Thursday, April 29, 2010

The Beauty of a Mosquito Wing

In scientia veritas, in arte honestas.
~ In science truth, in art honour.

Mixing it up with the art of science today.

National Geographic offers science visualization awards annually. Kai-hung Fung of Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital in Hong Kong captured the below image. It looks like a dragon to me, but it's a nose...

This next image won First Place for Illustration:

"Kuen's Surface"
A computer-generated picture by Richard Palais and Luc Benard of the University of California, Irvine.

The Institute for the Promotion of the Less than One Millimetre presents the Micropolitan Museum...

Here's a butterfly wing, which they say is "covered with tiny scales. These scales possess a microscopic texture that can produce iridescent colours by reflective interference."

I can't believe how beautiful a mosquito wing is:

From Princeton's Art of Science Gallery

Cement Flower
by Hope Connolly
She says: "For my senior thesis in George Scherer's lab, I was investigating the best way to dry cement without doing any damage to the cement's microstructure. I tried drying cement samples in both a desiccator and a 105 degree Celsius oven. The oven-dried samples had hundreds, even thousands, of these cement "flowers," with noticeable "petals" and "buds." The width of this flower is approximately four microns."

Uncovering Lost Painting of Vincent van Gogh
By Andrei Brasoveanu '09 (undergraduate) and Ingrid Daubechies (faculty)
Department of Mathematics, Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics

"Around 1885, Vincent van Gogh painted the portrait of a woman and then later reused this canvas, painting over her portrait to create "Pasture in Bloom," a painting found today in the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo, The Netherlands.

Following X-ray and chemical analysis performed at a laboratory in Delft, The Netherlands, a fragment of the original portrait was revealed. Our work was to first reconstruct digitally the gray-scale version of this portrait, by registering it to the pasture painting, by identifying and removing grass and flower traces, and by filling in the regions lacking content. Afterward, we needed to bring the portrait to life by coloring it using local pigment information and color distributions from similar portraits produced in the same period by the artist."

Links:

~ The Brain Balloon
~ Arborsmith, where trees are shaped into living sculpture
~ Making models of the nervous system, on the wonderful Neuroscience for Kids site. (I like the "Thinking Cap")
~ Songs from the Science Songwriters' Association
~ Two DNA sculptures: one at UC Davis and one at UC Berkeley. (Scroll down to see a cool shot at the bottom)
~ Northwestern University's Nano Art Gallery
~ DNA sculpture made from an old piano.
~ I should do a week just on the periodic table of the elements. There's something very visually appealing about them. I love Theodore Gray's posters.

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