Art captured under the microscope

Yomna Emad
Jul 10, 2017 · 5 min read

Every year, big shot Scientific conferences and reputable journals open the doors for scientists to showcase their work illustrated through art. Eye mesmerizing images that make you not only curious about this world but more appreciative for nature’s unnoticed miracles and beauties around us.

Science as art competitions became one of the annual highlights in the scientific communities attracting researchers from all around the world, to transfer their work into photographic master pieces. Images can be interesting illustrations of a scientific observation with vivid colors, mix of pallets and fine details. It can also be an innovative transformation of microscopic images into unexpected shapes and figures, using color touches and highlighting subcomponents.

As this article showcases some of these master pieces, it is a real manifestation of the say “A picture is worth a thousand words”. And as I took the freedom to name the pieces highlighted, every eye can receive different signal from the image translated into another emotion, observation or an inspiration for ideas.

Image#1 The Brutal Beauty

Gregory Szeto, Adelaide Tovar, Jeffrey Wyckoff Irvine Laboratory, MIT Koch Institute

One of 2015 competition finalists of “Wellcome Image Awards” run by the biomedical charity in London. The image illustrates drug releasing particles in micro scale (in pink) tested on mouse’s lung (in blue and green), as future vehicle for anti-cancer drug. Bioengineers and researchers behind this work hope that such micro-depots could be able to target the anti-cancer drug — which is toxic in nature — directly to the affected lung through inhalation, reducing the overall body side effect.

Thanks to advanced imaging techniques, such impressive quality of the picture with vivid color contrast and three-dimensional clarity can now be created. The image is taken by a type of microscopes called confocal microscopy. It obtains sets of images at different depths for the object being imaged, which are then reconstructed into that three dimensional shape.

Image #2 The Deceptively Simple

Dong-Chan Lee, Georgia Institute of Technology. Image saved from: https://www.mrs.org/science-as-art

The piece was originally named “Ferric Bloom” by its creator Dong-Chan Lee from Georgia Institute of Technology and was one of the winning images at MRS spring meeting 2015. MRS “Material Research Society” is one of the biggest conferences in the world of material science, with growing community of 14,000 from 90 countries around the world. The conference is one of many that holds “Science as Art competitions” and one of the few that strongly promotes it.

“Ferric Bloom” is a visual illustration of a chemical compound called iron oxide, composed of iron and oxygen as the name implies. Iron Oxides are widely spread in nature and plays important role in many biological and geological processes. That beauty is a reproduced version of this naturally existing compound created from scratch in a process called nucleation and growth.

As the image might look as a simple visualization of a beautiful flowers arrangement. It is actually a product of a fine and complicated fabrication process of geometrical shapes at the nanoscale, which is a BILLIONTH of a meter (10 -9 m), resulting into these iron oxide flowers of two microns (10 -6 m) in diameter.

Image #3 The Geometry of Nature

Fernan Federici, Crystals in polarized light (urea), https://www.flickr.com/photos/anhedonias/page2

A previous Wellcome awards winner and contestant of other competitions Fernan Federici, is the scientist/artist behind this abstract colorful masterpiece. While working on his Ph.D. in biological Sciences at Cambridge University, Federici caught himself finding art in unexpected place; under the microscope.

He uses a process called fluorescence microscopy to image plant, bacteria or crystals and publish it on his flicker account. “Microscopy is always serious science. For us [in the department at Cambridge] this was something we looked at as outreach. It was a way to bring this scientific data to the general public.” Says Federici.

Federici is specialized in a discipline called self-organization, a process by which things organize themselves spontaneously and without direction. Like a flock of birds flying together. This image shows a self-organized crystals of urea; the main nitrogen-containing substance in the urine of mammals. Urea serves an important role in biological processes in humans/animals and it is normally odorless and colorless. However, these self-organized crystals are imaged in polarized light, where propagation of light waves is altered, resulting in such beautiful and unique color pallet.

Image #4: The Fatal Camouflage

Hawaiian bobtail squid, Mark R Smith, Macroscopic Solutions, http://www.wellcomeimageawards.org/2017/hawaiian-bobtail-squid

This baby Hawaiian bobtail is a pacific ocean native, that tells a story from the mysterious world under the waters. During the day it hides under the sand waiting for the shades of night to come out for hunting shrimps near the coral reef. The bobtail survives through a mutual benefits-agreement with a glowing bacterium called Vibrio fischeri. Colonies of the bacteria houses an inside organ of the bobtail for bioluminescence in exchange of food and shelter from the seemingly generous squid.

This image was taken by Mark Smith, the founder of Macroscopic Solutions company that offers 2D and 3D imaging services and products capable of generating highly detailed content of samples ranging from a few microns (such as pollen) to a few meters (drill cores) in size, using one compact, portable and non-invasive imaging system called the Macropod Pro.

Albert Einstein claimed that “The greatest scientists are artists as well”. With the so many philosophical implications that lies within this phrase, visualization of nature and science observations is one straight forward and clear evidence to that claim.

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