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Case Western Reserve University (CWRU)

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First Place, CWRU Category. Taken outside in ambient lighting and digitally untouched, this picture shows one of the amazing properties of light: refraction. The semi-transparent layer of skin on the outside of the hand is just the right thickness to split the white light into its colored components. Small fragments of the hand are all acting like a prism giving the effect of holding tiny rainbows right in the palm. The effect is seen best when slightly out of focus, but is easily seen by eye when looking at the right angle. This image is important to me as a reminder that nature has lots of amazing surprises hiding right under our noses, and that we never have to look too far to find a sense of awe.
This image shows 5?m polystyrene Janus particles with a gold cap. Janus particles are used as models to understand various biological phenomena such as collective cell motion. The active motion of such particles is enabled via variations in physiochemical properties in the media which typically interacts with the cap and causes propulsion "active motion". The Janus particles were sliced with electrons to reveal the surface layers on the particle. Student of CWRU faculty member Chris Wirth - ECHE.
Runner-up, CWRU category. This piece is meant to capture how amazing our minds are. How our brains, simple masses of meat with electricity running through them, are able to store memories, think critically, and grow. Our entire reality is made up of our brain receiving inputs from only 5 senses. And everyone's senses see or hear or feel things a little differently. So we see the apple, we feel the apple, we smell, taste, hear the apple, and from this abstract concept of a thing, we have the power to understand what the apple is, how it tastes , where and how they grow. This image is meant to show this process, from the sense, in this case sight, seeing the apple, to the neurons in the brain lighting up with recognition as it recalls the memories of what the apple is. Although you may think you are the only one feeling some way or experiencing something in a certain way, sometimes it's important to step back and realize you are not the only one. When you look past all the layers on the surface, we are all the same.
Runner-up, CWRU category. Hidden Estrus is a research project exploring the facades of fertility in humans and other mammals. During times of fertility, female felines release pheromones, rhesus monkeys' faces darken, and baboons display exaggerated redness and swelling of the genitalia, known as sexual swellings. Human females, however, conceal ovulation and display limited outward physiological signs that would signal periods of fertility. Without highly explicit markers of ovulation, can other humans detect fertility through invisible biological cues? Supposing the invisible is made visible, the concealed is revealed? What repercussions could this have for human social and sexual interactions?The project catalogs personal daily saliva samples over the duration of a full menstrual cycle. The saliva is then examined under a microscope, and during a short window, displays crystalline salt structures which show a ferning, leaf-like pattern. The ferning pattern indicates an oestrogen surge and an increased chance of conceiving. The image displayed here is a saliva sample taken day 13, which was imaged using a microscope, then digitally drawn and laser etched into racy fluorescent pink plexiglass at the Sears think[box].
Science helps us understand the general laws that govern our physical world. With this knowledge, we can build flying machines, build homes, and protect our family and friends. Although humans still have a lot to learn, the step-by-step approach of the scientific method helps the world move forward only when we make decisions based on all of the facts, including those that are not as convenient.I am showing here, etched in stone, the evolutionary tree with the placement of dinosaurs in time. These stones hold vital information, but were made in sandstone to demonstrate the fragility of facts. The stone, and facts, requires care and protection if we choose to follow the scientific path.This is important to me due to the recent attacks on science. I worry what world we are heading towards. Although the main piece is about defending science, I show the historical method of using stone to store information in contrast with the think[box] laser, a tool developed by science.
Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) is caused by a single base change, from adenine to thymine, on the HBB gene. Hemoglobin, a molecule in RBCs, is responsible for delivering oxygen to tissues throughout the body. Sickle cell hemoglobin, or hemoglobin S, forms chains in the cell, causing normal cells to sickle and become stiff. This can obstruct blood vessels and ultimately cause damage to organs. This is what causes the symptoms and complications of SCD. Recently, researchers and scientists have been conducting trials to cure the disease using gene therapy. If scientists can switch the mutated gene back to the normal gene, the symptoms will no longer occur. So far, there have been some successful cases. This is a huge breakthrough in science. Many people believe gene therapy will continue to develop and be a more effective cure in the future. This would heavily improve the quality of patients' lives and has the potential to even cure the disease. Collaboration with Dr. Umut Gurkan- Case Biomanufacturing and Microfabrication Laboratory
Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) is caused by a single base change, from adenine to thymine, on the HBB gene. Hemoglobin, a molecule in RBCs, is responsible for delivering oxygen to tissues throughout the…
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The purpose of this project was to create an informational poster on the effects of marijuana dab carts. This poster contains crucial information to a lay audience, since it is hard to cater to the 'stoner' audience. The importance of the information shown is emphasized by the growing number of vaping related illnesses. The CDC stated that over 70% of vaping related illnesses were caused by dab carts bought on the black market, and more specifically has linked it to the vitamin E oil that is added to cut the marijuana oil. Vitamin E oil is added purely to make a higher profit, but it is having drastic health effects on those who inhale it.
New materials are needed to efficiently storage energy for the growing need of the modern society. This image provides a physical picture of an electrode-electrolyte interface within an energy storage device that is based on novel solvents that are synthesized and studied in Prof. Burcu Gurkan's laboratory in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. The interfaces such as the one portrayed here are often buried in the system and challenging to image at the molecular scale to understand the various steps involved in energy storage devices such as lithium-ion batteries. This image was created by Joe Williams (Cleveland Institute of Art alum) and was inspired by the study led by the PhD student Jeffrey Klein in Gurkan's group. It was featured in the cover of Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics (Klein et al., PCCP 2019, 21, 3712-3720).
Second place, CWRU category. Invisible to the naked eye, this photograph of the Rosette Nebula was captured from a backyard telescope on a cold winter's night. This stellar flower rests near the constellation of Orion and consists of young stars that heat and excite surrounding gas into emitting light resembling a rose. Revealing something so faint and distant requires layering images captured over the course of several hours. Photographing any nebula is a very delicate and involved process that requires a blend of art and science. Light pollution, equipment limitations, and digital noise all challenge the quality of deep-sky images. This picture reveals one of the many hidden beauties of our universe and instills a sense of wonder.
Third Place, CWRU category. Output view of software tracking body parts of a tethered, flying fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) from a high-speed video filmed at one hundred frames per second. The fly beats its wings approximately two hundred twenty times per second, and so even at this high frame rate, they appear as blurs. As the front edge of the blur corresponds to the farthest forward point in the wingstroke during that frame, we obtain an estimate of the power of the wingstroke by measuring this edge. By taking the difference in the edges of the two wingstroke blurs, we obtain an estimate of the direction in which the fly is steering.
Runner-up, CWRU category. For a moment, time stopped, and I was staring into nothingness. A baffling scene such as this with prevailing eerie silence, can make you forget the world around you. All your ego starts melting out, and you start feeling so inferior in front of this mighty nature.What was causing those reflections? Certainly it's water, but it cannot be a river or a sea as it is stagnant. Let me tell you a fact! It was neither a lake. We were in Bonneville Salt Flats! It was supposed to be hundreds of acres of just flat land densely covered with salt and salt alone.My friend took a leap of faith and stepped into the water to find that it was only a couple of inches of water throughout. As she tapped on water, we could see beautiful ripples emerging out. The reason for the presence of water was a snow fall that occurred few days ago. Since the snow melts quickly in the presence of salt, the snow had settled down as water and had created this spectacle. We were lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time.
I took this image my first year at CWRU one weekend when visiting the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Every time I see it, I am reminded of the hidden gems that exist within University Circle, and Cleveland as a whole: from museums to schools to cultural organizations, we are surrounded by people learning and teaching about every scientific field one can imagine. I hope this photo helps remind viewers that science does not have to be intimidating. It's not just those challenging classes in school, or the research labs doing amazingly complex things: the term "science" also encompasses who we are as people and what we know about the world around us. You don't need lab equipment or training to visit a museum; however, no matter how many times you visit, every time is an opportunity to learn something new about the scientific world. By sharing this photo I hope to inspire more CWRU students to take advantage of the opportunities around us, and also to spark the Cleveland pride in us all. We live in an area bursting with fascinating things to learn about -- let's go explore!
I took this image my first year at CWRU one weekend when visiting the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Every time I see it, I am reminded of the hidden gems that exist within University Circle,…
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If you have ever been kept up at night wondering what a cicada wing looks like at 10,000 magnification, now you can rest easy. Or at least a little easier, because this is not an actual cicada wing, but is a polymer replica of a cicada wing. The tightly-packed, uniformly distributed pillars observed make cicada wings incredibly water-resistant and replicas like that pictured here could be applied to coat any material you want to make water-resistant. However, that�s not really why my research group is interested in these wings. Instead, we want to cast these polymer cicada wing structures on electrodes, immerse them in a fluorescent gel, run an electric current across the electrodes, and use a microscope to see how the fluorescent gel interacts with the structures! Although we are still in the early stages of this project, the interactions we observe between the gels and nanostructures, be it the cicada wing structure pictured here or any number of other surface nanostructures, will have implications that help us understand how proteins and DNA move around within cells.
Ovarian cancer is the most common cause of gynecologic cancer death in the United States and the second most common gynecologic malignancy with less than a 30% response to treatment. Considering the costs and side-effects of chemotherapy, there is an unmet clinical need in ovarian cancer treatment. However, by calculating computer-generated patterns of spatial arrangements between tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) and cancer cells, one can identify long-term versus short-term survivors and thereby predict who is going to benefit from chemotherapy followed by their debulking surgery. These features are derived from standard H&E pathologic slides, identifying epithelial regions of the tissue, segmenting cancer nuclei and tumor infiltrating lymphocytes and calculating interactions between clusters of cells. These steps are all performed using artificial intelligence and deep-learning models with high accuracy and enables us to understand and investigate immune-related patterns that scientist had never looked before. These findings suggest that dispersion of TILs throughout the tumor is associated with better treatment response and is matched with genomic data.
Hopping on a plane, your inner child hopes you can sit next to the window and experience the uplifting experience of taking off away from your everyday reality which gets smaller and distant as you leave the tarmac. You find yourself soaring weightless and look outside to see the majestic cirrostratus looking like cotton-candy. In the distance you want to believe you can see the 'edge of the world' from which you see the sun rise up and paint the sky in hues of orange and yellow. The limitless horizon seems to stretch on and on as the plane moves further, making you ponder on whether you could perpetually keep gaining time as you moved back across time-zones...
This is a Computed Tomography scan and the corresponding surgical tissue scan from a lung cancer patient. The simple patterns in the above image are not obvious to the human eye but can be used for predicting whether or not the patient will survive, have recurrence or respond to certain treatments. The first row shows radiological patterns obtained using advanced mathematical tools capturing the texture of the lung nodule. The bottom line represents histological patterns discovered by analyzing the architecture of cancerous cells and immune cells.
All aspects of this image are elements of extraterrestrial rocks photographed through a cross-polarizing microscope specialized for rocks. These rock samples were examined in a lab setting during a class in the EEPS department at CWRU. I've taken these elements of what I like to call "space rocks" and warped them into a fun little aquarium scene. I think that the most interesting part of planetary/geological sciences is the microscope work and I think the public should be more exposed to the beautiful world of petrographic microscopy one way or another.
Though you won't find these materials in a saxophone, they are just as cutting edge in the engineering field as John Coltrane after he climbed his way to the top of the jazz scene. These materials are about one million times smaller than a step you'll scale on a typical staircase and can allow for remarkable innovations to occur. By scaling down the size of these materials to the nano-scale, their properties are greatly enhanced enabling applications in nano-scale batteries, superconductors, catalysis, sensing, and more. When engineering materials in the nano-scale the world becomes giant.
Though you won't find these materials in a saxophone, they are just as cutting edge in the engineering field as John Coltrane after he climbed his way to the top of the jazz scene. These materials are…
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Millions of years ago, uranium was formed from the merging of blistering neutron stars. Heated earth waters carried this metal into ore deposits where it became highly concentrated. The given photograph shows a product of this, a small mineral of uraninite. Our specimen constantly emits alpha particles, a type of atomic level particle, uraninite's specific form of ionizing radiation. This same phenomena, at an elevated scale, can create energy to power cities. With the help of dry ice underneath and isopropyl alcohol soaked fabric above, we can visualize a wonder typically invisible to the human eye. If you look carefully through the mist of the evaporated dry ice at the bottom of the mineral, you can see the energized particles charging the alcohol molecules. This excitation of particles results in rays of energy leaving our ancient rock sample, as if the alpha particles are airplanes leaving jet streams through a cloudy sky.
Millions of years ago, uranium was formed from the merging of blistering neutron stars. Heated earth waters carried this metal into ore deposits where it became highly concentrated. The given…
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Deep eutectic solvents (DESs) are a relatively new class of solvents with a wide variety of potential applications including, not limited, to separations and extractions, electrodeposition, catalysis, and energy storage. DESs are one of a kind liquids formed by two compounds, usually solids, that upon mixing creates a liquid with a significantly depressed melting point compared to the parent compounds. As a result, they have solvation capability for a wide variety of solutes and are stable under a wide range of conditions. DESs are often regarded as 'green solvents' or 'designer solvents' owing to their tunable properties. The Breakthrough Electrolyte for Energy Storage (BEES) - an Energy Frontier Research Center of the US Department of Energy led by Case Western Reserve University develops novel DESs to enable new opportunities in flow batteries that are safe, nonflammable and energy efficient. This image was featured as the cover in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters highlighting the study by a team of BEES researchers: Burcu Gurkan (CWRU), Henry Squire (CWRU) and Emily Pentzer (TAMU).
Dr. David Ferrier was a nineteenth-century physiologist known for his work in charting the motor cortex of dogs via electrical stimulation. While these findings contributed significantly to the field of neurology and our understanding of the human brain, he attracted the vocal ire of the antivivisectionist movement for his use of animal subjects. This public controversy over his work eventually left its mark on late Victorian gothic fiction and science fiction. Ferrier is the direct inspiration for both Wilkie Collins' villainous Dr. Benjulia and H. G. Wells' insane Dr. Moreau. He is also mentioned in Bram Stoker's Dracula, which both praises Ferrier's experimental work and draws on it in its accurate depictions of motor cortex injuries. This piece depicts the human brain as constructed out of the imagery of these novels, showing Collins' tormented animals, Wells' half-constructed puma woman, and Stoker's vampire--in addition to Ferrier's own face. The area of the motor cortex is a streak of red blood. By highlighting how apprehensions over one man's work had a major influence on lasting, genre-defining works of literature, I wish to show the ways in which scientific research and our perception of it leave unanticipated ripples throughout our cultural landscape.
My piece called \"What's Inside?\" is a cyanotype of a dissected gray treefrog. Gray treefrogs are common throughout Ohio and the eastern United States. Like other amphibians, they undergo a complex bodily change from living in the water to living on the land, a process called metamorphosis. Their internal anatomy changes dramatically as they transition from being herbivores to carnivores! And we know that these organs can change shape and size depending on varying environmental conditions.The intention of the artwork is to illustrate how connected we are to the natural world. While a frog may look very different from us, the inside of a frog is much like a human; we both have lungs, a digestive system, and a heart. We share these internal organs, and we share this world.
My piece called "What's Inside?" is a cyanotype of a dissected gray treefrog. Gray treefrogs are common throughout Ohio and the eastern United States. Like other amphibians, they undergo a complex…
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Depicted is a slice of bone tissue that was stained for visualization with a simple, shortwave UV LED. Histological examinations such as these typically require multiple, time-consuming steps to obtain similar results as the tissues must be sliced into sections of only a few microns in thickness. However, recent advancements in LED technology have made it possible to use simple equipment while still limiting the penetration of light into biological samples to very shallow, surface depths. Since no special preparation is needed, biological tissues could potentially be stained in this manner in an operating room to confirm a diagnosis in minutes instead of hours or days.