MRS "Science as Art" Competition(s)

After uncovering the following photos, I decided that my first two blogs could be considered a practice... because the ensuring pictures blow the others out of the water!

These first two pictures of science imitating art are my favourites from the series. We are able to see these pictures due to the magic of the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). The "Field of Sunflowers" were produced by S.K. Hark, Chinese University of Hong Kong and won 1st prise in the 2008 sprint meet. The Second image was produced by Wen Hsun Tu, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan and titled "Nano-Witch" was the 2nd Place Winner in the 2009 fall meeting.

Both images are composed of what is known as nanowires. Each nanowire is about 10 nm in diameter and tens of micrometers in length. They were grown from a silicon oxide (SiOx) compound for the sunflowers and a zink oxide (ZnO) for the nano-witch. Both use a process known as Vapour-Liquid-Solid (VLS) to grow the nanowires.

Art of Science Gallary 2010

On the second day of SaCrIt i blogged some neat photos...

The following photos are held a Princeton University webserver. They appear to have run some sort of competition for the best science related photos and have done so for 2010, 2009, 2006 & 2005. Don't ask me what happened to the other years.

Here are the three winners. Click on the images to read about how they were created. Much of the details bellow are in deed paraphrased as i understand very little of it.

This Xenon Plasma Accelerator uses electronic and magnetic fields to accelerate xenon propellant to produce thrust. Xenon is a colourless gas but we can see a blue haze here due to the result of the xenon being excited by electric discharge - like the blue zap of static electric shock we're all too familiar with, although this is a form of electrostatic discharge, but you get the idea. Plasma Accelerators are a leading technology for future space flight... and it looks darn pretty too.

Credits:Jerry Ross (fac) - PPPL

Art On A Chip

In my daily reading of newscienist.com I came across their exposé of a flickr photo stream detailing parts of circuit designs and other related images that have an underlying beauty/symmetry. In fact, my hunger to share these images is what sowed the seed for creation of this blog.

Here are the photos New Scientist found most striking. Click on each image to see what New Scientist had to say about how these marvellous works were created.

(Image: Chris Sip and Albert Folch/University of Washington)