Image collection includes cell skeletons, guts and bugs, spider web-like nerve cells, cell death, zombie cells and glowing bacteria

Keeping physical material in good condition falls to a team of five full-time conservators

With submissions spanning 83 countries, competition was tough

NSF-funded work could lead to a better understanding of creativity

Lab professionals share their thoughts on artwork in the workplace.

This year, in a new partnership with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Arts, Science & Culture Initiative awarded grants to five teams composed of nine UChicago and three SAIC graduate students.

Growing up in a household of artists and engineers, Peter Thelin was destined for a career in which artistry mattered. Only for him, art has come in the form of manipulating the shapes, sizes and qualities of optics. And now, as one of the few remaining practitioners of hand-polishing optics, Thelin is passing his artistry along to the next generation of optics specialists.

Whether a close-up of a leafcutter ant, or a micrograph of the neurons derived from marmoset stem cells, or an MRI of the hidden pathways in the human brain, submissions to University of Wisconsin-Madison’s 2015 Cool Science Image Contest continue to put science and nature on eye-catching display.

As thesis writing approached, University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student Veronica Berns faced a conundrum. She knew how hard it was to describe her work to friends and family — indeed, anybody outside the tight clan of structural chemists. And that was particularly true since she concentrated on a category of should-be-impossible structures called “quasicrystals.”

A collaboration between Cornell University and the Kitchen Theatre Company (KTC) has found a new way to make physics irresistible, with “Physics Fair,” an original musical theater production.