Essay, September 2013: Science Is Art

In the process of doing research scientists often produce images that not only contain the data that advances our knowledge in that area, but have an intrinsic beauty and appeal. That is part of the motivation behind creation of Science Is Art.

FASEB

FASEB, The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology is an umbrella group of 27 individual societies that includes a large proportion of the scientists that do biological, biochemical, and biomedical research. Their membership is now greater than 110,000. Every year they sponser a contest in which images acquired by scientists are evaluated by their contribution to science and beauty.

Look at the 8th image here, which is of the embryo of a skate. It's of particular interest to me because it reveales the circulatory system, and that's what I'm trying to understand in the tunicates.

In some cases you can't evaluate the importance of the image without being familiar with the research area and its techniques. However, you can always appreciate beauty.

Nikon

You could spend a lot of time looking at these images, since they make it easy to look at many years of the contest. My only complaint is that the images would be more meaningful if you knew the biology, biochemisty, and imaging technique being used. This would mean that each image would need to be annotated with about 1000 words of text.

Edmund Optics

Even more photos from a contest organized by Edmund Optics.

If you search the WEB I'm sure you can find more photos of scientific interest, but this gives you a taste of what is out there.