Mouse intestines on twitter

#Super resolution image of mouse intestine from @API_DeltaVision stained with #Phalloidin & #DAPI #microscopy #biology twitter.com/GECellBiology/…

— GE Cell Biology (@GECellBiology) February 20, 2012

Sciartist spotlight: Stephen Gaeta

I came across a series of creative prints over at the Street Anatomy store the other week and keep meaning to write about the artist, Stephen Gaeta. Stephen is a physician-scientist currently completing his internal medicine residency. After completing his phd dissertation on cardiac arrhythmia he said he wanted to "display his accomplishment without hanging a certificate on the wall". He therefore used the words of his dissertation in a print of a heart (similar to the print below) to display his achievement. From this, he continues to create typographical imagery from classic scientific masterpieces.

Click each image for a close-up.

Beat poetry

Text from the seminal 1809 work of cardiology Cases of the Organic Disease of the Heart, with Dissections and Some Remarks Intended to Point Out the Distinctive Symptoms of These Diseases, by John Collins Warren. In this work, Warren describes the symptoms of 11 of his patients with heart disease as they presented in his office and, later, on his dissecting table. 

Transgenic
Text from Chromosome 1 of the human genome.

Extraocular

Text from Zoonomia, the 1794 masterpiece of Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), in which he attempted to catalog and explain human anatomy, pathology, and physiology, including the visual system.

Reactant
Text from the The Sceptical Chymist by Robert Boyle (1661), in which he provided the foundations of modern chemistry by proving that matter is comprised of individual atoms.

Can you tell what it is yet?

Image: Babak Anasori/Michael Naguib/Yury Gogotsi/Michel W. Barsoum/Drexel University [high-resolution] 

Why it's nano-material titanium cliffs of course.

Alright, so perhaps you didn't get that straight off - it's pretty awesome though, huh? This microscopic cliff-like overhang is an electron micrograph of super-thin layers of a titanium compound. When dunked in hydrofluoric acid, a compound known as Ti3AlC2* loses its aluminum to form layers of Ti3C2 that are just five atoms thick. The result is a nearly two-dimensional compound called “MXene”.


*you can probably just skim right over that jumble of letters and numbers - like the first time you read 'Hermione' in Harry Potter.

If Alby says it, it must be true

'After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are artists as well'
- Albert Einstein


I came across this quote during some lazy google-ing on the Theory of Relativity and thought I'd share it with you.

Indeed, and as any avid readers (hi Mum) will know, I have long held the notion that the creativity and innovation required of scientists to reach new levels of understanding is that very same required of artists to dominate in their field. This snippet articulates what it is I have so inarticulately and unintelligibly tried to portray through a year's worth of posts on Michelangelo, the Vitruvian man, microwaving CDs, Gunther Von Hagens' Bodyworlds, string theory, Facebook, the brain, tattoos, spirographs and numerous other half-formed meanderings. Einstein's observation takes all the fragments of science, art and sci-art I have come across on the web, wraps them in a parcel, puts a tidy ribbon around them and leaves a note that says: 'friends?'

Tim Minchin: a question of science

Here's a little light relief to kick those Monday blues.

Tim Minchin, with his exceptional turn of phrase, observation and impeccable spoken word, spins out a lyrical masterpiece on the subject of science, knowledge and faith. Tim's observations of social interaction are intriguing and it is quite a talent to, in the same nine minutes, make a person laugh to the point of unplanned-urination; and then to honestly think about their readily accepted digestion of common knowledge, the sciences, medicine and religion in whatever ratios they inhabit their life up to this point.

This is a mish-mash of rhyme, anecdote, philosophy, science, knowledge and dinner table etiquette, mixing together social cliche, the immortal words of Puck and touching on every scientists favourite subject - homeopathy!

Tim Minchin's spoken word masterpiece - Storm:

Lehrer-inspired science album

For a while now I have been meaning to blog about a band whose last album was dedicated to songs about different areas of science. I know, I know, it sounds pretty terrible, but They Might Be Giants really hit the nail on the head if you ask me. (By the end of this post, I challenge you to stop the lyrics 'The sun is a mass of incandescent gas' from pin-balling around your head).

The album, titled 'Here comes the science' includes such songs as 'Speed and Velocity', 'Solid liquid gas' and  'Why does the sun shine?' and they music isn't half bad either. What finally pushed me to post this was a reminder in a Science-Online 2011 chatroom today about Tom Lehrer's famous 'The elements' song, a groundbreaker in packaging science up for the masses (simply putting the name of every element of the periodic table to a relatively catchy tune). Here's 'The Elements' if you're unfamilair with it -



That's the reason for deciding to finally blog about them. Now for the reason I'd always been holding back; it's difficult to get music, in any easily accessible format, into a blog post so here are a few ways for you to listen:

• on Spotify if you have an account
• on Myspace
• on this Youtube playlist.

Now, whilst the science isn't always accurate and the music is, on the odd occasion, a little irritating; their effort to educate is commendable and the lyrics are nothing short of genius. The fact that they follow up the song 'Why does the sun shine?' with 'Why does the sun really shine?' reflects the familiar feeling of learning one thing and being satisfied, only to find later that you had only scratched the surface. That the deeper and deeper you study, the more detail there is to find. No one will ever know everything about science, and that is an idea that I, personally, am comfortable with.

That fact accepted - I will, however, endeavour to fill my future children's neuro-plastic little brains with such catchy nuggets of information as these. Can't hurt to start them young.

Molecular wallpaper

I am too spring a chicken to remember the original Time-Life Science books but having made a trip to the British Library to check them out for myself I now consider myself up-to-scratch. The Time-Life series was a series of hardbound books published in the 60s on 26 areas of natural science intended for the lay-reader and would fit in fairly comfortably on today's popular science shelves in Waterstones (and also on my own library shelves. When I have a library. When I'm big).
Dan Funderburgh's recent series of sci-art wallpapers were inspired by these iconic Time-life books, a collection he calls a "repudiation of the fabricated schism between art and decoration". Amen Funderburgh, we too repudiate that schism.

The retro palette from the series compliments the printed sci-art designs and images, making for a beautiful collection of wallpapers, any of which I would happily hang in my own living room.

Though they are all pretty, I am particularly fond of the design in the next picture, reminscent of a sketchbook doodle penned in a particularly dull biomolecular science class.

"The work is a recognition of the art of knowledge and of the poetry of things we do not and can not know". Funderburgh

The collection is showing at Vallery in Barcelona and since it's a bit of a trek for us Londoners, you can see the photos from the opening of the exhibit on the Vallery website.

All images courtesy of Dan Funderburgh. See more on Flickr.

This is NOT just photography

The Wired Science blog  is undoubtedly one of the best science blogs on the net, being accessible for the laymen but diverse and in-depth enough to keep all interest-levels happy. Last week, however, one post stood out among the rest. The announcement of the top 20 microscopic photographs in the 36th annual Nikon Small World competition.

The 20 photos that popped up on my screen were unrecognisable at first glance and unbelievable upon closer inspection.  These photo's are truly phenomenal!  Take a look at the winner:

'Can you guess what it is yet?' (in my best aussie accent).  No?  Well it's the heart of a mosquito, magnified 100 times!  Betsy Mason at WIRED said that

'The image, which used flourescence technology to highlight different parts of the specimen, stood out as one of the most beautiful of the entries. And it also had scientific merit as part of the photographer’s research on how mosquitoes carry and spread disease.'

Below is a pick of my personal favourites but you can take a look for yourself at the Wired Science blog.

Ichneumon wasp compound eye and antenna base (40X), Reflected (Episcopic) Light Illumination 

Telophase HeLa (cancer) cells expressing Aurora B-EGFP (green) (100X)

Zebra Fish olfactory bulbs (250x)

Ctenocephalides canis (flea) (20X)

...and if you can't get enough of photomicrography, you can visit the Nikon Small World website.

All images courtesy of Nikon Small World

It's Diabetes week - let's talk insulin wallpaper!

It is diabetes week (at least, it is according to Diabetes UK, which is good enough for me) so today’s post is inspired by the complex, and somewhat inspiring, structure of insulin.  I am talking X-ray Crystallography-inspired 1950s wallpaper!  Dorothy Hodgkin pioneered this technique of X-ray crystallography and created a contour map of insulin from the resulting scans, which, from afar, looks like a collection of rosettes, but in fact details a complex hormone that captured Dorothy’s imagination. 

This drawing and her other atomic diagrams inspired simplified patterns that adorned wallpapers, furnishing, carpets and dress fabrics at the 1951 Festival of Britain.

Insulin has many wide-ranging affects on the body; it influences many bodily functions such as protein synthesis, vascular compliance (the blood vessels’ response to blood pressure) and cognition (thinking, concentration and memory) and is crucial in the control of diabetes.  Insulin causes your body’s cells to take up glucose and store it as glycogen which can later be used for energy.  Without insulin the body uses fat as its source of energy and the glucose level rises, in turn, this system of maintaining glucose and insulin in the body gets out-of-whack (a technical term, I assure you), which is why those with type-1 diabetes have to inject themselves subcutaneously with insulin in order to keep the this system in check.

So, from the islets of langerhans* to the decor of a 1950s festival, insulin is not only pretty useful but is also just plain pretty.

*sounds like a pacific resort but is in fact where insulin is produced in the pancreas

A creation of the 'Festival Pattern Group' project at the 1951 Festival of Britain

Do your bit this diabetes week and learn more about what it is and check out the cool* video at the bottom of the link to find out insulin's role in the body.  Diabetes UK

*this is a lie, it is fairly standard and in no way demonstrates what "cool" implies

The Art in Science

Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth
Pablo Picasso

There are hundreds of types of art; classical greek art, indian art, aborigine art, abstract art, impressionism, expressionism, realism, dadaism and a whole string of other -isms. Traditionally, as a culture, we teach our young to make the choice: Shakespeare or DNA, Rembrandt or fractional distillation, a Ming Dynasty vase or Einstein's Theory of Relativity. So claiming any kind of Art in Science seems like an oxymoron, doesn't it? But this seems to me a false dichotomy. Though one is the quest for truth and explanation and one the expression of individuality, artists have often chosen to take inspiration from scientific principles and have also unknowingly created structures present in science and nature: Be it music's fascination with mathematical patterns and beat; Rudolf Laban's choreography drawn from principles of geometry as the limbs trace lines along fundamental geometric shapes, or the way the pre-frontal cortical areas of the brain are titillated as you appreciate the aesthetics and respond emotionally to a classic Van Gogh; art and science are inexorably intertwined. Deal with it.

Science and writing, particularly, have a lot in common; the need for fresh ideas and attention to detail, a constant questioning and redeveloping of ideas and creating a complete understanding through commitment to a chosen route. I am interested in poetry and creating an understanding or questioning through creative expression, to take a step back from the raw details and mould it into something tangible and expressive. There is so much beauty in nature, I hope that, however naively, I can recreate and represent the fundamental, exquisite details of nature and science by sharing with you other peoples sci-art collaborations.

Welcome to the beautiful world of Science.