Beyond Vision: Data as Art
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Beyond Vision: Data as Art The ongoing quest to gather data leads to more tools and techniques for portraying phenomena in ways that are scientifically revealing and, as it turns out, beautiful. In this way, data are becoming a new category of art. Following is an array of scientific images chosen for their composition, color, and
form, along with their scientific significance. Their aesthetic characteristics tell scientific, technological, and sometimes social and cultural stories. IVAN AMATO Ivan Amato is a science writer whose articles have been published in several magazines and
newspapers, including Time, Fortune, and U.S. News & World Report. He is an associate editor for Science News and author of a book on materials science, Stuff: The Materials the World Is Made of (BasicBooks, 1997), which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book in 1997. His book Super Vision: A New View of Nature (Harry N. Abrams, New York, 2003) comes out next month.
▲ Still Life with Cobalt and Copper
Description: With false colors, this convergent-beam electron diffraction (CBED) image of lanthanum aluminate (LaAlO3), a ceramic substrate that in the 1980s helped rekindle research in superconductivity, looks like it ought to be hanging above a couple of lava lamps with the Grateful Dead rock band playing in the background. Working with the specific features of the image, such as the concentric disks and the radial forms, researchers can discern the sample’s crystal structure. The lattice constant of LaAlO3 is 5.357 Å. Courtesy: Paul Midgley, University of Cambridge
Description: With a scanning tunneling microscope and an attractive choice of colors at their disposal, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology generated some atomic portraiture worthy of framing. The larger mounds correspond to pairs of cobalt atoms, the smaller ones to single cobalt atoms—all of them on a background of copper. The cobalt atoms amount to a magnetic impurity that influences electrons near the copper surface. These electronic effects show up as green and red squiggly lines. The image is ~8 nm across. Courtesy: Joseph A. Stroscio, Robert J. Celotta, Aaron P. Fein, Eric W. Hudson, and Steven R. Blankenship, National Institute of Standards and Technology
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▲ Crystal Mandala
Twisted Crystal Description: When researchers synthesized a polymer using chiral monomers, as biology does in the construction of biopolymers such as proteins and DNA, they observed this stunning helical result. The structure emerges from a hierarchy of microstructures: About 2000 monomers string together and then repeatedly double back on one another to form a single lamella; these lamellae then stack by the thousands, like a deck of cards. A slight rotation between adjacent lamellae sums into a helical architecture. The helix is on the order of 1 µm wide. Courtesy: Stephen Z.D. Cheng and Christopher Y. Li, University of Akron
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Planet Fat Description: Take some cholesterol and mix it with
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