[Bandit LOAF]

We need a doctor! That's because today we thought it would be fun to look at the medical samples the TCS Midway intercepts from the Nephilim in Wing Commander Prophecy. It's the scene right before T'lan Meth E2 where Lt. Cmdr. Finley explains to Casey that the samples show "single nucleus, double-helix DNA, S-7 Ribosomes. I'd swear, if I didn't know any better, these were animal cytologic scans, er...tissue samples, Casey. Very thorough tissue samples, possibly human." We took a close look at the scene and found that the screen plays a 15-item loop consisting of 13 distinct images (two are repeats)... but we don't know enough about biology to make any sort of an educated guess as to their actual source! Do you know more?




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Original update published on August 2, 2026

 

[broadwing]

The low quality doesn’t tell us much, but stuff like the lack of scale bars raises doubts on this being once in published materials.
Interesting stuff though: most of them look like Hematoxilin/Eosin histochemistry staining. Hematoxilin Will color cell nuclei in deep blue/purple, while Eosin will color cell cytoplasm pink.
I’m unsure of the tissue types but 1 could be skin, while 5 or 9 could be liver sections of kidney glomeruli. 7 could be brain.
12 and 13 are histological tissue sections. 12 is clearly a brain section, I’m guessing primate. Unsure what 13 is.
Incidentally, none of these show in anyway « single nucleus (unsure what that means, given cells normally possess one nucleus) double-helix DNA, S-7 Ribosomes » : you would not see those at this scale, and not through these methods.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

We've now sourced two of them to this Human Histology Photo CD: https://web.archive.org/web/2013080...an_histology/Parotid-Serous.html#.UgIdUHbP32c

I suspect there's a further ancestor that'll have more of them.

 

[broadwing]

Interesting. Parotid cells… never worked on them.

Those are responsible for saliva secretion.