percussion, and as you progress through the rooms it adds and removes more channels or sometimes switches to a different section of music. It is unfortunately all sharp cuts, no attempts at smoothing or timing instrument entry and exit. A couple of samples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0LNaatyoQk is an hour of gameplay revelling in “the dynamic and sometimes beautiful music of Operation Neptune” using a Roland MT-32 MIDI synthesiser; and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPxEdQ4wx9s&list=PL3FC048B13... is the PCM files used on some platforms (if you want to compare that track with the MT-32, it starts at 28 minutes).

modeless2• 7 months ago

Man I played Operation Neptune a lot when I was a kid. I wonder if it was the first game to do this style of adaptive music layering. It predates the iMUSE system used in LucasArts games like X-Wing and TIE Fighter.

For anyone curious, you can actually play it here: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Super_Solvers_Operation_Ne...

compiler-guy• 7 months ago

The arcade classic Space Invaders had a primitive soundscape in that every time the remaining invaders advance, it plays a short bass note. As fewer and fewer invaders remain, it takes less time for them to advance, and the note repeats faster and faster, it adds a remarkable amount of increasing tension as each level progresses.

So not exactly the same, but perhaps prototypical. I think Asteroids did as well.

wormpilled• 7 months ago

I absolutely loved that looping music track, please authors make it available.

ralfhn2• 7 months ago

From the author on twitter[1] "The background music is a cello performance by Iratxe Ibaibarriaga and composed by Aleix Ramon" [1] https://x.com/nealagarwal/status/1998788695449808920

gizmo3852• 7 months ago

The music was breathtaking here - I'd absolutely pay for a version of it. Really solidified the experience

ralfhn2• 7 months ago

From the author on twitter[1] "The background music is a cello performance by Iratxe Ibaibarriaga and composed by Aleix Ramon"

[1] https://x.com/nealagarwal/status/1998788695449808920

AleixR4• 7 months ago

Glad you enjoyed it! You can get the soundtrack on Bandcamp: https://aleixramon.bandcamp.com/album/size-of-life-original-...

Tomorrow it should also be on Spotify, Apple Music, etc.

voxleone• 7 months ago

I love how the music swells and becomes more intricate as life expands and grows more complicated.

anon_cow1111• 7 months ago

Anyone find an actual link for the finished track? Credits are mentioned on his site and twitter but I didn't find it anywhere when searching for the artist names.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 7 months ago

Thank you for sharing this, I played Operation Neptune as a kid and never noticed the dynamic music!

tracerbulletx• 7 months ago

This is something you do when scoring a game too, wonder if the author ever worked on game programming.

jevogel• 7 months ago

The rest of the author's website is a bunch of games, so I'd say so.

AleixR4• 7 months ago

Hi there, I'm the composer—I do! 99% of my work is making music and sound effects for games.

And you're right, the music following the player's actions is common in games; we call it "adaptive music.

vanderZwan• 7 months ago

So I guess Operation Neptune was the inspiration for UFO 50s Porgy?

https://ufo50.miraheze.org/wiki/Porgy

cachius• 7 months ago

Oh noes, I explored with sound off.

WhyNotHugo• 7 months ago

It truly is, thanks for pointing it out! I just went through the entire site 5 minutes ago and it didn’t occur to me to grab my headphones and turn sound on first.

AleixR4• 7 months ago

Hi there, I'm the composer of the soundtrack—glad that you enjoyed the music.

The idea was to have a single instrument (a cello) that builds upon itself, like the cells in an organism. It starts with a very minimalistic loop, and new layers of music are progressively added as the organisms grow in size.

Thanks for sharing Operation Neptune! I didn't know about it, but it's a great example of early adaptive game music.

robrain• 7 months ago

I've got a sudden strong urge to play Katamari Damacy.

adammarples• 7 months ago

What about that 3.5 sq mil fungi

larodi• 7 months ago

yes indeed, fungi are under-represented here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillaria_ostoyae

SubiculumCode• 7 months ago

Why haven't I seen a Tardigrade with my eyeball? It seems like they are the size of a spot on a ladybug from the pics.

LeifCarrotson3• 7 months ago

Because you clearly haven't spent enough time closely looking at pond and river water!

Our local parks department has several annual events where they ask for volunteers to help perform benthic macroinvertebrate surveys. It basically amounts to meeting up at a local park with a couple people in waders dragging special nets along the bottom, dumping scoops of material into buckets and large, shallow, white trays, and others sitting at picnic tables with spoons, magnifying glasses, and muffin tins sorting out the critters that get caught in the nets.

The cool part is that at the end, you can score the creek based on the quantity and types of larvae that you find: Caddisfly, mayfly, and stonefly larvae are very sensitive to factors like runoff from agriculture and road salt, sediment, water oxygenation, and other factors, beetles, crayfish, dragonflies, and scuds are moderately tolerant, while leeches, worms, midges, and flies will grow in anything. Thousands of these surveys happen every year, so you can compare the relative frequency and quantity of various species and determine the relative health of the stream.

I don't know how many tardigrades you'll find just scooping 4-8mm nymphs and larvae by eye, but I've brought my microscope to a couple and put random droplets of water under a cover and slide: there are an astonishing number of tiny critters swimming around at any zoom level.

HelloUsername2• 7 months ago

You have seen a tardigrade with the naked eye (without microscope), that's as large as a spot on a ladybug?

myself248• 7 months ago

Do you set aside the tasty-looking ones and wrap it up with a seafood boil?

rsynnott• 7 months ago

The spot on the ladybug is black against red, usually (there are many varieties); it's very conveniently highlighted. We're better at seeing "bold colour on bold colour" than "semi-translucent thing in water".

JDEW• 7 months ago

Beautiful site. Also very pleased to see the mitochondrion being referred to as the powerhouse of the cell, as is law.

dwa3592• 7 months ago

[edited] - It's incredible to think that it starts from DNA, is 3.5nm tall and the solid silicon fins in our phone's transistor is twice that.

kyriakos• 7 months ago

The chip is not smaller than 3.5nm; but a component on the chip is that small.

sheepolog• 7 months ago

Very cool. I was surprised that orangutans are described as being only 2 feet 9 inches tall, I think most are a bit larger. Maybe when sitting they're under 3 feet? From wikipedia:

"females typically stand 115 cm (45 in) tall and weigh around 37 kg (82 lb), while adult males stand 137 cm (54 in) tall and weigh 75 kg (165 lb). The tallest orangutan recorded was a 180 cm (71 in)."

LeifCarrotson3• 7 months ago

It's using the size of the ruler, matching the posture as shown in the image. A few keys over and there's a picture of a grizzly bear that says it is 1m or 3'4" tall. And maybe when it's on all fours, that's a typical measurement to the shoulders - its arm length, more or less.

That's much shorter than the human at 1.7m or 5'7". From just those numbers, you might think that a human would weigh more than a grizzly or take one in a fight: But when a bear stands on its hind legs, it's 2.4m/8' tall and can be 800 lbs, I'd have put a grizzly way further to the right.

Moxdi• 7 months ago

if anyone that made this sees this, you made a typo on the Dwarf Lanternshark, its not Columbia, its ColOmbia

conorbergin• 7 months ago

microns to inches

absolutely foul

modeless2• 7 months ago

Reminds me of the classic "powers of 10" video: https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0. Someone ought to remake that but as a gaussian splat reconstruction, so you can freely move the camera as well as zoom.

cgh• 7 months ago

“Compressible rodent” was not a phrase I thought I’d ever hear but I’m glad I did. Worth the price of a couple of coffees.

JKCalhoun• 7 months ago

Banana, ha ha.

ramaniyer• 7 months ago

cool and artistic app, how did you make this

kayge2• 7 months ago

If anyone wants to set this up to auto-run all the way to the right and then all the way back to the left, here is a vibe-coded (sorry) browser console script. Makes a great "screen-saver" if you kick off the script and then put your browser in full screen mode :)

    (function() {
        let direction = 'right'; // Start by going right
        let intervalId;

        function getCurrentAnimalName() {
            const animalDiv = document.querySelector('.animal-name');
            return animalDiv ? animalDiv.textContent.trim() : '';
        }

        function pressKey(keyCode) {
            const event = new KeyboardEvent('keydown', {
                key: keyCode === 37 ? 'ArrowLeft' : 'ArrowRight',
                keyCode: keyCode,
                code: keyCode === 37 ? 'ArrowLeft' : 'ArrowRight',
                which: keyCode,
                bubbles: true
            });
            document.dispatchEvent(event);
        }

        function autoScroll() {
            const currentName = getCurrentAnimalName();
            
            if (direction === 'right') {
                pressKey(39); // Right arrow
                
                if (currentName === 'Pando Clone') {
                    console.log('Reached Pando Clone, switching to left');
                    direction = 'left';
                }
            } else {
                pressKey(37); // Left arrow
                
                if (currentName === 'DNA') {
                    console.log('Reached DNA, switching to right');
                    direction = 'right';
                }
            }
        }

        // Start the interval
        intervalId = setInterval(autoScroll, 3000);
        
        // Log start message and provide stop function
        console.log('Auto-scroll started! To stop, call: stopAutoScroll()');
        
        // Expose stop function globally
        window.stopAutoScroll = function() {
            clearInterval(intervalId);
            console.log('Auto-scroll stopped');
        };
    })();

ekipan2• 7 months ago

Cannot stand robot code. Thanks for the genuinely cool thing though. I hope you don't mind me rewriting, if only for my own satisfaction.

  {
    const s = window.scroller = {}
    const press = (key, code) => () =>
      document.dispatchEvent(new KeyboardEvent('keydown', {
        key: key, keyCode: code,
        which: key, code: code, bubbles: true
      }));
    const step = () => {
      const div = document.querySelector('.animal-name')
      const name = div?.textContent.trim()
      if (name === 'Pando Clone') s.dir = s.left
      if (name === 'DNA') s.dir = s.right
      s.dir()
    }
    s.left = press(37, 'ArrowLeft')
    s.right = s.dir = press(39, 'ArrowRight')
    s.start = (ms) => s.ival = setInterval(step, ms)
    s.stop = () => clearInterval(s.ival)
  }
  scroller.start(5000)

kayge2• 7 months ago

I don't mind at all, your rewrite looks much more elegant. Thanks!

newman8r2• 7 months ago

It claims a banana isn't technically living, but a banana has living cells so I'm not sure how accurate that is. I'm not sure when they're all considered 'dead' after harvesting though - maybe some wiggle room there.

mritterhoff• 7 months ago

My understanding is that picked fruits and veg are still alive [1], and often respirating [2]. This is a big component in figuring out how to refrigerate them at the optimal temperatures and atmospheric makeup.

1. https://healthland.time.com/2013/06/21/theyre-alive-harveste... 2. https://agriculture.institute/food-chemistry-and-physiology/...

HelloUsername2• 7 months ago

I think the banana was mostly added as a joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiducial_marker#%22Banana_for_...

newman8r2• 7 months ago

I got the reference, it's just the 'not technically alive' part that I was calling out

jakemanger• 7 months ago

This is simply beautiful, and will definitely inspire me with some arty projects I'm working on.

Great work -> the minimalist UI, art and music fits amazingly.

One thing I noticed: the site's images fail to load if the brave adblocker is on

thangalin• 7 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEHCCsFFIuY

Star Size Comparison 3, simply a stunning visualization.

jwpapi• 7 months ago

Neal is him

system2• 7 months ago

If I see a neal.fun link on HN, I click.

marseysneed• 7 months ago

1 nitpick: The Dwarf Lanternshark is not found off the coast of "Columbia" but "Colombia!"

leourbina• 7 months ago

Came to say exactly the same thing :)

phkahler• 7 months ago

EDIT: Nevermind. Perhaps it was an ad that I clicked on. Lots of comments here indicating they don't see it, and some that did.

My Original comment here (too late to delete):

Beware. When you reach the end there is a "more projects" button. In there is a cute IQ test (possibly appealing to the HN crowd). When you reach the end of the test it asks for email, and then ultimately wants $1 to get your results. If you pay by credit card due note that there is an auto-checked box for some $29.99 per month subscription for... something.

varenc• 7 months ago

Link? couldn't find the IQ test in more projects. And super skeptical neal.fun is trying to trick people into $30/month subscriptions

edit: I turned off my ad blocker and discovered the site is showing some ads. Guessing you clicked on an ad?

also it's pretty ironic because one of his projects is showcasing dark patterns: https://neal.fun/dark-patterns/

waxpancake• 7 months ago

This is definitely not something Neal would ever do. Can you share the URL you're talking about? There's no IQ test in his projects list at all. https://neal.fun/

pxndx• 7 months ago

Are you sure about that? for me it just leads to neal.fun, which is a well loved by HN list of projects, but no IQ test nor begging for money.

abustamam6• 7 months ago

I can't seem to find the IQ test. I see captcha and other "games"

WD-42• 7 months ago

Ironically this sounds like a piece of satire Neal would make.

beejiu• 7 months ago

For what it's worth, there are AdSense interstitial ads on the site, so you probably got duped by one of those ads.

krosaen2• 7 months ago

Saw this too on mobile - I think it's an ad - I requested a paid ad-free version elsewhere in the comments

foxrider• 7 months ago

Missing a mushroom from Oregon [1]

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-...

runtimepanic2• 7 months ago

Tools like this are surprisingly effective for teaching, especially compared to static diagrams. Interaction makes the scale differences stick.

abustamam6• 7 months ago

When my daughter is old enough, I'm definitely going to show her a bunch of visualizations on Neal's site as supplementary education. I learned so much from these visualizations as an adult, and even without being able to read you can get a sense of scale.

runtimepanic2• 7 months ago

Totally agree! Even as adults, the sense of scale hits differently when you interact with it. Your daughter will probably love discovering it too.

mncharity4• 7 months ago

When my daughter is old enough

Fwiw, I've done a pinch-nail-hand-arms 1-10-100-1000 mm "body as size reference" a couple of times around 5ish. And a 1000x "micro view" "pinch is zoomed to arms size" "it's like a scale model or doll playset - everything zoomed together" world of "bacteria sprinkles, red blood cell candies (M&M minis or concave Smarties minis or Sweetarts - there's lots of cell candy analogs), hair poles, salt/sugar boxes". Stories of sitting on a grain of salt and eating... etc; pet eyelash mites. No idea if it actually worked.

I did some user-test videos, now only on archive.org.[1] Hmm... the "Arms, hands" video there now doesn't seem to play inline? - but does wget'ed and browsered. :/

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221007220513/www.clarifyscienc...

nrhrjrjrjtntbt2• 7 months ago

I felt like I was at a museum exhibit. It is fantastic.

krosaen2• 7 months ago

Neal.fun is good clean fun - my kids love it too. Neal, if you are listening, would pay for an ad-free version (I already bought you some coffees too).

sungho_• 7 months ago

What surprised me most was how large a single neuron is.

jbotz• 7 months ago

In generalized, abstract sort of way it's probably accurate, but in reality most neurons don't look much like that and many have dendrites orders of magnitude longer than the one in that image. Stringing all your dendrites end-to-end they can probably easily go to the moon and back.

genix• 7 months ago

Well made!

js2• 7 months ago

Nit: the tool-tips on the action icons in the top-right aren't consistent.

When music is playing the tool tip is "unmute" which is a verb. It should either be "mute" (to indicate what clicking will do) or "unmuted" (adjective) indicating the current state. Similarly, when the music is muted the tool-tip should either be "muted" or "unmute".

I'm not sure _which_ is wanted (verb or adjective) because the ruler tool-tip uses "Hide Ruler" and "Show Ruler" (verb), while the units tool-tip uses "Units: imperial" and "Units: Metric" (adjective). The info tool-tip ("Info") is also an adjective.

For consistency, I'd use a verb-phrase in all the tool tips:

- "Show info"

- "Switch units to metric/imperial"

- "Hide/show ruler"

- "Mute/unmute music"

I mean, I know this is pedantic nit-picking, but the site is so perfect, what else am I going to do?

hermitcrab4• 7 months ago

Great job.

I did a side project that helps with comparisons, but in a rather different way (e.g. how many African elephants does something weigh). Not as slick as this site, but someone might find it useful:

http://howmanyelephants.co.uk/

mncharity4• 7 months ago

Nice. Two quick UI thoughts. Upon loading, perhaps start with some unit selected, and a default amount 1, so there's immediate content to be seen? And to extend the experience, maybe add a "dice roll" button, so users can "see more neat things" click-click-click without the cognitive overhead of pathing the option space

hermitcrab4• 7 months ago

That is a possibility, thanks.

MagicMoonlight• 7 months ago

He always makes great content, I love it.

macleginn• 7 months ago

Blood cells are huge!

arunc• 7 months ago

It was great until Sea snail appeared in inches. Transitioning from micrometer/milliliter to inches is pretty rough

Mogzol2• 7 months ago

For me it appears in millimetres, but I'm in Canada not the US. I'm guessing the default is chosen based on your browser's language. You can change the units in the top right.

Edit: I checked the page's code and it does indeed set the units based on language. If your language is "en-US" you get imperial by default, everyone else gets metric.

susiecambria• 7 months ago

Sorry to say that my first reaction was that this is heresy. . . all this talk of science is a hoax.

But then the music calmed me right down and I wended my way through, not understanding 99% of what I saw but in awe of nature and Neal's art nonetheless.

yunnpp• 7 months ago

Did you just escape from a religious sect living inside an underwater cavern or something?

talksik• 7 months ago

beautiful soundscapes

nrhrjrjrjtntbt2• 7 months ago

I am sure everyone has their own mind blown moment, and for me it was there being an animal about the size of a red blood cell.

spydr• 7 months ago

The Japanese spider crab being the same size as a tiger shocked me.

varispeed• 7 months ago

What made the DNA?

ptak• 7 months ago

Illustrations are fantastic

ge96• 7 months ago

looks like they don't show up with an adblocker

psikomanjak• 7 months ago

amazing job

bariswheel• 7 months ago

The music is so moving, tear inducing. One of the best links I've seen posted here and I've been here 15+ years. Well done Neal. I wish credit was given to the music, anyone know who created it?

hypertexthero• 7 months ago

The following from clicking on the i on the top-right after starting the show:

Created by Neal Agarwal
Illustrations by Julius Csotonyi
Production by Liz Ryan
Music & SFX by Aleix Ramon
Cello performance by Iratxe Ibaibarriaga

Beautiful work.

gizmo3852• 7 months ago

If you click the "i" info button in the top right, it'll list the full credits, including those who worked on the music.

hashstring• 7 months ago

So many loving comments, I have nothing more to add to them, and nothing to subtract from them.

kreelman• 7 months ago

So wonderful. Thanks for making this so open. I'll show it to my kids. The artwork is very good and the soundtrack too.

danielfalbo• 7 months ago

For comparison: ASML machines print chips with precision up to 2nm.

https://www.asml.com/en/products/euv-lithography-systems/twi...

ag8• 7 months ago

Not 13?

jfarlow• 7 months ago

And the atoms in the proteins and DNA that are exactly replicated to the atom each have a feature sizes resolved at fractions of a nanometer in 3 dimensions (and likely in time/dynamics too).

worldsayshi• 7 months ago

I didn't know tardigrades can be big enough to be seen with the naked eye. Apparently big enough to be seen but not big enough to be recognised without magnification.

njarboe• 7 months ago

Fun to see the Jerboa. I recently read a family history written by my uncle and he believes this is the source of our family name.

cantalopes• 7 months ago

Why would th3 website switch from metric to usa units out of nowhere m

higgins• 7 months ago

where is Solaris?

thymine_dimer• 7 months ago

(Uninsightful comment but I’m gonna put it here anyway) The US spelling of haemoglobin is all kinds of wrong. Love the site. Would love some algae in there though. Perhaps a desmid or diatom?

nickvec• 7 months ago

Always a joy to see neal.fun on the HN front page.

MarcelOlsz• 7 months ago

Music & SFX by Aleix Ramon Cello performance by Iratxe Ibaibarriaga

Got a link to the music?

p2detar• 7 months ago

I’m pleasantly surprised that Tyrannosaurus rex’s tiny hands were depicted so accurately. As far as I recall, scientists are still puzzled about why it even had hands. Apparently, they were too small to be useful for anything, not even scratching its face.

pazimzadeh• 7 months ago

This has DNA as the smallest object and has a large protein next to it, so it misses the fact that a gene's DNA is almost always larger by weight and volume than the protein it encodes.

g_host56• 7 months ago

Beautiful website, love that it's using vue.

darepublic• 7 months ago

this has more of an indie gem feel compared to the blockbuster that was stimulation clicker. as others have mentioned it reminds me of scale of the universe flash animation. I think borrowing some ideas from that, including zooming in and out rather than side to side, could have benefits here.

ProllyInfamous• 7 months ago

CGP Grey does a similar video — spanning the sizes of our entire observable universe — called "Metric Paper" [0]

[0] https://www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=pUF5esTscZI

Even if you've never taken a mild psychedelic, this video hits in a similar manner (as sober metaphor).

----

I still drive with Neal.fun's Internet Roadtrip (same OP link author), every time I'm out in my workshop.

kec• 7 months ago

These are all riffs on "Powers of 10", a film made in the 70's for IBM by Charles and Ray Eames: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

takira• 7 months ago

Did a great job keeping the scale jumps fresh. Every step had a little twist instead of just a commonly known larger animal on the next slide. Wild that the Japanese spider crab is basically the same size as an orangutan.

vinhnx• 7 months ago

Human: A highly social, relatively hairless bipedal ape that was once a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but has adapted to create websites.

Thanks for the laugh!

ronbenton• 7 months ago

Going to make this my LinkedIn headline

buyTheDip• 7 months ago

That was fun, neal.fun.

the-mitr• 7 months ago

One of the books that got me introduced to this fascinating aspect of our natural world is John Tyler Bonner's Size and Cycle. It has features amazing log-log plots of how different organisms from grow with time: from eggs to full-grown organisms. This kind of visualisation gives you a different perspective on growth and scale

For example, Sequoia gigantea Sequoia is the largest tree and can be effectively compared to the annual plant shown above. Fertilization and the early growth to the seed stage are essentially similar, but because of the cambium and the possibility of secondary thickening, the size of the tree can increase enormously. As can be seen from Figure 1 in the text, the sequoia does not begin to set seed until it is sixty years old and eighty meters tall.

https://postimg.cc/hfdGGJ8H

kretaceous• 7 months ago

Interesting things from this:

- Smallest animal: Myxobolus Shekel. Smaller than a WBC at 10 micrometeres.

- Biggest butterfly: Queen Alexandra's Birdwing. Bigger than human brain at 18cm.

- Largest insect to ever live: Meganeura (283 MYA). At 40cm long, a dragonfly larger than a house cat.

- Rafflesias are larger than German Shepherds

- Earth's largest crab: Japanese Spider Crab. 1m, legs pan of 3.75m. More than half the size of a human.

- Always thought Mososaurs were largest animal to ever live but it's the Blue whale at 26m. I don't think I ever appreciated how unfathomably huge they are. (The largest Mosasaur found was 13m. There's a speculated size of 17m as well.)

- World's largest living tree: Hyperion - a giant redwood in california at 115m.

Love seeing something so polished and inspiring. Amazing illustrations and even better music.

Thanks Neal for these projects!

manlymuppet• 7 months ago

The music is phenomenal. Really, really phenomenal.

utopcell• 7 months ago

nicely done.

ComputerGuru• 7 months ago

Onl missing a Wikipedia link on each page!

baalimago• 7 months ago

Why not "microinches" while you're at it?

klaushougesen1• 7 months ago

!! super nice thanks !

shahzaibmushtaq• 7 months ago

Is banana a life? If yes, then hundreds of other lives are not included in this project.

A simple idea but fabulous execution!

vrighter• 7 months ago

awesome that there was a banana for scale!

bicepjai• 7 months ago

Great webapp. There is a similar app that I love to scroll through from time to time. Its free and needs no internet connection. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/universe-in-a-nutshell/id15263... The range of size in the universe, from the tiniest particles to the epic galaxies - we take you on a journey of size that lets you explore it all with a single swipe.

Simplita• 7 months ago

Crazy how something so simple hits so hard. Always wild to see how much meaning people can pack into a minimal format.

Evidlo• 7 months ago

The people on the page look really scary with DarkReader enabled.

oscord• 7 months ago

Why not the super cluster?

gauravbluepi• 7 months ago

Like all of your projects....thank you for sharing

bobnarizes• 7 months ago

HUMAN

A highly social, relatively hairless bipedal ape that was once a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but has adapted to create websites. :)

filo404• 7 months ago

This is what the web should be

maelito• 7 months ago

The first page looks like a book. It's awesome. Thanks, so refreshing. No fucking inhuman cookie banner.

k__• 7 months ago

A week ago, I learned that animals weren't bigger in the past.

Sure, there were dinosaurs that were quite big, but they weren't living all at the same time. So there was maybe a big one, that died out, and the next big one would evolve much later.

As this project shows, the biggest animals and plants are living right now.

Also, we're living in the time with the biggest spiders in history. Somehow they don't get that big on average. Turns out, the high oxygen levels in the past didn't affect arachnid sizes as much as insect sizes.

singularity2001• 7 months ago

it seems strange E. Coli can fit 70,000 ribosomes

tcsenpai• 7 months ago

I find it amazing, that we can build microprocessors with transistors the size of a DNA molecule

mchinen• 7 months ago

If you liked the first half of this site and want an extension, Cell Biology by the Numbers (2015, Milo, Phillips, https://book.bionumbers.org/) is great and has a similar intuition-building fun sense about size as well as various other measurements, including weight, time and energy at the atomic to micro-organism level.

thunderbong• 7 months ago

On a desktop screen, you also see a 'Compare To' button which puts the current and the compared one beside each other!

hamiecod• 7 months ago

It makes me emotional when I think about where life started and what it evolved into. Life created so many different types of organisms, each having different features while maintaining the equilibrium of the planet. From bacteria, to massive dinosaurs, to tiny homosapiens who inevitably control the largest organisms.

8-prime• 7 months ago

My main takeaway was that I had no clue how large Krill can get. To think that Antarctic Krill is as long as the Bee Hummingbird is tall is absurd to me.

ebastiban• 7 months ago

You are an artist, a good one .

dsign• 7 months ago

Amazing!

I always thought that the best we could do for targeted drug delivery was an adenovirus. But after seeing that parasite being only slightly bigger than a red blood cell, I think we can do better...

catoc3• 7 months ago

No.fun in the cookie dialogue. Had to click 26 (sic!) switches to opt out of being tracked.

miramba• 7 months ago

It is encouraging to know that I am not the only one who does that (sometimes, on interesting sites. otherwise I just leave).

catoc3• 7 months ago

I would have definitely left normally. Just wanted to see the site.

And I know this also likely not Neil's idea of fun, and mostly the silly EU rules that are to blame but still, dialogs without a directly available "refuse all" are the worst

kunley2• 7 months ago

Yes, you are not the only one.

qn9n• 7 months ago

Honestly I don't really see cookie banners anymore because I have a dismiss feature built into my ad blocker.

catoc3• 7 months ago

Always afraid that auto dismiss results in auto allow-all on thus type of dialog.

N-Krause• 7 months ago

uBlock seemed to have handled it for me.

kunley2• 7 months ago

Not on mobile..

lionkor• 7 months ago

Consent-O-matic works fantastically to select exactly what you want.

anoplus• 7 months ago

So many new facts to learn and I like how popular a post about the natural world is here

bilsbie• 7 months ago

You’re telling me a white blood cell is only ten times longer than mitochondria?

How is that possible? Doesn’t it contain at least thousands?

solarized• 7 months ago

All hail web based apps!

We really dont need playStore and appStore to run beautiful things like this.

01-_-• 7 months ago

Wow! That's very interesting.

XCSme• 7 months ago

Neurons are huge

AleixR4• 7 months ago

Hi all! I’m Aleix Ramon, the music composer of the soundtrack.

Since some of you asked, here’s the soundtrack on Bandcamp: https://aleixramon.bandcamp.com/album/size-of-life-original-...

There you can download it in high quality, and it’s a pay-what-you-want: you can get it for free if you want, or pay what you feel like and support me. Either way, I’m happy that you enjoy it!

The music should also be on Spotify, Apple Music, and most music streaming services within the next 24h.

A bit about the process of scoring Size of Life:

I’ve worked with Neal before on a couple of his other games, including Absurd Trolley Problems, so we were used to working together (and with his producer—you’re awesome, Liz!). When Neal told me about Size of Life, we had an inspiring conversation about how the music could make the players feel.

The core idea was that it should enhance that feeling of wondrous discovery, but subtly, without taking the attention away from the beautiful illustrations.

I also thought it should reflect the organisms' increasing size—as some of you pointed out, the music grows with them. I think of it as a single instrument that builds upon itself, like the cells in an increasingly complex organism. So I composed 12 layers that loop indefinitely—as you progress, each layer is added, and as you go back, they’re subtracted. The effect is most clear if you get to the end and then return to the smaller organisms!

Since the game has an encyclopedia vibe to it, I proposed to go with a string instrument to give it a subtle “Enlightenment-era” and “cultural” feel. I was suspecting the cello could be a good instrument because of its range and expressivity.

Coincidentally, the next week I met the cellist Iratxe Ibaibarriaga at a game conference in Barcelona, where I’m based, and she immediately became the ideal person for it. She’s done a wonderful job bringing a ton of expressivity to the playing, and it’s been a delight to work with her.

I got very excited when Neal told me he was making an educational game—I come from a family of school teachers. I’ve been scoring games for over 10 years, but this is the first educational game I’ve scored.

In a way, now the circle feels complete!

(if anyone wants to reach out, feel free to do so! You can find me and all my stuff here: https://www.aleixramon.com/ )

js8• 7 months ago

I would like to play an open world game (like Minecraft) where 1 in-game meter equals 1 micrometer in the real world. That way, one could get a feeling about the scale of things.

mncharity4• 7 months ago

Hmm, perhaps with flying? When stuck on the ground, people's feel for size gets poorer as things get bigger (tall buildings, clouds, map distances). I think of having 4ish orders of magnitude available for visual reference in a classroom (cm to 10 m), plus less robustly 100 m and km in AR. At that micrometer per meter, a grain of salt towers over a city skyline - "nano view" in [1] (eep - a decade ago now - I was about to take another pass at it as covid hit).

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221007220513/http://www.clarif...

mncharity4• 7 months ago

Hmm, err, that could be misleading... 4ish for visible lengths in a large class. But especially in a small group, one can use reference objects of sand (mm) and flour (fine 100 um, ultrafine 10 um). The difference between the 100 um and 10 being more behavioral and feel (eg mouth feel) than unmagnified visible size. Thus with an outdoor view (for 100 m), one can use less-abstract "it's like that there accessible length" concrete-ish analogues across like 8 orders of magnitude. Or drop to 6, or maybe push for 9, as multiples of 3 nicely detent across SI prefixes.

chakintosh• 7 months ago

Human A highly social, relatively hairless bipedal ape that was once a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but has adapted to create websites.

Helmut10001• 7 months ago

Great visualization! It would have been nice to zoom out to a view of the world from space at the end, since this is really the max size of life as we know it (n=1 so far).

Zak• 7 months ago

Never before have I seen the message "Firefox has been terminated by the Linux kernel because the system is low on memory". Thanks for a new experience!

I do like the visualization.

greg7mdp• 7 months ago

The OOM killer strikes again.

shevy-java• 7 months ago

Visually this is nice, but navigation-wise I absolutely hate the UI.

I don't want to have to keep on scrolling to "discover" new images.

its_ethan• 7 months ago

Maybe it's a stupid question, but how does the poliovirus "work"? Like at this scale, the DNA strand is still pretty visible and a decent-ish percentage of the polio virus in size.. is it just a ball with DNA inside and not much else? How does it pack enough DNA to replicate itself into it's own size at that scale?

zxexz• 7 months ago

You’re pretty close actually. It’s a single strand of positive-sense RNA 7.5kb long, and a protein capsule. +ssRNA is treated as mRNA by the host and is directly translated into proteins.

almog• 7 months ago

One error I think I spotted: Wooly Mammoth atill lived 4000 years ago in Wrangel Island but the the website says it got extinct 10,000 years ago.

xwowsersx• 7 months ago

This is absolutely incredible. Thank you.

fastaguy88• 7 months ago

Nice display, but it starts off with misleading measurements of DNA. The spacing between DNA base pairs is 0.34 nm, so the 10 base pairs pictured are in fact 3.4 nm. But the DNA in a single human cell is about 2 meters, and chromosome lengths vary from 2 to 10 cm. I am skeptical of the hemoglobin vs ribosome sizes as well; hemoglobin has a molecular weight of about 60,000, while ribosomes weigh more than 5 million.

throwaway290• 7 months ago

Arthropleura is missing shadow.

Size of Life

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