I'm Kate. I do science. And when I'm not blowing stuff up, I'm trying to become a better photographer, musician, and cat. No really, Ruffles is teaching me to lay in front of the heater all day, beg for belly scratches whenever people are near, and tunnel under the area rug in the hallway. It's a good life.
This blog is a partial repository for my own photography, partial collection of inspiration photos (and a reflection of my love for photojournalism) and partial display of the chemistry nerd at my core. Check out more of my work on Flickr or follow me on Twitter!
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
David S. Goodsell is an Associate Professor of Molecular Biology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Both a researcher and an artist, Goodsell creates beautiful pictures of intracellular machinery alongside his scientific experimentation to help everyone visualise molecular and cell biology in a different - and stunningly beautiful - way.
When asked about his work, Goodsell responded, “Biological systems are a source of constant amazement for me. I use a combination of hand-drawn and computer graphics illustrations to reveal the invisible world of molecules inside cells. Computer graphics is a perfect way to display the atomic details of biological molecules. Using experimental coordinates determined by x-ray crystallography or other methods, we can see the position of every atom, and examine how they work together to catalyze a reaction or carry genetic information.”
His paintings are usually created through ink drawing and watercolour, taking inspiration from computer models and graphics of cells. The images shown here are six illustrations commissioned as a project for Biosite.
Top left: This illustration shows a portion of basement membrane, a structure that forms the support between tissues in the body. It is composed of a network of collagen (yellow green), laminin (blue-green cross-shaped molecules), and proteoglycans (deep green, with three arms).
Top right: A small portion of cytoplasm is shown, including three types of filaments that make up the cytoskeleton: a microtubule (the largest), an intermediate filament (the knobby one) and two actin filaments (the smallest ones). The large blue molecules are ribosomes, busy in their task of synthesising proteins. The large protein at bottom center is a proteosome.
Middle left: Blood serum is shown in the picture, with many Y-shaped antibodies, large circular low density lipoproteins, and lots of small albumin molecules. The large fibrous structure at lower left is von Willebrand factor and the long molecules in red are fibrinogen, both of which are involved in blood clotting. The blue object is poliovirus.
Middle right: Part of a muscle sarcomere is shown here, with actin filaments in blue and myosin filaments in red. The long yellow proteins are the huge protein titin.
Bottom left: This view shows DNA being replicated in the nucleus. DNA polymerase is shown at the center in purple, with a DNA strand entering from the bottom and exiting as two strands towards the top. The new strands are shown in white. Chromatin fibers are shown at either site of the replication fork.
Bottom right: A portion of a red blood cell is shown in this illustration, with the cell membrane at the top, and lots of hemoglobin (red) at the bottom.
All images courtesy of David. S. Goodsell, whose homepage can be found here.
My protein chemistry professor introduced this to our class, and I loved it. His art is actually a very accurate representation of our current knowledge of these biological systems. I could look at these forever and admire the diversity and intricacy of these systems while having a serious admiration for the artistry too.
Serious nerd love here. :D
(Source: amolecularmatter)
Ferrous sulfate and cobalt chloride crystals with droplets of immersion oil.
Images by Steven Nagar.
Photographs by Martin Klimas
“For this series, Klimas spent six months and about 1,000 shots to produce the final images from his studio in Düsseldorf, Germany. The resulting images are Klimas’s attempt to answer the question ‘What does music look like?’”
The view from here
Colin Twomey and the Couzin Lab | Princeton University | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
This image is a visualization of 150 fish (Notemigonus crysoleucas) free-swimming in a shallow 2.1 x 1.2 meter tank. It shows the recorded position of the body and eyes of each fish in the school for one frame of video.
Superimposed is a two-dimensional approximation of the field-of-view for each eye of each fish, shown as white rays cast outwards from the eye. Rays are terminated when they collide with another individual or the boundary of the arena.
This rough estimate of what each fish can see from its vantage point in the school is helpful for determining what information an individual has about its neighbors and environment at a given moment. This in turn allows us to study how information about a stimulus (for example, a predator or food in the environment) may propagate through a group — changing the configuration of the group itself.
(source)
Balls & bubbles without gravity
Stephanie Wissel | Princeton University | PPPL
The dynamics of the bubbles and splashes produced by a ball impacting water change dramatically when the force due to gravity is removed, leaving the only remaining driving forces: surface tension and inertia. A still shot from an experiment designed to investigate such a phenomenon shows that the bubble formed underneath the water’s surface expands rapidly and forms a jet, while the water above the surface gently floats away. Here the ball bounces off the bottom of the tank through the ever growing bubble.
(source)
Patterning the embryo
Yoosik Kim and Stanislav Shvartsman | Princeton University | Chemical and Biological Engineering
These images are vertical cross-sectional images of embryos of Drosophila melanogaster — otherwise known as the common fruit fly. The images, obtained using a confocal microscope, are of embryos stained with antibodies in order to visualize molecules that subdivide the embryo into three tissue types: muscle, nervous system, and skin.
Obtaining such images is an engineering challenge since it requires upright positioning of a tiny embryo, which is ellipsoid in shape and only a half-millimeter long.
In collaboration with Lu lab at Georgia Tech, we have developed a microfluidic device to trap and orient a large number of embryos vertically. This technique can be used to quantify spatial profiles of signaling molecules, which can be used to develop mathematical models and eventually to understand the processes that drive the development of the embryo.
(source)
National Science Museum by Pengin! on Flickr.
A drop of sugar syrup falls into a pool of methylated spirits, producing a Worthington jet and several ejected droplets. Although surface tension holds the jet in a smooth shape, the refractive index of the spirits reveals the turbulent mixing within the jet. (Photo credit: Rebecca Ing)
Celeste Nelson | Princeton University | Dept. of Chemical and Biological Engineering
This is a detail of an immunofluorescence image of the surface of the lung of a bearded dragon embryo (Pogona vitticeps). Nuclei are stained red and the actin cytoskeleton is stained green. The image reveals a nested hierarchy of tubes designed for effective gas exchange, which develops in the embryo even before the animal breathes air.
Stinky frogs are a treasure trove of antibiotic substances
Some of the nastiest smelling creatures on Earth have skin that produces the greatest known variety of anti-bacterial substances that hold promise for becoming new weapons in the battle against antibiotic-resistant infections, scientists are reporting. Their research on amphibians so smelly (like rotten fish, for instance) that scientists term them “odorous frogs” appears in ACS’ Journal of Proteome Research.
Yun Zhang, Wen-Hui Lee and Xinwang Yang explain that scientists long have recognized frogs’ skin as a rich potential source of new antibiotics. Frogs live in warm, wet places where bacteria thrive and have adapted skin that secretes chemicals, known as peptides, to protect themselves from infections. Zhang’s group wanted to identify the specific antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), and the most potent to give scientists clues for developing new antibiotics.
They identified more than 700 of these substances from nine species of odorous frogs and concluded that the AMPs account for almost one-third of all AMPs found in the world, the greatest known diversity of these germ-killing chemicals. Interestingly, some of the AMPs have a dual action, killing bacteria directly and also activating the immune system to assist in the battle.
(Picture: Species of Chinese odorous frogs and their gathering locations.)
This photograph was taken in the middle of a rough snowstorm in a field near McMurdo Station, Antarctica. With low visibility and strong winds whipping words out of earshot, a colored flag is the only guide on the Antarctic ice. Red and green indicates “okay to pass”; black indicates a crevasse. Out here, life depends on simple, critical designs.
Intelligence Design
Lisa Boulanger (fac) | Dept. of Molecular Biology and Princeton Neuroscience Institute
This is a pyramidal neuron from the hippocampus, a part of the brain where some kinds of memories are formed. This neuron has been labeled with fluorescent antibodies so that we can visualize microtubules (shown in green), which form a structural network inside the neuron, and insulin receptors (shown in red), which are cell surface proteins that instruct neurons to make connections with other neurons. These connections, called synapses, become stronger or weaker as memories are constructed.
(source)
Fireworks
Yunlai Zha (GS) | Princeton University | Dept. of Electrical Engineering
Arsenic sulphide dissolved in a solution displays colorful random patterns after being spin-coated and baked on a chrome-evaporated glass slide.
(source)
Paint-on solar cells developed (ScienceDaily, Dec. 21, 2011)
Imagine if the next coat of paint you put on the outside of your home generates electricity from light — electricity that can be used to power the appliances and equipment on the inside.
A team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame has made a major advance toward this vision by creating an inexpensive “solar paint” that uses semiconducting nanoparticles to produce energy.
The team’s search for the new material, described in the journalACS Nano, centered on nano-sized particles of titanium dioxide, which were coated with either cadmium sulfide or cadmium selenide. The particles were then suspended in a water-alcohol mixture to create a paste.
When the paste was brushed onto a transparent conducting material and exposed to light, it created electricity.
Chaos and geomagnetic reversals
Dr. Christophe Gissinger | Dept. of Astrophysical Sciences | Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory:
The magnetic field of the Earth has reversed its polarity several hundred times during the past 160 million years. Polarity reversals are known to be strongly irregular and chaotic, and the reversal durations are relatively short (typically a few thousand years) compared with the constant polarity intervals between reversals.
This image shows a simple deterministic model illustrating the geomagnetic reversals. The model is based on the non-linear interaction between two magnetic modes (dipole and quadrupole) and one velocity component of the Earth’s core flow, and the image shows typical trajectories in the 3D phase space. The corresponding strange attractor reproduces irregular reversals between two symmetrical states.
While the behavior in a given polarity is strongly chaotic and seems random, the path followed by trajectories during a reversal is always the same: during a reversal, the magnetic field changes shape (from dipolar to quadrupolar structure), rather than simply vanishing.
(source)
