Alcohol is everywhere, but have you ever thought of it as art? Have you ever seen your favorite drink through a microscope? BevShots is the brain child of researcher Michael Davidson, who first photographed crystallized drinks on a lab slide. The company maintains a catalog of microscopic slides of beer, wines and cocktails remade into art. Pictured here is whiskey.
Image from Laura Hughes’s Skin and Bones collection, part of the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design’s web exhibition for the class MIAD-FA382
Follow her on tumblr here
A collection of meteorites, from the American Museum of Natural History’s new exhibit, Picturing Science.
Japanese artist Iori Tomita transforms the scientific technique of preserving and dying organisms into an art form with this series entitled New World Transparent Specimens. The images give us an breathtaking look at the inner workings of underwater life.
The process Tomita goes through is extremely extensive. First, he removes the scales and skin that have been preserved in formaldehyde. He then soaks the creatures in a stain that dyes the cartilage blue. Tomita uses a digestive enzyme called trypsin, along with a host of other chemicals, to break down the proteins and muscles, halting the process just at the moment they become transparent. The bones are stained with red dye, and the specimen is preserved in a jar of glycerin. From start to finish, the entire production takes about five months to a year.
Virus-Cell Interaction
Joerg Schroeer
Department of Molecular Biology
Human cytomegalovirus infected human endothelial cells. Multicolor Immunofluorescence (IF). Blue: DAPI = cellular DNA. Green = GFP (green fluorescence protein). Red + Magenta = two different viral proteins. Captured with a Zeiss LSM510 laser scanning confocal microscope.
Sometimes the lines between art, nature photography, and science blur. And sometimes the definitions that scientists give things get blurry, too. The results, in both cases, can be amazing.
Take, for instance, the photos you see here. They show a virus that was originally found infecting amoebas in a Parisian water tank in 1992. This virus, however, was much, much bigger than viruses usually are—indeed, it was almost the size of a bacteria. After 11 years of study, researchers concluded that it was a “missing link” between viruses and living cells—between the living and the dead.
The researchers recently made pictures of the virus using an election microscope. Thousands of separate images were combined to create these 3-D views, which were recently published in Public Library of Science Biology. (You can also read more here.) What is amazing is that they look just the way I imagined a big virus would look, with a kind of reptilian skin and strange, vaguely scaring markings.I love it when imagery comes together.
Beautiful snowflake photography by Kenneth G. Libbrecht at snowcrystals.com. Check out the website to see more photos, learn about the physics of snowflakes and buy snowflake books.
This compilation photo shows a zebrafish embryo (in purple) superimposed on a background representing a branching family tree of genes.
Credit: Vanja Solin and Andreas Hartl
Source: LiveScience, Image Gallery
The Fibonacci sequence was used to create a mosaic from circular photographs. In the words of the artist, “This mosaic was made from 1099 individual photographs of circles, photographed by 265 talented individuals. The mosaic was constructed by Jim Bumgardner using images from the Squared Circle photo pool at Flickr.”
Pictures from Princeton’s 2009 Art of Science competition. The description of the last image:
All because we live in a finger
Alex Dahlen (graduate student)
Department of PhysicsIn an attempt to account for what happened before the big bang, as well as the smallness of the cosmological constant, some physicists have been led to a model where our entire observable universe is contained inside a bubble, which is expanding at the speed of light into an exterior space.
But our bubble is not the only one; outside our bubble, there are an infinite number of other bubbles, all expanding just like ours. Sometimes they collide and send waves of death that wash across our universe. In this figure, the regions colored red have already been swept clean by the wave, and the yellow regions can see it coming.
A clear prediction of the model is that Earth resides in the thin sliver, or finger, that forms when two bubbles that have both collided with our bubble narrowly miss one another, indicated here with an arrow. It is thanks to our location here, in a finger, that despite the enormous swaths of our universe decimated by these waves, the odds are exponentially small that they lie in our future. We can all sleep sounder, and it’s all because we live in a finger.
