The majority of my cookies were edible replicas of LB or blood agar plates with your basic bacterial streaks or streaks to single  colonies:

And here is a sample slide from my lecture – a baked depiction of some E. coli loving!

People in my lab also got a kick out of these cookies – they were all devoured within the same day!

I have always thought photos taken under a microscope (micrographs) were really neat. Hair and little bugs and fingertips look really cool and different under the microscope but I haven’t really thought of looking at liquid under there since fifth grade when we looked at pond water where paramecia and algae abounded. I have never though of looking at alcoholic beverages under the microscope because, well, hopefully there is none of that in there (ok maybe yeast I guess). But what if you crystallized it?!

…..Ok, so that’s like ochem lab (oh, the horror!)(not really, I liked o-chem).

Ok, but what if you crystallized it and then looked at it with polarized light?

BAM.

The folks at bevshots.com have done just that, and the results are quite lovely. Each type of booze creates a different crystal landscape (although, I imagine crystallization conditions have a lot to do with it too) and beautiful, bold colors. I would totally hang one of these on my wall: it is abstract with great contrast and interesting shapes, but still has an interesting story behind it. Now, onto important stuff, should I choose based on my favorite drinks (not beer, so the above is out. DARN!) or just on the way it looks?? Boy, what tough choice. Here are some more of my favorites just because I think they’re nice.

Image credits:
crystallized booze from bevshots.com. And if you’re wondering, the top, blue image is English Pure Brewed Lager and the orange and black one is Japanese Dry Lager.
lab photo from here

Soap in a petri dish, made to look like streaked bacteria!

Since I have to do this most days, I can appreciate the fact that this looks pretty real! Great idea Makers Market user
cleanerscience! Even though it’s supposed to smell like apples, I can’t say that I would love rubbing this on my hands, but it would fit perfectly in my science themed bathroom!

To get one of your own click here!

A DNA-adorned wreath depicting a virus infecting a bacterial cell:

A fun interpretation of the periodic table in the form of a postcard:

And finally, a nerdy piece of wall art inspired by the amino acids:

Hopefully that delighted the nerd in you all! There is certainly more to come! As a little preview, I plan to work on a cuff bracelet as inspired by this post. I’m not sure on the design yet, but the gorgeous embroidery work on Kootoyoo.com certainly reminded me of DNA!

Hm beads are pretty but this was a science swap! How can beads be science-y? What looks like beads in science? Test tubes don’t look like beads….Bacteria doesn’t look like beads. Proteins don’t either (well in some cases they do). Hmmm.

Here is a list of the qualities beads must have:
1. A hole all the way through.

Though not round, pipet tips match the extensive qualifications of a bead (see above) and if worked right can look surprisingly elegant!
Behold: pipet tip earrings!

The top is a ready made earring finding. I added a bead at the top, then through the inside of the pipet tip a spiral of wire, lending visual interest to the cone and ending in another bead drop.

When in this setting, who would have imagined that these items can be so dangerous when shot off the end of a pipet at your fellow lab mate?

I mean, what? I’d never do such a thing. Here, look at these pretty earrings.

Both photos were taken by my wonderful swap partner known on Craftster as “whenfishfly”.

Much more interesting was the video and audio composition (I hesitate to call it music) designed and composed by Ryoji Ikeda. It is very hard to describe the experience in words, but it was an interesting and stunning look at ways to visualize different sorts of mind-bogglingly huge data sets and was all tied together with audio motifs. The aesthetic was very harsh and mostly black and white, but when combined with the sound and precise on-screen movements, the stellar quality of the production was almost tangible. Included in the production was computer-generated imagery of hard drive errors, genes, protein structure, star positions, and likely other data sets that were completely abstract. Below are some stills of the video taken from the website. They probably don’t look that impressive when viewed out of context, but imagine them moving with strange digital sounds and also flashing.

One aspect of this group will be the “artscience exhibition” described on their website as:

“Contemporary artists and designers increasingly create around cutting edges of science ranging from biology to the environment. The Artscience Exhibition program will invite leading contemporary artists and designers to develop works of art and design around science themes relevant to major science partners to THE LABORATORY including the Wyss Institute, the Harvard Initiative for Global Health (HIGH) and SEAS. These works, developed in partnership with the Paris-based art and design innovation center Le Laboratoire, will be exhibited in the lobby and hall areas and frame the context for public exhibition evenings, conferences, and interdisciplinary faculty discussions around issues that bridge the arts “

Updates to come!

To find out, I decided that the obvious solution to this pressing question was to make a quilt.

DNA has four bases, adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine, represented by the letters a, t, c, g. These letters are just abstract representations of the real chemical structures of the bases, and not really great to look at when there are bunches in a row (like in actual DNA sequences). Example:

Informative, but not very nice to look at. Since the sequence is made up of only four letters, it is an easy task to convert each letter into a separate color. Additionally, there are two kinds of nucleotides—purines (adenine, guanine) and pyrimidines (thymine, cytosine). These groupings share similar chemical structures and so wouldn’t it be neat if the purines were the same color group and the pyrimidines a different one. And then wouldn’t it be neat if you could make a gene into a quilt??

Woah.

Here, each square represents a base pair and each triangle in the base represents one base within the pair. The colors represent bases as:

dark green = guanine,
light green = adenine,
dark blue= thymine,
light blue = cytosine

and this quilt shows the first 900 basepairs of the NADP gene of Agrobacterium vitis as shown in text above.

Now isn’t that nicer to look at?

So, a secret message didn’t appear, and neither did the face of jesus (whut), but it is interesting anyway to see what DNA looks like when represented by an alternate alphabet.

Quilting details:
The quilt fits a queen-sized bed. The squares are 2″ per side. And the quilting was done in this pattern:

It houses the best chocolate bar out there. That’s right, Almond Joys. And not only does it house these mouth-watering treats, it was also constructed with a science twist.

The top is an abstraction of negative charges (in red) and positive charges (in green) coming together to close the box. All that was used was some card stock, an exacto, and a little bit of glue. That’s really all it takes to make some ionic joy!