Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg and her DNA-derived self-portrait. Photo by Dan Phiffer.

It started with hair. Donning a pair of rubber gloves, Heather Dewey-Hagborg collected hairs from a public bathroom at Penn Station and placed them in plastic baggies for safe keeping. Then, her search expanded to include other types of forensic evidence. As the artist traverses her usual routes through New York City from her home in Brooklyn, down sidewalks onto city buses and subway cars—even into art museums—she gathers fingernails, cigarette butts and wads of discarded chewing gum.

At 12:15 pm on January 6, 2013, Dewey-Hagborg collected a cigarette butt (above, right) on Myrtle Avenue (above, left) in Brooklyn, NY. Testing the sample’s DNA revealed the smoker to be a male of Eastern European descent with brown eyes. Photos courtesy of Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

Do you get strange looks? I ask, in a recent phone conversation. “Sometimes,” says Dewey-Hagborg. “But New Yorkers are pretty used to people doing weird stuff.”

Dewey-Hagborg’s odd habit has a larger purpose. The 30-year-old PhD student, studying electronic arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, extracts DNA from each piece of evidence she collects, focusing on specific genomic regions from her samples. She then sequences these regions and enters this data into a computer program, which churns out a model of the face of the person who left the hair, fingernail, cigarette or gum behind.

It gets creepier.

From those facial models, she then produces actual sculptures using a 3D printer. When she shows the series, called “Stranger Visions,” she hangs the life-sized portraits, like life masks, on gallery walls. Oftentimes, beside a portrait, is a Victorian-style wooden box with various compartments holding the original sample, data about it and a photograph of where it was found.

The portrait Dewey-Hagborg created based on the DNA sample from the cigarette butt collected on Myrtle Avenue. Image courtesy of Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

Rest assured, the artist has some limits when it comes to what she will pick up from the streets. Though they could be helpful to her process, Dewey-Hagborg refuses to swipe saliva samples and used condoms. She tells me she has had the most success with cigarette butts. “They [smokers] really get their gels into that filter of the cigarette butt,” she says. “There just tends to be more stuff there to actually pull the DNA from.”

Also on January 6, 2013, but at 12:20pm, Dewey-Hagborg collected this cigarette butt (above, right) on the corner of Myrtle Avenue and Himrod Street (above, left) in Brooklyn. Testing revealed the smoker to be a female of European descent with brown eyes. Photos courtesy of Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

Dewey-Hagborg takes me step-by-step through her creative process. Once she collects a sample, she brings it to one of two labs—Genspace, a do-it-yourself biology lab in Brooklyn, or one on campus at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. (She splits her time between Brooklyn and upstate New York.) Early on in the project, the artist took a crash course in molecular biology at Genspace, a do-it-yourself biology lab in Brooklyn, where she learned about DNA extraction and a technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR). She uses standard DNA extraction kits that she orders online to analyze the DNA in her samples.

If the sample is a wad of chewing gum, for example, she cuts a little piece off of it, then cuts that little piece into even smaller pieces. She puts the tiny pieces into a tube with chemicals, incubates it, puts it in a centrifuge and repeats, multiple times, until the chemicals successfully extract purified DNA. After that, Dewey-Hagborg runs a polymerase chain reaction on the DNA, amplifying specific regions of the genome that she’s targeted. She sends the mitochondrial amplified DNA (from both mitochondria and the cells’ nuclei) to a lab to get sequenced, and the lab returns about 400 base pair sequences of guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine (G, A, T and C).

The artist produced this facial reconstruction from her DNA analysis of the cigarette butt she collected at Myrtle Avenue and Himrod Street. Image courtesy of Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

Dewey-Hagborg then compares the sequences returned with those found in human genome databases. Based on this comparison, she gathers information about the person’s ancestry, gender, eye color, propensity to be overweight and other traits related to facial morphology, such as the space between one’s eyes. “I have a list of about 40 or 50 different traits that I have either successfully analyzed or I am in the process of working on right now,” she says.

Dewey-Hagborg then enters these parameters into a computer program to create a 3D model of the person’s face.” Ancestry gives you most of the generic picture of what someone is going to tend to look like. Then, the other traits point towards modifications on that kind of generic portrait,” she explains. The artist ultimately sends a file of the 3D model to a 3D printer on the campus of her alma mater, New York University, so that it can be transformed into sculpture.

Five minutes later, at 12:25pm on January 6, 2013, Dewey-Hagborg obtained this piece of green chewing gum (above, right) on the corner of Wilson Avenue and Stanhope Street in Brooklyn. Testing revealed the chewer to be a male of Native American and South American descent with brown eyes. Photos courtesy of Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

There is, of course, no way of knowing how accurate Dewey-Hagborg’s sculptures are—since the samples are from anonymous individuals, a direct comparison cannot be made. Certainly, there are limitations to what is known about how genes are linked to specific facial features.”We are really just starting to learn about that information,” says Dewey-Hagborg. The artist has no way, for instance, to tell the age of a person based on their DNA. “For right now, the process creates basically a 25-year-old version of the person,” she says.

That said, the “Stranger Visions” project is a startling reminder of advances in both technology and genetics. “It came from this place of noticing that we are leaving genetic material everywhere,” says Dewey-Hagbog. “That, combined with the increasing accessibility to molecular biology and these techniques means that this kind of science fiction future is here now. It is available to us today. The question really is what are we going to do with that?”

The artist created this portrait based on the DNA in the chewed gum. Image courtesy of Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

Hal Brown, of Delaware’s medical examiner’s office, contacted the artist recently about a cold case. For the past 20 years, he has had the remains of an unidentified woman, and he wondered if the artist might be able to make a portrait of her—another clue that could lead investigators to an answer. Dewey-Hagborg is currently working on a sculpture from a DNA sample Brown provided.

“I have always had a love for detective stories, but never was part of one before. It has been an interesting turn for the art to take,” she says. “It is hard to say just yet where else it will take me.”

Dewey-Hagborg’s work will be on display at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on May 12. She is taking part in a policy discussion at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. on June 3 and will be giving a talk, with a pop-up exhibit, at Genspace in Brooklyn on June 13. The QF Gallery in East Hampton, Long Island, will be hosting an exhibit from June 29-July 13, as will the New York Public Library from January 7 to April 2, 2014.

Editor’s Note: After getting great feedback from our readers, we clarified how the artist analyzes the DNA from the samples she collects.

“This project was inspired by the universe of unseen organisms that inhabit our bodies,” author William Myers says of Julia Lohmann’s mural Co-Existence exhibited in 2009 in London. Photo courtesy of The Wellcome Trust.

When Julia Lohmann set out to create an artwork for the street-level windows of the London headquarters of the Wellcome Trust, the health research foundation, she chose a classic subject: the female body. But where Lohmann broke from tradition was her medium. The German designer created her large-scale portrait of two reclining nudes using 9,000 petri dishes, each containing an image of live bacteria.

Suzanne Lee, a British fashion designer, is attempting to grow clothes. She cultivates bacteria in vats of sugary green tea and then harvests the cellulose that forms on the mixture’s surface. The durable film serves as a pleatherlike fabric.

Thousands of petri dishes contain images of colored gels and actual colonies of microbes from a female body that were grown in a laboratory. Photo courtesy of Julia Lohmann Studio.

The Italian artist Giuliano Mauri planted 80 hornbeam trees amid columns of bundled branches in Arte Sella, a sculpture garden in northern Italy. The trees inch up the columns to form Cattedrale Vegetale, a Gothic cathedral complete with naves.

All these works are prominent examples of a nascent aesthetic movement called biodesign, which integrates living things, including bacteria, plants and animals, into installations, products and artworks. “Designers and architects, more and more, want to design objects and buildings that grow by themselves,” says Paola Antonelli, design curator at the Museum of Modern Art.

Photo courtesy of Julia Lohmann Studio.

Biodesign takes advantage of the “tremendous power and potential utility of organisms and their natural interaction with ecosystems around them,” says William Myers, a New York City design historian and author of the new book Bio Design: Nature + Science + Creativity. “It can be a means of communication and discovery, a way to provoke debate and explore the potential opportunities and dangers of manipulating life for human purposes.”

Some ventures are very down-to-earth. Microbiologist Henk Jonkers at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands is developing self-repairing “bio-concrete”; he adds limestone-producing bacteria to cement and, over time, they fill in cracks. If adopted widely, the material could benefit the environment, since concrete production is a major source of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Giuliano Mauri’s Cattedrale Vegetale is organic architecture in more ways than one. Eighty columns, fashioned from branches, outline a Gothic cathedral. Photo courtesy of Aldo Fedele / Arte Sella.

Other proposals read more like science fiction. Alberto Estévez, an architect based in Barcelona, wants to replace streetlights with glowing trees created by inserting a bioluminescent jellyfish gene into the plants’ DNA.

The biodesign movement builds on ideas in Janine Benyus’ trailblazing 1997 book Biomimicry, which urges designers to look to nature for inspiration. But instead of copying living things biodesigners make use of them.

Hornbeam trees planted within the columns will eventually form the roof, nearly 70 feet high. Then, in time, the columns will disintegrate, becoming fertilizer that will nourish the living structure. Photo courtesy of Aldo Fedele / Arte Sella.

The effort brings artists and scientists together. “These novel collaborations are often joyous contaminations in which scientists feel, even just for a moment, liberated from the rigor of peer review and free to attempt intuitive leaps,” Antonelli writes in a foreword to Bio Design.

Julia Lohmann teamed up with Michael Wilson, a microbiologist at University College London Eastman Dental Institute. Wilson, who studies the bacteria that inhabit people, grew common bacteria from the female body and photographed the colonies under a microscope. Lohmann affixed these photographs to actual petri dishes and positioned each type of bacteria where it would occur on or in a woman’s body—pictures of the scalp microbe Propionibacteria, for instance, cover the head.

“The petri dish is a magnifying glass into this other world,” says Lohmann, who was inspired by the mind-bending fact that only one in ten cells in the human body is actually human. The rest are microbes. “There is so much advertising out there that tells you that all bacteria are bad, and it is simply not true. We couldn’t live without bacteria, and they couldn’t live without us,” says Lohmann. She considers her mural Co-existence to be part of the counter propaganda.

E. coli, by Luke Jerram.

Few non-scientists would be able to distinguish the E. coli virus bacteria from the HIV virus under a microscope. Artist Luke Jerram, however, can describe in intricate detail the shapes of a slew of deadly viruses pathogens. He is intrigued by them, as a subject matter, because of their inherent irony. That is, something as virulent as SARS can actually, in its physical form, be quite delicate.

Clearly adept at scientific work—as an undergraduate, the Brit was offered a spot on a university engineering program—Jerram chose to pursue art instead. “Scientists and artists start by asking similar questions about the natural world,” he told SEED magazine in a 2009 interview. “They just end up with completely different answers.”

HIV (series 2), by Luke Jerram.

To create a body of work he calls “Glass Microbiology,” Jerram has enlisted the help of virologist Andrew Davidson from the University of Bristol and the expertise of professional glassblowers Kim George, Brian George and Norman Veitch. Together, the cross-disciplinary team brings hazardous pathogens, such as the H1N1 virus or HIV, to light in translucent glass forms.

The artist  insists that his sculptures be colorless, in contrast to the images scientists sometimes disseminate that are enhanced with bright hues. “Viruses have no color as they are smaller than the wavelength of light,” says Jerram, in an email. “So the artworks are created as alternative representations of viruses to the artificially colored imagery we receive through the media.” Jerram and Davidson create sketches, which they then take to the glassblowers, to see whether the intricate structures of the diseases can be replicated in glass, at approximately one million times their original size.

Swine Flu, by Luke Jerram.

These glass sculptures require extreme attention to detail. “I consult virologists at the University of Bristol about the details of each artwork,” says Jerram. “Often I’m asking a question about how a particular part of the virion looks, and they don’t know the answer. We have to piece together our understanding by comparing grainy electron microscope images with abstract chemical models and existing diagrams.”

Yet, to physically create these structures in glass, the design may have to be tweaked. Some viruses, in their true form, would simply be too delicate and wouldn’t hold up. Jerram’s representation of the H1N1 (or Swine Flu) virus, for instance, looks far spikier than it might in reality. This was done, not to add to the ferocity of the virus’ image, but to prevent the artwork from crumbling or breaking.

Malaria, by Luke Jerram.

Jerram has to decide what to do when new research suggests different forms for the structures of viruses. “Over time, scientific understanding of the virus improves and so I have to amend my models accordingly,” explains the artist. For example, “I’m currently in dialogue with a scientist at the University of Florida about the structure of the smallpox virus. He has published papers that show a very different understanding of the internal structure. I now need to consider whether to create a new model or wait until his model has become more widely accepted by the scientific community.” Jerram’s art is often used in scientific journals as an alternative to colorful simulations, so being as up-to-date as possible is definitely in his best interest.

Enterovirus 71, involved in hand, foot and mouth disease, by Luke Jerram.

Jerram’s marvelous glass sculptures bring awareness to some of the worst killers of our age. “The pieces are made for people to contemplate the global impact of each disease,” he says. “I’m interested in sharing the tension that has arisen between the artworks’ beauty and what they represent.”

Jerram’s microbial sculptures are on display in “Playing with Fire: 50 Years of Contemporary Glass,” an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Art and Design through April 7, 2013, and “Pulse: Art and Medicine,” opening at Strathmore Fine Art in Bethesda, Maryland, on February 16. “Pulse” runs through April 13, 2013.

Editor’s Note, February 15, 2013: Earlier versions of this post incorrectly stated or implied that E. coli and malaria are viruses. They are not–E. coli is a bacteria and malaria is a malaise caused by microorganisms. Errors in the first paragraph were fixed and the title of the post was changed.

First Place and People’s Choice, Photography: Biomineral Single Crystals. Credit: Pupa U. P. A. Gilbert and Christopher E. Killian; University of Wisconsin, Madison.

When Pupa U. P. A. Gilbert, a biophysicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her colleague Christopher E. Killian saw the scanning electron micrograph that they took of a sea urchin’s tooth, they were dumbstruck, says the journal Science. “I had never seen anything that beautiful,” Gilbert told the publication.

The individual crystals of calcite that form an urchin’s tooth are pointy, interlocking pieces; as the outermost crystals decay, others come to the surface, keeping the tooth sharp. In Photoshop, Gilbert added blues, greens and purples to the black-and-white image to differentiate the crystals. The resulting image calls to mind an eerie landscape in a Tim Burton movie.

Judges of the 2012 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge, a competition sponsored by Science and the National Science Foundation, as well as the public who voted online, were equally ecstatic about the SEM image. Enough so, in fact, that they selected the micrograph as the first place and people’s choice winner for the contest’s photography division.

The 10th annual Visualization Challenge received 215 entries across five categories—photography, illustration, posters and graphics, games and apps, and video. The submissions are judged based on visual impact, effective communication and originality.

And…drum roll, please. Here are some of the the recently announced winners:

Honorable Mention, Photography: Self Defense. Credit: Kai-hung Fung, Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital in Hong Kong.

Kai-hung Fung, a radiologist at Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital in Hong Kong, captured this image of a clam shell (on the left) and a spiral-shaped sea snail shell (on the right) using a CT scanner. The image won honorable mention in the photography category. The multi-colored lines represent the contours in the shells. Fung told Science that he took into account “two sides of a coin” when making the image. “One side is factual information, wile the other side is artistic,” he told the journal.

Honorable Mention, Photography: X-ray micro-radiography and microscopy of seeds. Credit: Viktor Sykora, Charles University; Jan Zemlicka, Frantisek Krejci, and Jan Jakubek, Czech Technical University.

Viktor Sykora, a biologist at Charles University in Prague, and researchers at the Czech Technical University submitted three miniscule (we’re talking three millimeters in diameter or less) seeds to high-resolution, high-contrast x-ray imaging (on the left) and microscopy (on the right). The above image also won honorable mention in the photography category.

First Place, Illustration: Connectivity of a Cognitive Computer Based on the Macaque Brain. Credit: Emmett McQuinn, Theodore M. Wong, Pallab Datta, Myron D. Flickner, Raghavendra Singh, Steven K. Esser, Rathinakumar Appuswamy, William P. Risk, and Dharmendra S. Modha.

Earning him first prize in the illustration category, Emmett McQuinn, a hardware engineer at IBM, created this “wiring diagram” for a new kind of computer chip, based on the neural pathways in a macaque‘s brain.

Honorable Mention and People’s Choice, Illustration: Cerebral Infiltration. Credit: Maxime Chamberland, David Fortin, and Maxime Descoteaux, Sherbrooke Connectivity Imaging Lab.

Maxime Chamberland, a computer science graduate student at the Sherbrooke Connectivity Imaging Lab in Canada, used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to capture this ominous image of a brain tumor. (The tumor is the solid red mass in the left side of the brain.) Science calls the image a “road map for neurosurgeons,” in that the red fibers are hot-button fibers that, if severed, could negatively impact the patient’s everyday functions, while blue fibers are nonthreatening. The image won honorable mention and was the people’s choice winner in the contest’s illustration category.

A team of researchers (Guillermo Marin, Fernando M. Cucchietti, Mariano Vázquez, Carlos Tripiana, Guillaume Houzeaux, Ruth Arís, Pierre Lafortune and Jazmin Aguado-Sierra) at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center produced this first-place and people’s-choice winning video, “Alya Red: A Computational Heart.” The film shows Alya Red, a realistic animation of a beating human heart that the scientists designed using MRI data.

“I was literally blown away,” Michael Reddy, a judge in the contest, told Science. “After the first time I watched the video, I thought, ‘I’ve just changed the way I thought about a heart.’”

Be sure to check out the other videos below, which received honorable mention in the contest:

Fertilization, by Thomas Brown, Stephen Boyd, Ron Collins, Mary Beth Clough, Kelvin Li, Erin Frederikson, Eric Small, Walid Aziz, Hoc Kho, Daniel Brown and Nobles Green Nucleus Medical Media

Observing the Coral Symbiome Using Laser Scanning Confocal Microscopy, by Christine E. Farrar, Zac H. Forsman, Ruth D. Gates, Jo-Ann C. Leong, and Robert J. Toonen, Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, University of Hawaii, Manoa

Revealing Invisible Changes in the World, by Michael Rubinstein, Neal Wadhwa, Frédo Durand, William T. Freeman, Hao-Yu Wu, John Guttag, MIT; and Eugene Shih, Quanta Research Cambridge

For winners in the posters and graphics and games and apps categories, see the National Science Foundation’s special report on the International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge.

Doug E. Fresh (shown above, performing at the Legends of Hip Hop Tour in February 2011) was a beatboxing pioneer in the 1980s. © Briana E. Heard/Corbis

It is always interesting to watch a beatboxer perform. The artist, in the thrust of performing, can reach a compulsive fit as he musters up the rhythmic sounds of percussion instruments a cappella-style.

But what does beatboxing looking like from the inside?

That is the question that University of Southern California researchers Michael Proctor, Shrikanth Narayanan and Krishna Nayak asked in a study (PDF), slated to be published in the February issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. For the first time, they used real-time Magnetic Resonance Imaging to examine the so-called “paralinguistic mechanisms” that happen in a beatboxer’s vocal tract.

A beatboxer demonstrated three different snare drum effects while lying on an MRI scanner. Screengrab from University of Southern California.

For the purposes of the experiment, a 27-year-old male hip hop artist from Los Angeles demonstrated his full repertoire of beatboxing effects—sounds imitating kick drums, rim shots, hi-hats and cymbals—while lying on his back in an MRI scanner. The researchers made a total of 40 recordings, each from 20 to 40 seconds in duration and capturing single sounds, free-style sequences of sounds, rapped or sung lyrics and spoken word. They paired the audio with video stringing together the MRI scans to analyze the airflow and the movements, from the upper trachea to the man’s lips, that happened with each utterance.

“We were astonished by the complex elegance of the vocal movements and the sounds being created in beatboxing, which in itself is an amazing artistic display,” Narayanan told Inside Science News Service, the first to report on the study. “This incredible vocal instrument and its many capabilities continue to amaze us, from the intricate choreography of the ‘dance of the tongue’ to the complex aerodynamics that work together to create a rich tapestry of sounds that encode not only meaning but also a wide range of emotions.”

It was a humbling experience, added Narayanan, to realize how much we have yet to learn about speech anatomy and the physical capabilities of humans when it comes to vocalization.

One of the larger goals of the study was to determine the extent to which beatbox artists use sounds already found in human languages. The researchers used the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to describe the sound effects produced by their subject and then compared those effects to a comprehensive library of sounds, encompassing all human languages.

“We were very surprised to discover how closely the vocal percussion sounds resembled sounds attested in languages unknown to the beatboxer,” Michael Proctor told Wired. The hip hop artist who participated in the study spoke American English and Panamanian Spanish, and yet he unknowingly produced sounds common to other languages. The study states:

…he was able to produce a wide range of non-native consonantal sound effects, including clicks and ejectives. The effects /ŋ||/–/ŋ!/–/ŋ|/ used to emulate the sounds of specific types of snare drums and rim shots appear to be very similar to consonants attested in many African languages, including Xhosa (Bantu language family, spoken in Eastern Cape, South Africa), Khoekhoe (Khoe, Botswana) and !Xóõ (Tuu, Namibia). The ejectives /p’/ and /pf’/ used to emulate kick and snare drums shares the same major phonetic properties as the glottalic egressives used in languages as diverse as Nuxáalk (Salishan, British Columbia), Chechen (Caucasian, Chechnya), and Hausa (Chadic, Nigeria).

Going forward, the researchers would like to study a larger sample of beatboxers. They’d also like to get to the bottom of something that has been boggling audiences for decades: How do some beatboxers simultaneously layer certain instrumental sounds with hums and spoken words?

Courtesy of the Water Tank Project.

This New Year’s Eve, in addition to the typical resolutions to exercise more or spend more time with family, consider resolving to take better advantage of the cultural offerings of America’s cities and towns. Whether you seek to attend concerts, listen to lectures by authors and visiting scholars or become regulars at area museums, a few exhibitions slated for 2013 on the intersection of art and science will be must-sees in the New Year.

The Water Tank Project

Courtesy of the Water Tank Project.

The skyline of New York City will be transformed next summer when 300 water tanks in the five boroughs become public works of art, calling attention to water conservation. Artists, including Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha, Catherine Opie, Lawrence Weiner, and even Jay-Z, have agreed to participate in the project. Their original designs will be printed on vinyl, which will be wrapped around the mostly wood tanks, which typically measure 12 feet high and 13 feet in diameter, perched on top of buildings. The art will be a welcome addition to the city’s rooftops, while also providing more awareness of the global water crisis.

Teaching the Body: Artistic Anatomy in the American Academy, From Copley, Eakins, and Rimmer to Contemporary Artists

Female torso, by Lisa Nilsson. Photo by John Polak.

Naomi Slipp, a PhD candidate in art history at Boston University, is organizing an ambitious exhibition of more than 80 sketches, models, prints, books, paintings and other works that tell a full story of artistic renderings of human anatomy in America. On display at the Boston University Art Gallery at the Stone Gallery, from January 31 to March 31, the exhibition spans two and half centuries, from the very first anatomy text by painter John Singleton Copley, dating to 1756, to works by contemporary artists, such as Lisa Nilsson, who creates paper sculptures depicting cross sections of the human body. ”This exhibition examines both what that study of artistic anatomy meant for these artists and for the way we, today, think about our own bodies and how they work,” said Slipp, in her successful bid to raise funds for the project on Kickstarter. ”In looking at artworks created by artists and doctors, I hope to unite this diverse audience, bringing together people who are interested in art and those who are interested in medicine for a rich, shared conversation about what it means to occupy, treat and picture our own bodies.”

Portraits of Planet Ocean: The Photography of Brian Skerry

Harp seal, by Brian Skerry.

“I believe my most important role remains as artistic interpreter of all that I see. I need to understand the science, but I want to capture the poetry,” writes Brian Skerry, in his book, Ocean Soul. A National Geographic wildlife photographer with decades of experience, Skerry has captured enchanting portraits of harp seals, Atlantic bluefin tuna, hammerhead sharks, beluga whales, manatees and other creatures of the deep. His line of work requires loads of equipment—underwater housings for his cameras, strobes, lenses, wetsuits, drysuits, fins—to get the perfect shot. “While no single image can capture everything, in my own work I am most pleased when I make pictures that reveal something special about a specific animal or ecosystem, pictures that give viewers a sense of the mysterious or in effect bring them into the sea with me,” says Skerry, in a dispatch on Ocean Portal. Earlier this fall, Ocean Portal asked the public to vote for a favorite among 11 of Skerry’s photographs. The viewers’ choice and other images by the underwater photographer will be on display at D.C.’s National Museum of Natural History beginning April 5.

American Vesuvius: The Aftermath of Mount St. Helens by Frank Gohlke and Emmet Gowin

Inside Mount St. Helens Crater, Base of Lava Dome on the Left (detail), by Frank Gohlke, 1983. Courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art.

On May 18, 1980, stirred by a 5.1 magnitude earthquake, Mount St. Helens in Washington state’s Cascade Range erupted, forever changing the landscape surrounding it. Separate from one another, American photographers Emmet Gowin and Frank Gohlke documented the devastation (and in Gohlke’s case, the gradual rebirth) of the area. The Cleveland Museum of Art is bringing the photographers’ series together, side by side, in an exhibit, on display from January 13 to May 12.

Interestingly, the museum will also play host to “The Last Days of Pompeii: Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection,” looking at art by masters ranging from the 18th and 19th century artists Piranesi and Ingres to more modern contributions from Duchamp, Rothko and Warhol, all inspired by the deadly eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. The exhibit will be on display from February 24 to May 19.

Gogo: Nature Transformed

Maine seaweed cuff, 2008. Designed by Gogo Ferguson and Hannah Sayre-Thomas. Photo by Peter Harholdt.

Gogo Ferguson and her daughter, Hannah Sayre-Thomas, live on Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia. Morning, noon and night, the pair walks the beach, collecting interesting skeletons, seaweed and seashells brought in by the tide. “Nature has perfected her designs over millions of years,” writes Ferguson, on her Web site. And so, the artist incorporates these organic designs into jewelry, sculptures and housewares. Her first museum exhibition, at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta from January 19 to July 7, features more than 60 works, including a six-foot by eight-foot wall sculpture modeled after seaweed from New England and an ottoman fashioned after a sea urchin.

View of the solar corona and magnetic loops during an eclipse of the Sun by the Earth. Solar Dynamics Observatory, April 2, 2011. Credit: NASA GSFC/Michael Benson/Kinetikon Pictures.

Michael Benson

Photographer Michael Benson takes raw images collected on NASA and European Space Agency missions and enhances them digitally. The results are brilliant, colorful views of dust storms on Mars and Saturn’s rings, among other sights. The American Association for the Advancement of Science Art Gallery in Washington, D.C. will be exhibiting images from Planetfall, Benson’s latest book, as well as his other titles, including Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle (2009) and Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes (2003), from mid-February through the end of April.

Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence

(Left) Firefly signals captured in slow-shutter speed photos. © Tsuneaki Hiramatsu. (Right) A re-creation of New Zealand’s Waitomo cave system, with sticky “fishing lines” dropped from the ceiling by glowworms. © AMNH\D. Finnin.

If you missed it at New York’s American Museum of Natural History this past year, there is still time to see “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” at its next stop, Chicago’s Field Museum, from March 7 to September 8. The exhibition highlights the diversity of animals, from fireflies and glowworms to jellyfish and fluorescent corals found upwards of a half-mile deep in the ocean, that use bioluminescence, and the variety of different reasons for which they do. A firefly, for instance, glows to catch the attention of a mate. An anglerfish, meanwhile, attracts prey with a bioluminescent lure dangling in front of its mouth; a vampire squid releases a cloud of bioluminescence to befuddle its predators. The show also explains the chemical reaction that causes the animals to glow. “The one real weakness,” wrote the New York Times, at the opening of the exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, “is that with only a few exceptions—like the tanks of blinking ‘splitfin flashlight fish’ found in deep reefs of the South Pacific—this is not an exhibition of specimens but of simulations.”

Female Torso, by Lisa Nilsson. Photo by John Polak.

Lisa Nilsson was on an antiquing trip three or four years ago when a gilt crucifix caught her eye. The cross was crafted using a Renaissance-era technique called quilling, where thin paper is rolled to form different shapes and patterns.

“I thought it was really beautiful, so I made a couple of small, abstract gilt pieces,” says Nilsson, an artist based in North Adams, Massachusetts. She incorporated these first forays in quilling into her mixed media assemblages.

Almost serendipitously, as Nilsson was teaching herself to mold and shape the strips of Japanese mulberry paper, a friend sent her a century-old, hand-colored photograph of a cross section of a human torso from a French medical book. “I have always been interested in scientific and biological imagery,” says the artist. “This image was really inspiring.”

Abdomen, by Lisa Nilsson. Photo by John Polak.

In the cross section, Nilsson saw many of the shapes that she had already been coiling and building. The quilling technique, she thought, with its “squeezing shapes into a cavity,” certainly lent itself to her subject matter. She could make tiny tubes and squish them together to fill the many different spaces in the body—lungs, vertebrae, pelvic bones and muscles.

Her first anatomical paper sculpture, Female Torso (shown at top), is a near-direct translation of the French medical image.

Head II, by Lisa Nilsson. Photo by John Polak.

Nilsson went on to create an entire Tissue Series, which offers artistic slices, literally, of male and female bodies: a cross section of a head at eye level (above), another of a chest just above a man’s arm pits (below) and one of an abdomen at navel height, to name a few.

Nilsson began exhibiting her paper sculptures at galleries and museums. “The two words that I heard most often to describe the work were ‘beautiful,’ which is always nice to hear, and…’creepy,’ ” she said in a talk at TEDMED, an annual conference focusing on health and medicine. The artist admits that she never found the project disturbing. “I was so enthralled with the aesthetic possibilities I saw in cross sections, I had kind of overlooked the idea that viewing the body in this sort of ‘slice of deli meat’ fashion could be a bit unsettling to people,” she said.

Thorax, by Lisa Nilsson. Photo by John Polak.

Viewers come in close, at first, she says. “They would see the piece as an intriguing handmade object and put their noses up to the glass and enjoy the subtle surprise that it is made of paper,” she says, in the TEDMED lecture. Up close, a portion of the lacy, intricate sculpture appears abstract. “Then, people would typically back away, and they would be curious about what region of the body they were looking at….They would usually start to identify familiar anatomical landmarks.” The heart, perhaps, or the ribcage.

When making a paper sculpture, Nilsson starts with medical images, often culled from the Visible Human Project, a National Library of Medicine initiative that collected anatomical images from one male and one female cadaver. She usually consults illustrations of specific parts of the body in medical textbooks as well, to better understand what it is she is seeing in the Visible Human cross sections. “My background is in illustration”—she has a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design—”so I am used to combining sources and just being resourceful in getting all of the visual information I need to say what I want to say,” she says.

Head and Torso, by Lisa Nilsson. Photo by John Polak.

Nilsson creates a composite image from these sources and adheres it to a base of styrofoam insulation. The two-dimensional image serves as a guide for her three-dimensional paper sculpture; she quills in between the lines, much like one colors in a coloring book.

“I often start in the center and work out,” says Nilsson. She builds a small quilling unit, pins it to the styrofoam base and then glues it to its neighbor. “It is almost like putting a puzzle together, where each new piece is connected to its predecessor,” she adds. Working in this “tweezery” technique, as the artist calls it, requires some serious patience. A sculpture can take anywhere from two weeks to two months to complete. But, Nilsson says, “It is so addictive. It is really neat to see it grow and fill in.”

There is a basic vocabulary of shapes in quilling. “I have really tried to push that,” says Nilsson. “One of the things I don’t like about a lot of quilling that I see is that the mark is too repetitious. It is curlicue, curlicue, curlicue. I really try to mix that up.” Follow the individual strands of paper in one of her sculptures and you will see tubes, spirals, crinkled fans and teardrops.

Male Torso, by Lisa Nilsson. Photo by John Polak.

When the sculpture is finished, and all the pins have migrated to the periphery, Nilsson paints the back with a bookbinder’s glue to reinforce it. She displays her cross sections in velvet-lined shadow boxes. “I really like them to read as objects rather than images. I like the trompe-l’oeil effect, that you think you might be actually looking at a 1/4-inch slice of a body,” says Nilsson. “The box, to me, suggests object and frame would suggest an image. The decorative boxes also say that this is a precious object.”

Many medical professionals have taken an interest in Nilsson’s work. “It feels like an homage, I think, to them, rather than that I am trivializing something that they do that is so much more important,” she says, with a humble laugh. Doctors have sent her images, and anatomists have invited her to their labs. She even has a new pen pal—a dissector for Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds, a touring (and somewhat startling!) exhibition of preserved human bodies.

Angelico, by Lisa Nilsson. Photo by John Polak.

The connections Nilsson has made in the medical community have proven to be quite helpful. “Where does this particular anatomical structure end and where does the next one begin? Sometimes it is not all that clear-cut,” says the artist. As she works, questions inevitably arise, and she seeks out anatomists for answers. “Sometimes I want to know what is a general anatomical structure and what is an idiosyncrasy of the particular individual I am looking at. Rib cages. How much variance in shape is there? Am I overemphasizing this [part]? I am always wondering, am I seeing this accurately? Am I reading this right?”

Ultimately, Nilsson hopes that her works familiarize people with the internal landscape of the human body—the “basic lay of the land,” she says. “Everything is tidily squished in there in this package that is graphically beautiful and also highly functional,” she adds. “To me, the shapes are endlessly interesting. There is just the right amount of symmetry and asymmetry.”

Two of Nilsson’s latest pieces will be featured in “Teaching the Body: Artistic Anatomy in the American Academy, from Copley, Rimmer and Eakins to Contemporary Artists,” a three-month exhibition opening at the Boston University Art Gallery at the Stone Gallery on January 31. 

Bracelet-like tattoo of the 5,300-year-old Iceman. Photograph © South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology/Eurac/Samadelli/Staschitz.

“The earliest evidence we have of tattoos, not surprisingly, is cosmetic,” says Lars Krutak. Tattooed on the upper lip of a 7,000-year-old mummy from the Chinchorro culture of northern Chile and southern Peru is a thin pencil mustache. “But, the second oldest we have is medicinal,” he adds.

The Iceman and his tattoos. © Lars Krutak.

Krutak, sitting at his desk in the bowels of the National Museum of Natural History, is referring to Ötzi, the 5,300-year-old mummified “Iceman,” so named by researchers because he was discovered in the Ötztal Alps on the Italy-Austria border in September 1991. The preserved body has a total of 57 tattoos—short lines etched in groups on his lower back and ankles, a cross behind his right knee and two rings around his left wrist.

“Incredibly, approximately 80 percent of these tattoos overlap with classical Chinese acupuncture points utilized to treat rheumatism, a medical condition that plagued the Iceman. Other tattoos were found to be located on or near acupuncture meridians [pathways that connect internal organs with specific points located on the skin] that may have had the purpose of relieving other ailments, like gastro-intestinal problems,” writes Krutak in his latest book, Spiritual Skin: Magical Tattoos and Scarification, published this fall. The Iceman had a whipworm infection, researchers discovered in 2001.

Krutak works as a repatriation case officer in the museum’s anthropology department, returning human remains, funerary objects and sacred and ceremonial objects to Native tribes in Alaska. But, in addition to these duties, he is an expert in the anthropology of tattoos. As an undergraduate at the University of Colorado, Boulder in the early 1990s, Krutak studied art history and anthropology. “Those two things have always been a passion of mine, and tattooing is one way for me to connect both of them together,” he says. In 1998, he received a master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and, by 2009, he had earned a doctorate in the discipline from Arizona State University.

Krutak’s introduction to tattoos happened during his graduate school years. For his master’s thesis, he studied a traditional tattoo technique called skin-stitching, performed by the Yupiget women on St. Lawrence Island off the coast of Alaska in the Bering Sea. Skin-stitching is literally sewing geometric designs into the skin; Krutak calls it “epidermal embroidery.” Through interviewing the last remaining women who still practice the art, he also learned that the St. Lawrence Island Yupiget had historically used a therapeutic tattoo method that resembled the joint markings on the Iceman. “It’s a form of tattoo puncture, or acupuncture but leaving behind a pigment,” says Krutak. The residue was thought to be “a magical pigment believed to shut down passageways into the souls of the body,” he explains.

Lars Krutak with Pius, a traditional healer and one of the last Makonde tattooists of Mozambique. © Lars Krutak.

Since this first exposure, Krutak has felt an urgency to study other tribal tattoo and scarification traditions. He feels it is a race against time to get to indigenous communities in remote places across the world before these last tattoo artists and their oral histories—along with their traditional medical techniques—vanish.

Tattooing is “part of our world’s cultural and artistic heritage,”  Krutak says. Maybe it is a by-product of his day job, but Krutak strongly believes that in a world where tattooing has become a multi-billion dollar industry, we should be recognizing and honoring the art form’s roots. To communicate the knowledge he gathers, the cultural anthropologist has published several books, filled with photographs that showcase the artistic ability of individuals who create intricate tattoos with natural inks and tools, such as thorns and sharpened bamboo sticks.

Crocodile cutting of the Kaningara of Papua New Guinea. © Lars Krutak.

Though only one dark dot on the back of his hand is visible when he is dressed in business attire, Krutak has transformed his own body into a canvas depicting the many tribal tattoo techniques he has studied. He has been hand-tapped by the Iban people of Borneo with needles, the Kalinga of the Philippines with thorns and the Mentawai of Indonesia with nails. He has been poked by Buddhist monks in Thailand and pricked by the Kayabi of the Brazilian Amazon with palm thorns. Then, there is the skin-stitching and scarification: Krutak has received more than 100 skin-stitched tattoos and about 1,000 scars, the remnants of incisions made with razors, blades and knives.

Such experiences “help me in some sense when I’m writing and trying to understand what they mean for the peoples who created them,” explains Krutak. “Obviously, I can never be a member of these tribes just because I get a tattoo. But, it gives me some sense of the transformation that takes place.”

Oh, he adds, “And the pain, for sure.”

While filming Tattoo Hunter, a 10-part Discovery Channel series that aired in 2009 and 2010, Krutak took part in a “crocodile cutting” ceremony with the Kaningara of Papua New Guinea. A rite of passage for Kaningara boys becoming men, the ceremony involves an elder cutting a massive pattern of small incisions on a participant’s chest and back. “After 450 plus cuts, my entire chest felt like it was on fire,” writes Krutak in Spiritual Skin. (If you don’t believe him, watch him bear the pain in this episode capturing the process.) River mud is applied to the fresh cuts, which causes them to become infected. The overall effect—in both look and touch—is reminiscent of the scales on a crocodile. The Kaningara believe that with this scarification they appropriate the powers and knowledge of the crocodile spirit.

So certainly tattoos have a spiritual tradition. But medicinal?

Colin Dale, a tattooist in Copenhagen, Denmark, has mastered several traditional forms of tattooing. He has personally sewn all of Krutak’s skin-stitches and shares the anthropologist’s interest in medicinal tattoos. Last year, in fact, for the 20th anniversary of the Iceman’s discovery, Dale conducted a small test, tattooing David Schütze, a client plagued by asthma, rheumatism in several of his joints, headaches, tinnitus in his ear and a loud snoring habit, with marks similar to Ötzi’s and in many of the same spots. Dale had an acupuncturist on hand to recommend locations that aligned with certain acupuncture points. After three months time, Schütze reported that just about all of his pains and symptoms had noticeably eased, if not completely disappeared. By a year, some had returned, but nowhere near the original intensity. The acupuncturist, Irg Bernhardt, compared the results of the one tattooing session to 10 to 15 acupuncture treatments. “In my estimation, this project shows that tattooing of acupuncture points [produces] a sustained therapeutic effect,” said Bernhardt in Spiritual Skin. “And not just for a short period of time, since it actually seems to work for the long term.”

Medicinal joint tattoo of the Kayan. © Lars Krutak.

Besides the St. Lawrence Island Yupiget women, Krutak has found two other groups that continue to practice therapeutic joint tattooing 5,300 years after the Iceman lived. Last spring, in Borneo, he met some Kayan men and women who had dots tattooed on their wrists, ankles and knee caps. When he asked about the tattoos, the Kayan explained that whenever they sprained a joint, one woman in their clan  would tattoo dots on the swollen area and full mobility would typically return within a week. Krutak noticed that some of the people who had experienced multiple sprains had layers of tattooing. (Actually, Krutak and others believe that the Iceman’s tattoos may have been applied on several occasions, since they are so clear and dark to this day.) More recently, the anthropologist spotted joint tattooing among the Inland Aroma people of Papua New Guinea.

Another medicinal tattoo of the Kayan. © Lars Krutak.

Krutak suspects that medicinal tattooing of this type arose in many places simultaneously, as opposed to diffusing from one specific location. Whether by accident or experimentation, people found tattooing to relieve their ailments, he says.

As one can imagine, there may be “many more possible relationships and connections between organs, points, joints, and tattoos that are waiting to be discovered,” Krutak notes.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Given the growing public interest in artsy science and sciency art, I like to think these gifts are sure to impress your friends and family this holiday season!

For the movie buff:

If there is a participating theater near you, grab tickets and take a movie-loving friend or family member to see the documentary Chasing Ice. Inspired by a trip to Iceland in 2005, photographer James Balog embarked on a massive project called the Extreme Ice Survey. He deployed time-lapse cameras across the Arctic as a means of gathering visual evidence of climate change. “His hauntingly beautiful videos compress years into seconds and capture ancient mountains of ice in motion as they disappear at a breathtaking rate,” says the movie’s Web site. Outside Magazine says Chasing Ice “should be required viewing for every policymaker on earth.”

For the athlete:

Muscle leggings by Black Milk. Courtesy of Flickr user Brett Jordan.

Unfortunately, the women’s running tights that Nike released in mid-October, boldly decorated with X-ray images of bones, flew off the shelves and are currently out of stock. The company described the spandex leggings as giving a glimpse into the wearer’s “inner toughness,” and, boy—or shall I say, girl!—they were fierce. But, if you have an athlete on your list who’d be willing to make equally as bold and scientific a fashion statement, consider these muscle leggings from the Australian clothing brand Black Milk.

Rorshock in Color

For the game nut:

Some families (mine) are into games, while others (my husband’s) cringe at the mention of them. If yours is the former, think about bringing the boardgame, Rorshöck in Color, to your holiday gathering. Loosely based on the ideas of Swiss pyschoanalyst Hermann Rorschach, who designed his “Rorschach test” on the premise that much about an individual’s personality could be deduced by what he or she sees within a set of inkblots, the game comes with 20 cards, each with a different inkblot painting. When one player responds with what they see in a given inkblot, another refers to a handy book of diagnoses. “Don’t worry, you haven’t lost your mind: The diagnoses here are funny, cheeky and downright irreverent,” claims the game’s manufacturer. As the tagline says, Rorshöck in Color is “a game for colorful personalities.” (Recommended for ages 15 and up)

For the art collector:

DNA portraits, shown here, are reminiscent of barcodes. Courtesy of DNA 11.

One of the very first posts I wrote for Collage of Arts and Sciences was about a clever company called DNA 11. Since 2005, founders Adrian Salamunovic and Nazim Ahmed have filled orders placed by people around the world wanting their very own (and sometimes even their dogs’) DNA portraits. The customer swabs his inner cheek and then rubs that foam swab onto a paper card, which DNA 11 provides in a DNA collection kit. Once the company receives the sample, technicians in DNA 11′s genetics lab—the very first of its kind devoted solely to art making—isolate specific DNA sequences and create a unique digital image–a pattern of highlighted bands–that is then printed on a canvas. For the artist or art collector on your list, DNA 11 offers a gift kit. The kit includes all the materials a recipient would need to collect his or her DNA sample and submit it for a custom portrait.

America’s Other Audubon. Princeton Architectural Press, 2012.

For the bookworm:

America’s Other Audubon, published this past May by Princeton Architectural Press, is an incredible book for anyone interested in scientific illustration. To most, John James Audubon is a familiar name, but author Joy M. Kiser tells the story of Genevieve Jones, an illustrator whose artistry and scientific accuracy rivaled Audubon’s and yet history forgot. In the 1880s, Jones and her family published 90 copies of her masterpiece, Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Ohio. Today, only 34 of those 90 originals are known to exist. (The Smithsonian Institution Libraries is lucky enough to have two.) Yet, in America’s Other Audubon, Kiser brings Jones’ story and her detailed illustrations of delicate birds’ nests and dappled eggs to the public for the very first time.

For the shutterbug:

The blood-brain barrier in a live zebrafish embryo. Image by Dr. Jennifer L. Peters and Dr. Michael R. Taylor.

Introduce someone near and dear to the fascinating world of photomicrography. For 38 years, Nikon has hosted an annual “Small World” competition where skilled researchers submit photographs captured through a light microscope. This year’s top winners, depicting everything from a zebrafish embryo to coral sand, and the retina of a fruit fly to a close-up of garlic, are featured in a 2013 calendar.

Sun print. Courtesy of Flickr user .scribe.

For the crafty kid:

A fun way to teach a child about the beauty of nature is through sun printing. Using a SunPrint kit, one can put leaves, flowers and other objects on chemically-treated solar paper and place the composition to the sun. In a matter of minutes, the areas exposed to sunlight are blue whereas the areas blocked by the objects are white. The design can be preserved by dipping the paper in water and allowing it to dry. Once your child has mastered sun printing on paper, she or he can apply the technique to fabrics. Light-sensitive cotton, silk, t-shirts and scarves can be purchased at www.bluesunprints.com.

Periodic Table of Heavy Metals by Pop Chat Labs

For the nephew or niece who eats and sleeps with Beats headphones on:

Pop Chart Lab, a Brooklyn-based company founded by Patrick Mulligan, a book editor, and Ben Gibson, a graphic designer, has made it its mission “to render all of human experience in chart form.” Music is no exception. Check out the Periodic Table of Heavy Metals print and the Grand Taxonomy of Rap Names, which takes an almost scientific approach to linking all the Lils, Bigs, Daddys, Masters and Doctors populating the genre’s history.

Ornament by Artologica

And, last but not least, for a party’s host or hostess:

A petri dish ornament! Artist Michele Banks watercolors—resembling bacteria-laden agar—are actually quite beautiful.

See More Holiday Gift Guides from Smithsonian.com »

What drives plate tectonics? Illustrated by Marc Bell.

“Today we’re spoiled with an abundance of information,” write Jenny Volvovski, Julia Rothman and Matt Lamothe, in their latest book, The Where, The Why, and The How. “We carry devices that fit in our pockets but contain the entirety of human knowledge. If you want to know anything, just Google it.”

Why, for instance, are eggs oval-shaped? The authors wondered—and, in a matter of seconds, there was the answer, served up in the form of a Wikipedia entry. Eggs are oblong, as opposed to spherical, so that they roll in a contained circle (less chance for wandering eggs). They also fit into a nest better this way.

But Volvovski, Rothman and Lamothe, all partners in the design firm ALSO, see this quick answer-finding as a negative at times. In the case of the egg, they say, ”The most fun, the period of wonder and funny guesses, was lost as soon as the 3G network kicked in.”

The Where, The Why, and The How is the authors’ attempt to revel in those “mysteries that can’t be entirely explained in a few mouse clicks.” Volvovski and her coauthors selected 75 not quite answerable questions—from “Where did life come from?” to “Why do cats purr?” to “How does gravity work?”—and let artists and scientists loose on them. The artists created whimsical illustrations, and the scientists responded with thoughtful essays. ”With this book, we wanted to bring back a sense of the unknown that has been lost in the age of information,” say the authors.

Cartoonist Marc Bell took on the stumper, What drives plate tectonics? His imaginative response is pictured above.

Why do we hiccup? Illustrated by Dave Zackin.

Why do we hiccup, anyway? As you can see in his busy and somewhat grotesque illustration, above, comic artist Dave Zackin is entertained by the many scientific theories and folk remedies. Scientist Jill Conte touches on these in an accompanying essay:

Hiccups happen when our diaphragm, the muscle in our chest that controls breathing, spasms involuntarily, causing a sudden rush of air into our lungs. Our vocal cords shut to stem the flow of air, thus producing the sound of a hiccup. No one knows exactly what triggers the diaphragm to spasm, although it’s probably due to stimulation of the nerves connected to the muscle or to a signal from the part of the brain that controls breathing.

Some scientists hypothesize that the neural circuitry implicated in human hiccuping is an evolutionary vestige from our amphibian ancestors who use a similar action to aid respiration with gills during their tadpole stage. Humans have maintained the neural hardware, scientists theorize, because it may benefit suckling infants who must manage the rhythm of breathing and feeding simultaneously.

Notice the tadpoles squirming out of the man’s brain? Can you find the hiccuping baby?

What defined dinosaurs’ diet? Illustrated by Meg Hunt.

And, what defined dinosaurs’ diet? In the book, Margaret Smith, a physical sciences librarian at New York University, describes how paleontologists sometimes analyze coprolites, or fossilized dinosaur feces, to determine a dinosaur’s last meal. A dino’s teeth also provide some clues, writes Smith:

Through comparing fossilized dinosaur teeth and bones to those of reptiles living today, we’ve been able to broadly categorize the diets of different kinds of dinosaurs. For example, we know that the teeth of the Tyrannosaurus rex are long, slender, and knife-like, similar to those of the komodo dragon (a carnivore), while those of the Diplodocus are more flat and stumpy, like those of the cow (an herbivore). However, whether carnivorous dinosaurs were hunters or scavengers (or even cannibals!) and whether the the herbivorous ones noshed on tree leaves, grasses, or kelp is still uncertain.

Illustrator Meg Hunt stuck to the teeth.

What is dark energy? Illustrated by Ben Finer.

A couple of years ago, Smithsonian published a story that calls dark energy the biggest mystery in the universe–I suspect that Volvovski, Rothman and Lamothe might jump on board with this mighty superlative, given the fact that they asked Michael Leyton, a research fellow at CERN, to comment on the murky topic early in the book. Leyton writes:

In 1998, astrophysicists were shocked when new data from supernovae revealed that the universe is not only expanding, but expanding at an accelerating rate…. To explain the observed acceleration, a component with strong negative pressure was added to the cosmological equation of state and called “dark energy.

A recent survey of more than 200,000 galaxies appears to confirm the existence of this mysterious energy. Although it is estimated that about 73 percent of the universe is made up of dark energy, the exact physics behind it remains unknown.

Artist Ben Finer, in turn, created a visual response to the question, What is dark energy?

Do immortal creatures exist? Illustrated by Steven Guarnaccia.

The ALSO partners tried to assign scientific questions to artists, whose bodies of work in some way, shape or form included similar subjects or themes. Much like he recast the pigs as architects, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry in his book version of “The Three Little Pigs,” Steven Guarnaccia, an illustrator and former New York Times Op-Ed art director, envisioned a spinoff of Ernest Hemingway’s classic The Old Man and the Sea called The Old Men of the Sea in his response to “Do immortal creatures exist?”

So, why the wrinkly, bespectacled jellyfish? Well, engineer Julie Frey and Hunter College assistant professor Jessica Rothman’s essay inspired him:

Turritopsi nutricula, a jellyfish that lives in Caribbean waters, is able to regenerate its entire body repeatedly and revert back to an immature state after it has matured, rendering it effectively immortal. Scientists have no idea how the jellyfish completes this remarkable age reversal and why it doesn’t do this all the time. It is possible that a change in the environment triggers the switch, or it may be solely genetic.

Sometimes science is stranger than fiction.

1st Place: The blood-brain barrier in a live zebrafish embryo. Image by Dr. Jennifer L. Peters and Dr. Michael R. Taylor.

Last week, Nikon unveiled the winners of its 38th annual Small World Photomicrography Competition. What’s photomicrography, you ask? Well, while there are many techniques involved, the genre, simply put, is photography captured through a light microscope.

Researchers use photomicrographs as a means of scientific inquiry. The images depict life in all its glorious, magnified detail. “But a good photomicrograph is also an image whose structure, color, composition and content is an object of beauty, open to several levels of comprehension and appreciation,” reads the competition’s Web site.

For its 2012 contest, Nikon received more than 2,000 submissions—stunning images of algae, insects, seeds, snowflakes, embryos and minerals—from photomicrographers around the world. Judges plucked from the cell biology departments at Northwestern University and Columbia University and the staffs of Popular Science and the scientific journal Nature Methods then selected 115 finalists “on the basis of originality, informational content, technical proficiency and visual impact,” according to the site. Those finalists were further divided into 20 top winners, 11 honorable mentions and 84 images of distinction.

First-place winners Jennifer Peters and Michael Taylor, both of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, achieved a photomicrography first. Their winning entry, “the blood-brain barrier in a live zebrafish embryo,” pictured above, is believed to be the first image to show the creation of this barrier, between circulating blood and fluids in the central nervous system, in a living organism.

“We used fluorescent proteins to look at brain endothelial cells and watched the blood-brain barrier develop in real-time,” said Peters and Taylor in a press release. “We took a three-dimensional snapshot under a confocal microscope. Then, we stacked the images and compressed them into one—pseudo coloring them in rainbow to illustrate depth.”

Nikon launched a Popular Vote contest on Facebook, to determine a fan favorite. Which of the finalists do you like best? Polls are open until November 13, and the winner will be announced on November 15.

Here is a selection from the top 20 winners:

Credit: Walter Piorkowski

Walter Piorkowski of South Beloit, Illinois, captured this image of live newborn lynx spiderlings, magnified six times.

Credit: Dylan Burnette.

Dylan Burnette, of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, created this photomicrograph using a technique called structured illumination microscopy (SIM). The image is of human bone cancer (osteosarcoma) showing actin filaments (purple), mitochondria (yellow) and DNA (blue).

Credit: Michael John Bridge.

With a confocal microscope, Michael John Bridge, at the HSC Core Research Facilities’ Cell Imaging Lab at the University of Utah, created this close-up of the eye organ of a Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) third-instar larvae.

Credit: Geir Drange.

Geir Drange, of Asker, Norway, entered this image of Myrmica sp. (ant) carrying its larva.

Credit: Alvaro Migotto.

Alvaro Migotto, of the Centro de Biologia Marinha at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, used a combination of stereomicroscopy and darkfield microscopy to capture this brittle star.

Credit: Diana Lipscomb.

This photomicrograph, by Diana Lipscomb in George Washington University’s Department of Biological Sciences, shows Sonderia sp., a ciliate that preys upon various algae, diatoms and cyanobacteria.

Credit: José R. Almodóvar Rivera.

Here, José R. Almodóvar Rivera, of the biology department at University of Puerto Rico’s Mayaguez campus, has captured the pistil, or female reproductive part, of Adenium obesum, a flowering plant native to Africa.

Credit: Charles Krebs.

Charles Krebs, of Issaquah, Washington, is a prolific photomicrographer, who has placed in several of Nikon’s competitions. In 2005, he took first prize with an incredible close-up of a house fly. Seen here is a stinging nettle trichome on a leaf vein.

Credit: David Maitland.

This busy image shows coral sand magnified by 100 times. David Maitland, of Feltwell, England, created it using brightfield imaging.

Credit: Somayeh Naghiloo.

Somayeh Naghiloo, a faculty member of the plant biology department at the University of Tabriz in Iran, submitted this image of the floral primordia of Allium sativum (garlic).

Credit: Dorit Hockman.

This strangely adorable image of embryos of the species Molossus rufus (black mastiff bat) was taken by Dorit Hockman, of the University of Cambridge’s department of physiology, development and neuroscience.

A false-colored scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of caffeine crystals. “It is a bright, intricate image of something that most of us experience every day,” said James Cutmore, a picture editor at BBC Focus Magazine and a judge for the Wellcome Image Awards. Image by Annie Cavanagh, Wellcome Images.

So many images created in the name of science are brilliant works of art. Magnetic resonance imaging, for instance, produces beautiful reconstructions of the human brain, with all its neural tracts traced in different colors. And, when a geologist photographs a thin slice of peridotite, lit with polarized light, the sample resembles brightly-colored stained glass.

This idea of scientists seeing the artistry in their work certainly hasn’t been lost on Wellcome Images, the world’s leading collection of photographs, X-rays and illustrations chronicling the history of medicine. Each year, the Wellcome Image Awards celebrate the cream of the archive’s new crop of pictures, chosen, as Catherine Draycott, head of Wellcome Images, says, “for their scientific and technical merit as much as for their aesthetic appeal.”

This year’s batch of 16 winners, on display at the Wellcome Collection in London through December 31, depicts cancer cells, bacteria, the connective tissue from a person’s knee and even the surface of a living human’s brain.

“They offer people a chance to get closer to science and research and see it in a different way, as a source of beauty as well as providing important information about ourselves and the world around us,” added Draycott, in a press release.

Here is a sampling, with some scientific explanation to help identify what exactly it is that you are seeing.

Moth fly (Psychodidae). Image by Kevin MacKenzie, University of Aberdeen, Wellcome Images.

Kevin MacKenzie, who manages a microscopy facility at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, found a moth fly on his kitchen wall. He decided to take a closer look at the fly under a scanning electron microscope and, in doing so, produced this somewhat menacing image (above). Moth flies, commonly referred to as drain flies, deposit their larvae in sink and bath drains. The flies grow and emerge from the drain, as this one likely did, when they reach adulthood. From anterior to posterior, this fly measures only four to five millimeters. But, under intense magnification, one can see the tiny hairs that cover the insect’s body.

A fluorescence micrograph of a chicken embryo’s vascular system. Image by Vincent Pasque, University of Cambridge, Wellcome Images.

To create this image of a chicken embryo, Vincent Pasque, now at the University of California, Los Angeles, cracked open part of an egg’s shell so that he could inject a fluorescent dye into the embryo’s vascular system. The embryo’s heart pumped the dye throughout the veins and arteries connecting it to the yolk sac. In the center, you can see the embryo’s brain, heart and slender body.

Cell Division. Image by Kuan-Chung Su, London Research Institute, Wellcome Images.

Here, thanks to time-lapse photography, one can see how a cancer cell undergoes mitosis, or cell division, over the course of 16 hours. The red blobs are the DNA in the HeLa cells, and the bright blue represents the cell membranes.

Intercranial recording for epilepsy. Image by Robert Ludlow, Wellcome Images.

This photograph of the surface of a human brain (selected as the grand prize winner) captures the intimate view that a neurosurgeon had while operating on an epileptic patient. “The arteries are bright scarlet with oxygenated blood, the veins deep purple and the ‘grey matter’ of the brain a flushed, delicate pink,” said Alice Roberts, an anatomist and one of the judges, in a press release. “It is quite extraordinary.”

Bacteria biofilm. Image by Fernan Federici & Jim Haseloff, Wellcome Images.

While this may look like a Pointillist painting, it is actually a colony of bacteria growing on a petri dish. Each dot is an individual bacterium, called Bacillus subtilis, and the red, lime green and royal and sky blues represent different lineages. The researchers mixed all of the colors together, at first, but, as the bacteria grew, they reconfigured themselves into mathematically predictable patterns.

Loperamide crystals under a scanning electron microscope. Image by Annie Cavanagh, Wellcome Images.

The mesmerizing beauty of this pink, spiky, bur-looking thing might be tainted when you hear the story behind it. What you are looking at is loperamide, a drug used to treat diarrhea. Loperamide targets the nerve fibers in the large intestine, slowing down the movement of the intestine and thereby the food passing through it. As a result, there is more time for some of the water in the food to be reabsorbed into the body.

Lavender leaf under a scanning electron microscope. Image by Annie Cavanagh, Wellcome Images.

This is a close-up of a lavender leaf, enhanced with bright colors. The green spikes are hair-like growths on the surface of the leaf, called non-glandular trichomes; the orange spheres are glandular trichomes, which contain the shrub’s fragrant oil.