Fertility Paths (2017)
At first glance, these lines resemble ink strokes on paper. In reality, they are the recorded movement paths of sperm cells observed under the microscope.
Rather than capturing the cells themselves, the image traces their motion over time, transforming microscopic movement into an abstract network of trajectories. Patterns like these help researchers study sperm motility, an important factor in fertility and reproductive health.
Captured by Dr. Miloš Stojanov (@dr_milos ), the image offers a glimpse into one of the earliest steps in the beginning of life, where movement, direction, and chance all play a role.
#sciart #microscopy #fertility #reproductivescience #cellbiology
Color Hunting: Green Edition
This week, we went looking for one color across the Figure 1A archives: Green.
Often associated with life, growth, resilience, and renewal, green appears throughout science in surprising ways. Sometimes it is natural color, sometimes it comes from fluorescent markers or elemental mapping techniques that allow researchers to see what would otherwise remain invisible.
Swipe through this carousel to explore six images where green takes center stage, from microscope lenses and brain cells to resilient plant roots, protective molecules in the intestine, and shimmering photonic crystals.
Featuring works by:
1. Extension of scientific eye — Frédéric Cassé (2018)
2. Neptunia amplexicaulis lateral roots — Maggie-Anne Harvey (2025)
3. Prairie — Marie-Laure Possovre (2019)
4. New generation — Nicolas Toni (2017)
5. Intestinal forest — Alejandra Gonzalez (2020)
6. Bio-decorations — Cédric Kilchoer (2021)
Which image caught your eye first?
#colorhunting #greenedition #sciart #microscopy #scienceisbeautiful
Captured emptiness (2025)
What looks like a distant planet is, in reality, something far smaller.
This transmission electron microscope image shows a tiny hollow plastic bead covered with even smaller particles called nanoresonators. These nanoparticles are specially engineered to respond to light and their surroundings, making them useful for detecting biological particles such as viruses.
Created by Dr. Maria Bandurist, the work points toward a future where virus particles could be rapidly captured and identified inside the human body, enabling faster and more precise treatment.
Nanoscience explores a world invisible to the naked eye, where the smallest changes can have major effects. This image is a reminder that some of the most important breakthroughs happen at the tiniest scales.
#sciart #nanoscience #microscopy #electronmicroscopy #biotechnology
Moovement (2024)
What can three cows teach us about adaptation and survival?
This image maps the simulated positions of three cows after three days (cyan), five days (red), and thirty days (pink) of grazing in a pasture the size of a football field.
Created by Dr. Alejandro Romero-Ruiz, the work is based on GPS-collar data from cattle grazing in southeast England. Using a statistical random-walk model called “Moovement”, he explores how cows balance exploration and exploitation: when to search for new resources, and when to make the most of what they have already found.
The research group behind this model studies how animals, soil, vegetation, and atmosphere interact to shape agricultural ecosystems in a changing climate.
These movement patterns appear across life, from bacteria and insects to fish, monkeys, and livestock. They may even offer a lesson for research itself: progress often comes from alternating between curiosity and focus.
#sciart #datascience #animalbehavior #climatechange #agriculture
Taurine (2022)
A burst of color created from something normally invisible.
These are crystals of taurine, an amino acid that plays important roles in the body, from supporting the nervous system and heart function to helping regulate water and salt balance in cells. Under normal light, these crystals are completely colorless. But under polarized light microscopy, they reveal vivid interference colors, created by the way light interacts with their internal structure.
To create this image, scientist José Manuel Martínez López (@quimica_tech ) placed a small drop of concentrated taurine solution on a heated slide, allowing crystals to form and spread.
While polarized microscopy is typically used to study and identify crystalline structures, here the settings were adjusted to emphasize color and form, turning a scientific technique into a striking visual composition.
🏆 This image received the Public Award in 2022.
#sciart #microscopy #crystals #chemistry #polarizedlight
Glomerular ore (2021)
At first glance, this looks like a fragment of rock or a metal ore. In reality, it’s a high-magnification image of a human kidney.
The vivid colors reveal different components of the tissue: blue marks the nuclei of cells, orange highlights a structural protein that helps cells maintain their shape, green labels nerve-related proteins, and yellow shows immune cells. At the center, the bright orange bundle is a glomerulus, one of the kidney’s many filtration units responsible for cleaning the blood..
Captured by bioloigist Esperanza Hughes Salinas, the image is part of research exploring the role of immune cells within the kidney. Understanding how these cells behave is key to uncovering how kidney function is maintained and how it can be disrupted in disease.
#sciart #microscopy #kidney #cellbiology #immunology
2025 Throwback with a bonus!
Science No Matter What from Anna Carratalà (Extreme Environments Exhibition 2025)
Sampling bacteria in lake aerosols during an arctic storm in East Greenland in June 2024. The scientist spent three hours holding the tripod with the aerosol sampler against 30–40km/h winds and harsh cold.
Bonus ✨️ If you missed the opportunity to meet Anna at our Extreme Environments Exhibition last year, you can now read the article she contributed to describing the dedication, flexibility and collaboration needed to pursue research in places most people would never venture. Truly impressive!
Want to learn more? Full article in bio
Is there life on Mars? (2020)
At first glance, this looks like the surface of a distant planet.
In reality, this is a bright-field microscopy image of human induced pluripotent stem cells differentiating into neurons. These cells began as ordinary adult cells that scientists “reset” back into a stem-like state by introducing a specific set of genes. This reprogramming enables them to become many different cell types. Here, they are transforming into nerve cells, extending long projections called axons that begin to form connections.
Captured by Dr. Rosaria Di Martino using an iPhone 8 through the microscope eyepiece (10× magnification), the image highlights the dynamic nature of cell cultures, especially during differentiation, when cells dramatically change both shape and function.
At that moment, Rosaria was listening to Life on Mars? by David Bowie, an unexpectedly perfect match for a scene that felt more like a distant planet than a dish of living cells.
#sciart #stemcells #neuroscience #microscopy #artandscience
Bubbles (2019)
Plants know when to let go.
What looks like a cluster of glowing bubbles is actually a close-up of an abscission zone, the region where plants shed leaves, flowers, or damaged parts. The blue “bubbles” are plant cells, while the red outlines trace a lipid layer that marks the boundaries between them.
Studying this process reveals how plants control growth, respond to stress, and manage resources, a deeper understanding that could help improve crop resilience and productivity.
Captured by Dr. Sebastian Augustin, the image highlights how even a process as functional as shedding can be breathtakingly beautiful.
🏆 This image received the Public Award in 2019.
#sciart #plantbiology #microscopy #cellbiology #plantscience
Yin & Yang of Leaf Microbiome (2018)
A simple leaf hosts an entire invisible world.
Leaves are home to a remarkable diversity of microbes. Far from passive passengers, many of these microscopic partners help shape how plants grow, defend themselves from disease, and interact with insects and other organisms.
To create this image, Dr. Zigmunds Orlovskis placed a leaf of european beech on bacterial growth media and incubated it for 48 hours at 25 °C. As the microbes began to grow, a small fraction of the hidden community living on and within the leaf became visible.
This image offers an artistic glimpse into the delicate balance between plants and the microscopic life that surrounds them, reminding us that even a single leaf is a living ecosystem.
#sciart #plantmicrobiology #microbiology #plantscience #microbialworld
Tentacle Flowers (2017)
At first glance, the shapes in this picture look like delicate flowers. In reality, this is the surface of human colon tissue.
The round structures are tiny glands, arranged at almost equal distances from one another and supported by surrounding muscle cells that help keep the tissue organized. This orderly pattern is part of how a healthy colon works.
The image was captured by MD and researcher Christophe Cisarovsky during a project studying colorectal cancer, one of the most common and deadly cancers worldwide. Getting such a perfect cross-section of human colon tissue is uncommon, which makes the natural organization especially clear.
Images of healthy tissue like this are important for cancer research. By understanding what normal tissue looks like, scientists can better recognize how these patterns change as colorectal cancer develops.
🏆 This image received the Jury Award in 2017.
#sciart #microscopy #histology #colorectalcancer #cancerresearch
Expansion Inversion Collapse (2025)
How will the universe end?
In this work, Dr Alexandra Vasilyeva (@avasciart ) explores possible cosmic futures: expansion, inversion, and collapse. The sequence moves from the familiar idea of a universe that keeps expanding, through a moment of instability and uncertainty, to the possibility that expansion itself could one day reverse.
The piece was inspired by recent observations suggesting that the properties of dark energy, the force believed to drive cosmic expansion, may change over time. If true, the long-held assumption of endless expansion may not hold.
Using ink on paper and digital collage, the work turns one of cosmology’s biggest questions into a visual reflection on uncertainty and the unknown fate of the universe.
#sciart #cosmology #darkenergy #astrophysics #spaceart
