Science imagery

Science imagery

I was going to write a post about the Visualizing Science 2013 contest but my #ScienceSunday  co-curators beat me to it. Check out the images and videos. If you have questions, the ScienceSunday team will try to get you an answer.

Originally shared by ScienceSunday

Visualizing Science

Science you’d hang on your living room wall

Earlier this week, we shared a great example of scientific visualization, showcasing the   Pseudomonas    bacteria in a large green, bacteria covered hand (http://goo.gl/bWtKeP, via William McGarvey).

That was just one of many amazing scientific images from the 2013 Visualization Challenge sponsored by   Science   and National Science Foundation  , so here are several more beauties to behold. 

The challenge includes entries in several categories, including illustration,  posters & graphics, photography, games & apps, 

and video. So even this group of images just scratches the tip of the iceberg from the 200+ entries they received. You can see many more of the entries yourself, and learn about the science behind the images here: http://goo.gl/Bgx1n1

The images we highlight here illustrate a range of scientific results and phenomena, the description of which are from the   Science   article linked above:

Spherical Nucleic Acids

(by Quintin Anderson, The Seagull Company, Midland, Texas; Chad Mirkin and Sarah Petrosko, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois)

The floating golden sphere, bristling with corkscrew strands of RNA, drifts majestically toward the jostling lipid bilayer that surrounds a cell. Slowly, gently, it squeezes through the layer until it is inside the cell.

Breezing across cell membranes is just one talent of these spherical nucleic acids (SNAs) developed by nanotechnology pioneer Chad Mirkin at Northwestern University. Once inside a cell, they can fend off attacks from enzymes, which makes them hot prospects as vehicles for delivering gene therapy treatments. SNAs also bind strongly to complementary strands of genetic material, an ability being used in a commercial medical diagnostics system called Verigene.

Mirkin commissioned Quintin Anderson, creative director at scientific animation firm The Seagull Company, to create a video explaining his research to colleagues and funders. The toughest part, Anderson says, was creating the lipid bilayer. “There are hundreds of thousands of lipids in those scenes and it required a complicated mathematical algorithm to create the random movements.”

The Life Cycle of a Bubble Cluster: Insight from Mathematics, Algorithms, and Supercomputers

(Robert I. Saye and James A. Sethian, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley)

“Isn’t that just a photograph of soap bubbles?” Robert Saye and James Sethian hear that all the time when people see their poster. “Naturally we are eager to point out that it is in fact a visualization of a physics computational model,” says Saye, who recently completed his Ph.D. with Sethian at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley.

Predicting how bubbles in a foam rearrange and rupture is a tough modeling problem, because it involves intricately coupled processes that operate at very different scales. The soap films are only micrometers thick, while the gas pockets themselves might be centimeters across. Meanwhile, individual films rupture in milliseconds; bubbles rearrange in a fraction of a second; and liquid inside the film drains over tens of seconds or longer.

Running a simulation at the smallest scales to predict the macroscopic effects would eat up vast amounts of computer power. “Instead, we found a way to separate distinct time and space scales, and allow these to communicate so that the most important physics affecting foam dynamics are captured,” Saye says. The model, published last year (Science, 10 May 2013, p. 720), could be useful in devising lightweight materials or optimizing industrial processes, he and Sethian suggest.

This image is a part of a larger poster that was entered in the contest,and you can see a video of the foam simulation at Bursting Bubbles at UC Berkeley

Cortex in Metallic Pastels

(Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards, Greg Dunn Design, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Marty Saggese, Society for Neuroscience, Washington, D.C.; Tracy Bale, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Rick Huganir, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland)

With a Ph.D. in neuroscience and a love of Asian art, it may have been inevitable that Greg Dunn would combine them to create sparse, striking illustrations of the brain. “It was a perfect synthesis of my interests,” Dunn says.

Cortex in Metallic Pastels represents a stylized section of the cerebral cortex, in which axons, dendrites, and other features create a scene reminiscent of a copse of silver birch at twilight. An accurate depiction of a slice of cerebral cortex would be a confusing mess, Dunn says, so he thins out the forest of cells, revealing the delicate branching structure of each neuron.

Dunn blows pigments across the canvas to create the neurons and highlights some of them in gold leaf and palladium, a technique he is keen to develop further.

“My eventual goal is to start an art-science lab,” he says. It would bring students of art and science together to develop new artistic techniques. He is already using lithography to give each neuron in his paintings a different angle of reflectance. “As you walk around, different neurons appear and disappear, so you can pack it with information,” he says.

The painting was commissioned for the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s Brain Science Institute, but, Dunn says, “I want to be able to communicate with a wide swath of people.” He hopes that lay viewers will see how the branching structures of neurons mirror so many other natural structures, from river deltas to the roots of a tree. “I want to help people to appreciate the beauty of the brain.”

You can read Greg Dunn’s description of how he came to merge art and science in this uniquely beautiful way at http://goo.gl/yYNmgc, and you can check out much more of his art+science work – and even order a print of this image to hang on your wall – here: www.gregadunn.com.

Invisible Coral Flows

(Vicente I. Fernandez, Orr H. Shapiro, Melissa S. Garren, Assaf Vardi, and Roman Stocker, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge)

The swirling patterns moving around these coral polyps may look like fireworks streaking across a long-exposure photograph—but they are the result of a cunning technique that uses false colors to help compress time and movement into a single picture.

The image shows two Pocillopora damicornis polyps roughly 3 millimeters apart, colored pink. To reveal how the corals’ wafting cilia beat the water into a vortex, the team tracked particles in the water by video and super-imposed successive frames to highlight the flow (gold). About 90 minutes later, the coral polyps have changed position (shown in purple), altering the water flow (cyan), “but the vortex stayed roughly the same,” says Massachusetts Institute of Technology environmental engineer Vicente Fernandez, part of the research team that produced the image. The spacing between points in the vortex tracks even reveals the speed of the particles, he adds: “Up close you can see the steps of individual particles, see where the flow is strongest.” Fernandez says that the team drew inspiration from the palette used by Andy Warhol in his Flowers prints, which feature vivid, strongly contrasting colors.

The vortex helps draw nutrients toward the coral and sweep away waste products, says Fernandez’s colleague Orr Shapiro, an ecologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. “Everywhere I look at corals now I find these vortical swirls,” he adds.

h/t to DJ Spin for inspiring the post

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