The 2019 winners of the Northwestern Scientific Images Contest represent advances across a wide range of disciplines including medicine, chemistry, engineering, physics and astronomy. This gallery showcases both the breathtaking beauty and scientific innovation of contemporary research.
Judged by an interdisciplinary panel of local artists, scientists, educators and community leaders, these images were captured by Northwestern researcher students, staff and faculty. The winners were announced during an evening reception at Evanston Township High School, where the images were hosted within a gallery of more than 40 student artworks.
Read more: ‘Beauty of Science' Winner Captures Network Synchronization with Striking Image
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Real-world physical systems can often exhibit beautiful and intricate patterns, such as zebra stripes, sand dune ripples, or cloud formations. This image shows water in a petri dish that is placed on a vertically vibrating surface. When the vibrations are strong enough, patterns of waves form on the surface of the water.
A square pattern of waves is visible in this image, which is surprising given the circular shape of the dish. We have only recently made progress predicting these patterns with the aid of modern computers and advanced mathematics. Application of this finding will help us understand and control natural and engineered systems.
Zachary Nicolaou
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Tools & Techniques: Phantom VEO high speed camera
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We have all made bubbles by blowing air on a bubble wand dipped in a soap solution. Here, we make many small bubbles of uniform size by slowly injecting air into soapy water. The bubbles then arrange themselves in a uniform pattern-this is exactly how atoms arrange to form crystals. In fact, such ‘bubble rafts’ were first used in 1940 to understand how crystals form.
In this image, we see a single layer of bubbles arranged in a hexagonal pattern. The peculiar patterns are locations with two layers of bubbles sitting atop each other. Atomic crystals also show such irregular patterns, known as ‘crystal defects’.
Phalguni Shah
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Tools & Techniques: Moto G7 power
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In this image you can appreciate a dorsal root ganglia (DRG) from the mouse spinal cord. DRGs are clusters of neurons localized in the dorsal root of a spinal nerve. These neurons are responsible for some sensory modalities (for example touch); they transfer information perceived by the periphery of the body to the brain using their axons. In this picture, the neuronal axons (in yellow) spread out from the ganglia and are supported by satellite glial cells (in cyan).
Jean-Michel Paumier
Department of Neurology
Tools & Techniques: Confocal microscopy
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Meet the OHM Sponge. This Oleophilic (likes oil), Hydrophobic (hates water), Magnetic porous material can be used to separate oil and water. This material can absorb 30x its weight in oil, making it an ideal material for recovering oil from a spill. The sponge’s exceptional properties come from the nanomaterials attached to the sponge. Nanomaterials are so small (on the order of 100 atoms) that they have different properties than their bulk (normal sized) counter parts. For the OHM sponge we are using iron-oxide nanoparticles, which due to their size have exceptional magnetic susceptibility, meaning they can be pulled easily by a magnet. In this image, the bright green spots are the illuminated iron-oxide nanoparticles.
Stephanie Ribet
Department of Material Science and Engineering
Tools & Techniques: EPIC SEM FEI Quanta 650
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The vivid colors and patterns you see are a result of birefringence. Birefringence is an optical technique that can be used to determine the structural orientation in a transparent material by looking at the changes in the polarized light that is passing through. Usually light waves travel in all directions, but polarized light waves are travelling in only one direction (horizontal or vertical).
When you put a transparent material, like the plastic dish and tube in the image, in between two polarizers that are oriented perpendicularly, only the light that has been rotated by the material will pass through. Stress in the material changes the microscopic structure which rotates the light waves shining through, and we see this as bright patterns and colors aka birefringence.
Kelsey-Ann Leslie
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Tools & Techniques: iPhone 8+
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This image captures muscle sarcomeres, the smallest functional unit of muscle, from inside a living human. The consecutive green lines in the image shows the naturally occurring arrangement of sarcomeres. A whole muscle (ex. biceps) is made up of hundreds of thousands of sarcomeres.
For the biceps to produce force, these individual sarcomeres need to be shortened (green lines would come closer together). With the advent of this imaging technique (second harmonic generation microendoscopy) we are able to study how muscle sarcomeres change due to disease or following an injury or surgery.
Amy Adkins
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Tools & Techniques: “Zebrascope” - second harmonic generation microendoscopy
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My research involves analyzing the stress patterns that form in a drying drop of small particles suspended within a medium, which is called a colloidal system. In our everyday lives, these systems include milk, blood, and paint. Using a microscope, a dried drop containing large, plastic spheres that is heavily diluted with water is examined. In this image, there is a ring of accumulated particles that forms on the perimeter, which has been documented as the “coffee ring” effect. However, unlike the other drops, there are no cracks that pass through the center, as the larger particles instead clump around anything they may find, even themselves.
Yuchen Liu
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Tools & Techniques: Olympus IX83 Inverted Microscope
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Every symbol on this picture represents a different pigment cell in a fish skin pattern. We created this pattern using computer simulations of a mathematical model.
Zebrafish have stripes on their skin, but some fish that evolved from zebrafish have spots like these. Whether fish have spots or stripes, their patterns form because brightly-colored cells move around and organize themselves into a pattern. Think of these cells like birds interacting to form a flock in the sky -- they follow rules of behavior to make beautiful patterns.
With mathematical modeling and simulations, we search for the rules of behavior that pigment cells follow to create zebrafish stripes. When we change these rules in our model, different patterns form, like the spots in the picture. This shows one way that mathematics is used to study the evolution of skin pattern diversity in nature.
Alexandria Volkening
NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology
Tools & Techniques: Computer simulations of a mathematical model
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When growing cells outside the body, it is important to give them a safe place to attach and lay down roots. Like how plants need fertile soil, cells need nutrients to survive for long periods of time in a petri dish. Some experiments require cells alive for 60 days outside the body. One way to address this problem is to coat the surface of the dish with a biomaterial before laying the cells down.
The biomaterial can provide the necessary nutrients that the cells will need to thrive. Before planting the cells, researchers studied the stability of the coating and ensure that it would last for long periods of time submerged within the liquid that cells grow in. After leaving the material to incubate for 60 days, they dried the sample and made a scratch mark on the surface to measure the thickness of the coating. The instrument then colors the image by height. The red areas are peaks, and the blue areas are valleys on the surface. The height variation in this image is due to salts that were present as the coating dried. This caused the final image to appear like stained glass.
Alexandra Edelbrock & Zaida Álvarez
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Simpson Querry Institute
Tools & Techniques: Bruker Zygo 3D Optical Profiler
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Water vapor condenses into droplets when it encounters a cold surface. The surface was made to be a wavy pattern like a tilled farm. Droplets condensed on the surface are just like crops growing on the furrows. The droplet at the center of the image, which is analogous to a premature strawberry, was dyed red for visualizing its growth dynamics.
Yuehan Yao
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Tools & Techniques: Nikon D5500 DSLR, Nikon AF-S 85mm lens
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Directed Energy Deposition (DED) is a metal 3D printing process. In this process, small metal powders are blown through a nozzle onto a block of metal and melted with a high-powered laser to form new, solid metal. An object is made by creating many layers of new metal from the powders. DED is very popular for making complex or customizable parts, such as car engine blocks or hip implants. However, very small pores are commonly left in the part. These pores can cause catastrophic failures, meaning the object that was just made can suddenly break in half or have a large crack in it when it is being used. Therefore, it is important to understand how pores form and how to get rid of them. The powerful x-ray beam used to capture this image can show what is happening inside the metal as it is melted, such as pore formation or how powder is incorporated into the melt pool.
Samantha Webster
Department of Theoretical and Applied Mecanics
Tools & Techniques: Advanced Photon Source, Beamline 32-ID