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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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).
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.
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."
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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/
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".
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:
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.
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.
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)."
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.
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.
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');
};
})();
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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_
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.
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.
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).
I love how the music swells and becomes more intricate as life expands and grows more complicated.
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...
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.
The music was breathtaking here - I'd absolutely pay for a version of it. Really solidified the experience
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
I absolutely loved that looping music track, please authors make it available.
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
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.
He has many other cool visualizations!
Space Elevator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640226
Deep Sea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21850527
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.
You really can't go wrong with any of Neal's fun projects!
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.
I was taught in school they were something in between.
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.
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.
as a former virologist, I love the thought that LLMs are the virus of reasoning :)
Once a virologist always a virologist I always say.
..er, a parasitic threat to life and happiness that become an endemic drag on global well being?
They do have genes and are subject to natural selection so to say the least they are a clear borderline case.
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!
We are megafauna predators! We’ve wiped them almost all out, which makes it less obvious, but that’s our ecological niche.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
Thank you for that info/correction!
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."
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.
But if scales were perfectly respected, how could you see both a neuron and a human on the screen?
The tardigrade vs. ladybug gave me pause. So a tardigrade is about the side of a ladybugs eye?
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).
> A highly social, relatively hairless bipedal ape that was once a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but has adapted to create websites.
Definitely worthy the scroll!
Makes a good profile description on certain websites.
Tools like this are surprisingly effective for teaching, especially compared to static diagrams. Interaction makes the scale differences stick.
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.
Totally agree! Even as adults, the sense of scale hits differently when you interact with it. Your daughter will probably love discovering it too.
Pretty glad the 9 foot long Arthopleura centipede went extinct 300 million years ago. No one wants to deal with that thing.
We've still got this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_aphroditois
Thankfully they don't live on land.
That's fresh nightmare fuel all right
Not really bothered by snakes, sharks or spiders. But those things (and cave centipedes) look terrifying.
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.
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).
This was awesome! Also, I couldn't stop my child brain from anticipating "your mom" at the end.
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.
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.
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/
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/
For what it's worth, there are AdSense interstitial ads on the site, so you probably got duped by one of those ads.
Saw this too on mobile - I think it's an ad - I requested a paid ad-free version elsewhere in the comments
I can't seem to find the IQ test. I see captcha and other "games"
Ironically this sounds like a piece of satire Neal would make.
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".
beautiful soundscapes
Missing a mushroom from Oregon [1]
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-...
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/
It was great until Sea snail appeared in inches. Transitioning from micrometer/milliliter to inches is pretty rough
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.
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.
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.
Some of your neurons stretch from your brain to your big toe. 1.5m, or more in a tall person.
There's no way a tardigrade is half a sea snail.
Correct, but not the one on the site.
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.
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)."
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.
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.
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.
You have seen a tardigrade with the naked eye (without microscope), that's as large as a spot on a ladybug?
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 :)
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.
I think the banana was mostly added as a joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiducial_marker#%22Banana_for_...
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/...
> Velociraptor > Smaller than usually depicted, the Velociraptor was actually only about the size of a turkey.
This is an interesting fact.
He always makes great content, I love it.
Absolutely loved that the intensity of the music is synced with the swiping. Fantastic job as always!
> A highly social, relatively hairless bipedal ape that was once a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but has adapted to create websites
Blood cells are huge!
Reminds me of the classic Scale of the Universe flash toy by Cary Huang (now available in HTML 5!):
https://htwins.net/scale2/
[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.
The chip is not smaller than 3.5nm; but a component on the chip is that small.
“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.
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
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEHCCsFFIuY
Star Size Comparison 3, simply a stunning visualization.
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?
1 nitpick: The Dwarf Lanternshark is not found off the coast of "Columbia" but "Colombia!"
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.
Beautiful! I love the human feet always visible in the background! It helps me set perspective.
What surprised me most was how large a single neuron is.
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.
Wonderful. The music, illustrations, and sliding sound effect reminded me of the game Braid.
the slinding at some point made me wonder what if i was playing Tinder
Beautiful site. Also very pleased to see the mitochondrion being referred to as the powerhouse of the cell, as is law.
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?
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.
It isn't a secret. The location can easily be found if you Google it.
It is literally a secret. The location cannot easily be found with Google. Go ahead, try and find it.
And if you do, don't post it.
were you able to? I wasn't
http://famousredwoods.com/hyperion/
Nevermind!
There are a lot of 300 foot trees in the general vicinity, so you'd need to actually measure to be precisely sure
Minor thing that bothers me is that I can't scroll through the things like in the deep sea or space elevator.
Very beautiful. Love this.
If it helps, AFAIK (I do atomic force microscopy of DNA), DNA's height is closer to 2nm than 4.
I like the stuff un the sute but the number if partners and affiliates in the consent window is very off putting.
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.
Are there supposed to be pictures? I passed a human silhouette, but that was it.
An obvious benefit of "humans adapting to create websites"!
I've got a sudden strong urge to play Katamari Damacy.
>microns to inches
absolutely foul
Always awesome with by Neal.
Well made!
if anyone that made this sees this, you made a typo on the Dwarf Lanternshark, its not Columbia, its ColOmbia
beautiful illustrations, beautiful site
Just delightful, thank you Neal.
What about that 3.5 sq mil fungi
yes indeed, fungi are under-represented here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillaria_ostoyae
Nice that the back button works.
I always click when I see neal.fun.
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_
Neal is him
If I see a neal.fun link on HN, I click.
Great use of sound!
cool and artistic app, how did you make this
The visual scale seems off, especially on the smaller end of things. Also, are Velociraptors really that small? Jurassic Park lied to me.
Spielberg took a Deinonychus and called it a Velociraptor because it sounded cooler.
My kids will LOVE this
Banana, ha ha.
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.
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.