Are you ready for your close up? - March 11, 2008
Entries in this year’s Wellcome Image Awards go on display tomorrow in London (here). The annual award for images created by scientists has thrown up some truly remarkable winners this year.
My favourite: Annie Cavanagh’s fly standing on sugar crystals.
“I think it’s really important to express science for the public in an artistic fashion so that they relate to something that they think is beautiful as well as scientific,” says Cavanagh, who works for the School of Pharmacy, part of the University of London.
More images from the collection – which will also go on show in Tokyo later this year – below the fold. One criticism: it would be nice to have a little more detail from the artists on how these amazing images were created.
Ruptured blood vessel / Anne Weston
Red blood cells leak from a ruptured blood vessel in this image from Anne Weston, an electron microscopist at Cancer Research UK. This is due to mutation in the ephrin-B2 gene which makes blood vessels to be more fragile than normal.
Vitamin C crystals / M.I. Walker
This image of oxidised Vitamin C crystals was created by Spike Walker, who has perhaps the coolest job title of anyone in the competition: freelance photomicrographist.
Liquid crystal / Karen Neill/LCI
“One of the tutors used to say, ‘you can’t make a scientist out of an artist and you can’t make an artist out of a scientist’,” says Karen Neill, creator of this shot of liquid crystals under polarised light. How wrong they were.
New blood vessel formation / Denise Stenzel
This image from Denise Stenzel shows new blood vessels developing in a retina.
Images: all images credit as given
Comments
Annie Cavanagh’s fly standing on sugar crystals is a key image, raise the possibility to pick up images to other insects which not only will open more research programms to understand the actual mechanisms of insect feeding among different insects especially blood feeders, make it possible to deter such step but also giving us more detail about insect morphology, so we can provide easily identification to closely related species.
Posted by: Abdallah Samy | March 12, 2008 08:29 AM