For the first time ever, using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have seen a comet reverse its spin.

Comet 41P didn’t just slow down—it nearly stopped, then began rotating in the opposite direction. Why? Jets of gas erupting from its surface, acting like tiny thrusters and reshaping the comet in real time.

This rare observation (shown in this science visualization) offers a front-row seat to how small bodies evolve on human timescales: https://news.stsci.edu/4c2u6hv

"A qubit made from photons lives in the polarization property of light. This is depicted here as individual glowing wavelets. Coated pieces of glass, such as the cube shown in the video, can separate out different polarization states of light. Other elements can switch the polarization from one state (vertical) to the other (horizontal). Photon qubits can also live in other properties, such as color." (Caption via The Quantum Atlas)

One of a series of videos I made for UMD's Quantum Atlas:

I'll soon be available for more work like this, kindly contact me via:

Although my work tends to be primarily physics-related — from subatomic to cosmic scales — I'm also interested in other fields e.g. Long COVID research & advocacy.

Watch as this visualization reveals the stars of the Orion constellation in three dimensions. The familiar pattern on the sky distorts into a whole new perspective.

The sequence begins with a view of Orion in our sky. Featured in this scene are some of the night sky's brightest stars, including Betelgeuse and Rigel within Orion, and Sirius at its lower left, a star in the constellation Canis Major.

UIC student Madison Rice’s illustration on the December 6, 2019, cover of the Journal of Biological Chemistry depicts a molecular scene in which peptides, or pieces of a protein, from of a foreign material (red and green spheres) are partially bound to MHC class I molecules (see through with orange and red ribbons) waiting to be trimmed.

UIC student illustrates cover of national journal

 Recently, University of Illinois at Chicago described a new mechanism to detect foreign material during early immune responses. Their paper, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, was selected as “Editors’ Pick” and for the cover of journal. UIC’s Madison Rice, a graduate student in biomedical visualization, illustrated the cover.

“When starting the program, I had no idea that I was going to make work good enough to be on a cover of a journal,” Rice said.

“I’m very pleased with what Maddie did,” said Marlene Bouvier, senior author and UIC professor of microbiology and immunology at the College of Medicine. “My lab and I attempted to create several covers, but they all looked like figures that should be inside a paper. We tended to think too precisely, which is not the best for a featured cover. There had to be a balance between art and science while still making it visually attractive. She was able to find that balance and made a stunning image that conveyed the main story of our research without words. I think she did a superb job and people at the journal recognized that as well.” 

Rice, who is also president of the Student Association of Medical Artists, began her collaboration with the Bouvier lab through her graduate program.

“Getting to talk with Marlene about the paper let me dive back into my science degree background, which was cool,” Rice said. “They have this novel way of thinking about MHC class I proteins presenting antigens on the surface of cells. We talked about what we were going to highlight, what we wanted people to interpret and how we would visually represent it with colors and perspectives. So, we came up with sketches and I used the 3D models from the protein database to model it. I put the protein models in a scene, processed them and submitted it to the journal.

“I am really thankful about this experience,” she said. “Being able to get my work out right now is great because I can get recognition and also receive insights from critiques by people who are well known in the field. I am learning so much.”

“I think it’s wonderful to include art into STEM fields,” Bouvier said. “BVis students are amazingly talented artistically and most have a background in science. They can contribute to making figures in publications and posters, generating websites for labs and help us convey our science on social media platforms.”

“As we move forward with new discoveries in research, it’s becoming increasingly important for people like us, medical illustrators, to visually depict findings in order for a broad audience to understand them,” Rice said. “I would really love if people would learn to appreciate art in STEM and why we need more people in my field.”

Rice’s work can also be found on Instagram @rice_visuals.

This time-lapse is one of the most compelling — and unsettling — visualizations of evolution we’ve ever seen.  The overhead footage depicts a strain of the gut bacterium E. coli evolving to be 1,000 times more resistant to an antibiotic in a matter of 11 days, starkly visualizing the speed with which diseases can adapt to the drugs we throw their way.

This striking demonstration plays out on a giant petri dish called the Microbial Evolution and Growth Arena plate (MEGA-plate, for short), but the researchers who designed it refuse to take credit for it.  “We really did not invent the MEGA-plate.  It was invented in Hollywood, of all places,” says Roy Kishony, a systems biologist at the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology.  “I don’t know if you know this movie Contagion, but it has a billboard ad that was done for it, and it is basically a gigantic petri dish,” he says.

The Contagion billboard gave Kishony an idea.  If he and his team — including Harvard biologists Tami Lieberman and Michael Baym — could build a large enough petri dish, they could use it to visualize antibiotic resistance in a lucid way.  It’s no secret that drug-resistant superbugs are making it increasingly difficult to treat everything from gonorrhea to UTIs, and evidence suggests the threat is likely to increase.  But antibiotic resistance is a tough problem to visualize — and not just because bacteria are microscopic.  Acquired resistance is a concept that can be difficult to impress upon non-scientists, especially if they just wants to know why they can’t buy their favorite antimicrobial soap anymore.

So Kishony and his team built the MEGA-plate and filled it with a media on which E. coli could grow, die, evolve, and propagate.  Next they dosed the media with greater and greater concentrations of antibiotics; the outermost reaches of the plate received no antibiotic whatsoever, but by the time they got to the center of the plate, Kishony and his team had laced the agar with antibiotics at 1000 times the concentration needed to kill their starting strain of E. coli.  Then they switched on their video camera, seeded the antibiotic-free section of the plate with bacteria, and watched what happened.

It took some doing (the first few colonies succumbed to contamination and water condensation) but eventually they had the movie you see here.  “It suddenly looked like magic,” Kishony says.  The video is an 11-day time-lapse.  Every second of video translates to about five hours of real time.

In it, you can watch as the bacterial colony spreads, white and blob-like, across the agar in the Petri dish.  Whenever the colony encounters a higher concentration of antibiotic, it pauses.  Untold bacteria perish.  But seconds later, a small extension of the colony crosses the threshold.  These pioneering microbes, which have evolved resistance to the higher concentration of antibiotic, go on to colonize this new, drug-dense territory.  That is until they encounter the next antibacterial boundary.  The process then repeats.  At each new stage, mutant bacteria bridge the divide and surge onward, begetting an increasingly resistant strain of E. coli.

Kishony and his team knew this would happen, but that doesn’t make the MEGA-plate pointless.  For starters, it’s an uncommonly powerful visualization of evolution, and its role in the rise of superbugs.  It also gives biologists a tool to better analyze how those superbugs develop.  From the sound of it, this video is the first of many.  “We plan on mapping all the different ways bacteria can become resistant, and using this to develop diagnostic tools that can foresee the future,” Kishony says.  With that, physicians might learn more about how these pathogens evolve — and what we can do to stop them.

Video at link.

A fantastic way of visualizing why it's essential to take antibiotics only when they're necessary, and to complete the full course of medication.  Not to mention justification for removing ineffective antibacterial compounds from our soap that create conditions for breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Bonus points for being inspired by 2011′s Contagion.