There are roughly 8,000,000,000 grains of sand per cubic meter of beach, and roughly 700,000,000,000 cubic meters of beach on Earth. That's 5 sextillion grains of sand. An incomprehensible number, and yet every sand grain is microscopically unique. Like a snowflake, no two are the same.
my finished quilt for my undergraduate thesis show! my art practice lately has been spending time with small things the average person doesn’t notice or know about. this quilt is entirely hand printed and hand stitched. show label below:
Little Glass Houses, 2023
Hand-dyed and unbleached muslin, cotton batting, mercerized cotton thread and block printing ink
Diatoms are a prolific single-celled microorganism, found in water and soil across the planet. This quilt "magnifies" them for the human eye in a composition that mirrors the view of a slide under the microscope. The cell walls of diatoms are likened to glass, as they are made up of a thin layer of transparent silica. Replaced by soft cotton and thread, this quilt gives them a dimensional quality that is lost under a microscope.
various tissue samples viewed through the microscope of my high school pathophysiology class. these have been sitting in my google drive since 2016. i didn’t label them so i couldn’t tell you what any of them are displaying now.
“A young scientist who worked in the jungles of Thailand has been awarded a national prize for his invention of a $2 paper microscope that can be taken on field expeditions.
If a scientist wants to study something at the microscopic level, they need a microscope, which if they are deep in the Amazon Rainforest presents a serious problem.
Stanford University bioengineer Manu Prakash saw in his team’s $50,000 microscope a serious contradiction. As well as being bulky and ridiculously challenging to transport to remote locations, it needed training from skilled technicians to know how to use it. It also had to stay well out of the weather and other environmental impacts.
So he invented a portable one. Costing $1.75, the Foldscope has a 140x zoom, which is a small enough field to see a malaria parasite inside a cell...
“I want to bring science into everyone’s hands, make it more personal,” Prakash told CNN. “We have decoupled everyday life from the process of science.”
The ultimate in schoolhouse science, Prakash’s invention has sold 1.6 million units, mostly to schools in America, but serious scientists are also using it—like Dr. Kirti Nitnaware in India who works on the isolation and characterization of bioactive metabolites in cyanobacteria.
She used the Foldscope last year to isolate a new species of cyanobacteria. For this and other reasons, Prakash received the 2022 Golden Goose Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), parent company of the scientific journal, Science.
“The Golden Goose Award reminds us that potential discoveries could be hidden in every corner and illustrates the benefits of investing in basic research to propel innovation,” said Sudip S. Parikh, chief executive officer at AAAS.” -via Good News Network, 9/20/22