The Art of Research

In January 2016, we ran a scientific image competition at Imperial College London. As the Technology Transfer partner for Imperial, we get to see firsthand all the amazing things researchers here create, invent, and discover. But sometimes the wonder of it all can get lost in all the seriousness of work.

Thus, Art of Research was born. The aim was to celebrate the beauty of scientific research, as well as the wide gamut of expertise working at Imperial.

Throughout the month of January we saw entries pour in in amazement. In total, we received 261 submissions from across all four faculties at Imperial. It all culminated in a small exhibition at Imperial’s main entrance showcasing a shortlist of 15 images chosen by our judges and a few “staff choice” images that we felt deserved some recognition.

You can see the shortlisted entries here, and read our announcement of the winners here.

As you can imagine, 15 out of 261 can’t quite capture all the glory of what we received so below are just some images that we wanted to highlight. Some were also in our “staff chocie” boards, but others we’re showing for the first time now. Even with this post, we wouldn’t be able to share all the incredible images submitted by Imperial scientists.

“Limbic Scorpion” by Jim Myersis a 3-D rendering of the results of a Positron Emission Tomography scan using the radioligand [11C]Ro15–4513 to label receptors in the limbic system of the brain. The resemblance to a scorpion is borne out when ‘ghost’ legs are added. The tail is actually the anterior cingulate gyrus of the brain, the claws the temporal lobes, and the head is the ventral striatum. The limbic system is particularly involved in emotional processing, activated, for example, on seeing a scorpion.

Trisection by Li Shen shows the ‘trisection’ line of 3 different bubbles undergoing thin-film drainage. The colour variations exhibited here gives an indication of the change of thickness of the film, which is then verified using Navier-Stokes equation under the lubrication approximation.

Submitted by Laura Bella, this images shows the extremely rare encounter of 1 day old conjoined zebrafish twin embryos. The existence of zebrafish twins has so far only been documented once in 1969, where it was revealed that their occurrence is of 0.16% of cases.

This photograph, submitted by Rosemary Teaque, captures the angular distribution of air distortions due to heating from a desk lamp. The image was taken using schlieren imaging techniques to view the changes to the refractive index caused by pressure differences.

Though these may look like microplankton, they are actually computer generated force-directed graph visualizations of Bitcoin transactions and their associations within selected blocks that were mined into the Bitcoin blockchain during a coordinated attack on the peer-to-peer network in late 2015. The parasitic worm and cancerous tumour structures immediately reveal the different nature of the evolving algorithms used to automatically generate the pernicious transactions used in the attack — submitted by Dan McGinn.

Here we see human lung alveolar macrophages that have ingested fluorescently tagged Heamophilius Influenzae bacteria. Green shows fluorescently labelled bacteria, blue shows DAPI nuclear stain, and red shows the cell cytoplasm labelled with cell tracker red — submitted by Kylie Belchamber

The image above was submitted by Pooya Sareh and shows how origami-inspired structures can be used as conceptual designs for future engineering structures. Apart from their potential engineering applications, these structures can be presented as artistic products. The photographs of the paper models have been taken using the light emission from a PC monitor in different colours which depict the three dimensional form of the structures beautifully.

This colour-coded depth projection image, submitted by Alan King Lun Liu shows the dense network of blood vessels in a block of mouse brain tissue with a human brain tumour, which was stained and clarified using a novel tissue clearing technique.

As described by Nataly Maimari, “This image shows short interfering RNA (siRNA) molecules tagged with flourescent dye. The siRNA molecules can be seen to be dissolving away from their designated spot, rather than adhering to it. This is actually an image from a failed experiment, a snapshot representative of literally months of constant failure, frustration, repetition, adaptation and development for the fabrication of a microarray of siRNA molecules for high-throughput molecular studies. In many ways, this image epitomises how scientific research is a marathon, where failure far outweights success. What makes research wondrous and rewarding, is that in those moments of despair, there could still be beguiling and mysterious beauty. To me this is the microscopic equivalent of the romantic ruins of castles and cathedrals — the scenery one may see en route to their destination — that can make a long and arduous journey more bearable.”

This dizzying image was submitted by Nicholaos Miscourides with the simple caption “What hundreds of transistors look like…”

The sharpness of this micrograph by Uma Anand really impressed us. This shows Fluorescently labelled beta-tubulin in cultured Schwann cells.

Pony-vortex might conjure images related more closely to science-fiction than science, so this image, submitted by Tyler Sorensen, really had the office confused for a while (until we red the description). This is part of a series of images that represent the intersection of two lines of research into testing graphics processing platforms. The vortex-like background images and the ponies should all appear identical to those shown in the top left. However, bugs in the graphics pipeline cause variations in rendering of the vortex, and weak memory issues cause deterioration of the ponies to varying degrees. The result image is a by-product of our research into identifying such bugs automatically.

Submitted by Arkhat Abzhanov, this photo depicts a Cactus finch (Geospiza scandens), one of the iconic Darwin’s finches from the Galapagos Islands. It has a beak specialised for feeding on Opuntia cactus flowers. The exact shape of its beak is regulated by a species-specific beak developmental programme.

We would like to say a final thank you to our three judges: Jen Wong, Sabrina Taner from @wellcomeimages, and Susan Aldworth (represented by @GV_Art). We can only imagine how hard it was to choose amongst so many high quality images.