Exhibit showcases scientists’ creativity

The scientific process doesn't simply yield answers or breakthroughs, but also some stunning sights along the way. Nowhere is this more evident than in Binghamton University's annual Art of Science competition. This year, more than 30 researchers, professors, staff and students from around campus submitted evidence capturing the artistry of their work - both visible and invisible to the naked eye.

From scenes of the great outdoors to photos of tiny structures and tissues beneath a microscope, here is a closer look at a few of this year's entries.

Capturing the navel of the world

Whenever Binghamton archaeologist Carl Lipo and his research team make the 10-plus-hour trip from New York to Rapa Nui, they must lug briefcases of drones and bags heaping with batteries through TSA.

Image Credit: Jonathan Cohen.

Opening reception April 30

The Art of Science exhibition will open Wednesday, April 30, outside the Center of Excellence's Symposium Hall, as part of Binghamton University's Research Days. The opening reception is from 4-5:30 p.m., with award winners being announced at 4:30 p.m.

A $5,000 drone is the linchpin of their fieldwork, which involves systematically photographing and mapping out the entirety of that 14-by-10-mile island off the coast of Chile. The researchers cannot risk stashing it in the cargo of the plane.

"We end up with all these carry-on bags that weigh a million pounds. Every time, it's explaining, 'This is a drone,'" Lipo said. "The TSA people are more and more used to it all the time. In the old days, they were like, 'What the hell is this?'"

Last summer, Lipo took two undergraduates to Rapa Nui, touching down amid a balmy and breezy Southern Hemisphere winter. Rapa Nui (previously known as Easter Island) is small - about the size of Vestal, Binghamton, Johnson City and Endicott combined, according to Lipo.

Despite the size, he said, "From an archaeological perspective, it's like Disneyland."

Rapa Nui is nicknamed "the navel of the world," covered in lush greens and dotted with a few volcanoes. In the center is its main quarry, Rano Raraku, a cliff where the island's famous moai statues were painstakingly carved then brought to ground level.

Lipo captured this towering quarry in his photo submitted to the Art of Science's The World Around Us category, using his drone to take a series of photos in 360 degrees, before stitching them together to create a single panorama. The tiny, shadowy specks beneath the navel-like quarry are the three-story tall moai peppering the island.

"It's what we dreamed of in the old days, where you just tell [the drone] the mission, press the button, it goes and takes itself off," he said.

Lipo's work is one of the first to attempt to generate a comprehensive, high-resolution model of the entire island, including this quarry. But this documentation has been a long time coming.

When he began working on Rapa Nui in 2001, the closest things to drones were flying kites and hydrogen blimps with digital cameras suspended off them. Any pictures taken were thanks to mechanical fingers pressing down on the camera buttons.

"Of course, with the kites, it depends on where the wind is, so it would almost never be over what we were trying to map," he said.

Thanks to advancements in drone technology, now these goals have become feasible - as long as things go right. Between Chilean hawks that dive-bomb the drones they see as threats and strong winds that threaten to crash the quadcopters, piloting them is no less stressful.

"It's this interesting balance between trusting the technology and then not trusting the technology," Lipo said.

But even after over 20 years spent flying to and from the island, Lipo learns something new every time. Whether craning his neck up to stare into the face of a moai that weighs about as much as a Boeing 747, or being surrounded on all sides by the ocean and evidence of human resilience in the face of colonization, disease and limited resources, Rapa Nui brings a sense of awe that never goes away.

"With concerns about the world as it is today, you worry, 'Oh my God, everything's falling apart.' But you realize when you do archaeology that the world falls apart all the time," Lipo said. "And then people get through it."

Splitting nature's harmonies

In staff scientist Anju Sharma's submission to Visualizing the Unseen, what looks like intricate arches and leafy veins is actually the inside of an intact conch shell, no bigger than your palm.

Conch shells are a blend of biology, artistry and acoustics. These 3D images, acquired using the Xradia's Versa 620 X-ray microscope, reveal Fibonacci spiral patterns inside the shell that create a resonant chamber of harmonic frequencies. Image Credit: Anju Sharma, senior scientist, S3IP Center of Excellence. At the Analytical and Diagnostics Laboratory in the Innovative Technologies Complex is a special 3D X-ray microscope, capable of virtually cross-sectioning any sample without physically slicing it. The Xradia Versa 620 X-ray Microscope might look like a large cabinet at first, but behind lead doors, it beams X-rays through a sample that rotates on a stage. Additional lenses inside allow researchers to zoom in to the sample and observe features at sub-micron resolution, about a fiftieth of a human hair.

Similarly to how bones show up white because X-rays can't pass through them, the resulting black-and-white image depends on the composition of the sample. The microscope takes more than a thousand of such images in rotational steps, which are then reconstructed and rendered into a 3D object.

One day, Sharma decided to scan a conch shell, gluing it to a small platform and loading it into the machine. These shells have been used as wind instruments in rituals, wars, festivals and mythology across many cultures. She was curious about exactly what inside those shells could produce such distinct sounds.

The resulting CT scan precisely splits the shell, revealing the intricate spiral structures inside that create a unique cavity able to resonate harmonic sounds - combining biology, physics and acoustics. The data can be spliced to make sense of its 3D structure. Depending on which slice you pick, you might see an image that resembles a heart or even a face.

"We try to improvise the instrumentation techniques to analyze all kinds of sample types, materials, shapes and sizes," Sharma said, "and achieve the best imaging resolution and contrast in order to understand their internal design and microstructure."

This play is important, because where Sharma works at the S3IP Center of Excellence, scanning defective electronics and devices is a regular pastime. The ADL's machine has X-rayed everything from speed sensors in jet engines to regular cell phones.

"Once we know where the failure happened using this non-destructive technique, then we can actually cut the sample in exactly that position, open it up and understand what went wrong," she said.

The machine is incredibly versatile. Sharma has had researchers bring in retinal cells, fossils, rocks, face masks and even deer legs that have been fractured by bullets. The resulting images can look highly artistic - from ghost-like electronic defects to smartwatch circuitry resembling subway tunnels.

Growing neurons out of skin cells

Upstairs from the ADL is the Engineering Multicellular Systems Lab, led by Tracy Hookway, associate professor of biomedical engineering. Inside tall incubators are trays upon trays of plates, containing living heart cells and neurons - all engineered out of pluripotent stem cells.

Neural rosettes (red) are polarized neuroprogenitors in 2D cultures of pluripotent stem cells, reminiscent of early neural tube formation in vivo. Image Credit: Muhammad Arslan Tayyab, doctoral candidate, Department of Biomedical Engineering. Collaborator: Tracy Hookway, associate professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering. Our bodies contain reserves of stem cells in case of injury, lab doctoral student Arslan Tayyab explained. Induced pluripotent stem cells are generated from the skin, then reprogrammed into the pluripotent stage, from which they can transform into any cells we need. In Tayyab's case, those are parasympathetic neural cells, which interact with the heart's cardiomyocytes to slow down its beating.

One of Tayyab's submissions to Art of Science depicts neurons in the process of differentiation, flowering like a garden of red roses beneath the microscope. The lab's goal at large is to somehow replicate the intricate networks between neurons and cardiomyocytes in our bodies - all on a plate.

The stem cells come in frozen vials, which are kept in a tall jar of sizzling liquid nitrogen. To stimulate them into the neurons he needs, Tayyab switches on certain genes, while stopping others. He explained, "Each of our cells is like a phone that has all the hardware for all the different functions and DNA in it, but only certain software or expressions of genes allow certain things to happen."

That gene expression is triggered by special molecules that get added into the cells' liquid food, which they absorb through diffusion.

Keeping the cells alive for the experiments Tayyab and his colleagues need to do, however, is a whole other challenge. "Even if we come in contact with them, they're not going to hurt us," Tayyab said. "But while we're handling them, if germs come into contact with them, they're going to kill those cells."

The cells are kept in sterile, isolated environments while tiny pores on the filters of their containers allow oxygen to pass through and keep contaminants out - though even this is not foolproof.

But when everything works out, seeing a beating heart cell is rewarding.

"When you start seeing these kinds of things, you have a small sense of accomplishment: I've done this. That looks great!" Tayyab said.

Cardiomyocytes and neurons grown from pluripotent stem cells, however, currently can't mature. They're instead locked in fetal stages, which isn't particularly applicable to adult bodies.

"We want to mature them, because if we are going down the road for drug testing platforms, we want mature cells - the cells identical to those present in humans to whom we are going to give that drug," Tayyab said. This is the central problem Hookway's lab is dedicated to solving.

Tayyab earned a bachelor's in dentistry, then began pursuing his master's in oral pathology in Pakistan. Since 2014, he has worked with animal models, analyzing the impact of toxins like arsenic on the jaw bones and tongues of rats.

When he started reading more about growing stem cell research, however, he saw a way to continue his scientific career while doing his part to reduce animal testing.

Yet, while the flowering cells pictured in his Neural Rosettes are no longer alive, he hopes they'll convey a story of just that - hope.

"We will reach a point where things will get much better," Tayyab said. "We'll find treatments to all the diseases at some point, and hope for a better quality of life for all the people."

Mapping out the Northern Lights

When the Northern Lights touched down in upstate New York last October, SUNY Distinguished Professor Hiroki Sayama and his wife drove to Cornell University's mountaintop observatory to witness them - or at least, try to.

The summit was already full of cars and rowdy students, many of whom didn't bother turning their headlights off, blinding anyone up there to the night sky.

"We were just hopelessly wandering, oh my goodness," Sayama recalled. "That recommended location was such a crowded place, so we had no luck."

It was late at night, and Sayama and his wife drove to Candor to try again.

That was when they happened upon the perfect spot: the midst of a vast, empty field, with no one else on the road but them. And the lights - everywhere.

The feeling of seeing the famed aurora for the first time, Sayama said, was "unreal." Without thinking, he began snapping one photo after another on his phone, though they were visible to the bare eye: a sky painted with bright banners of greens and reds, streaming across the horizon. Unlike the timelapses we're used to seeing, these lights were peaceful and slow, nearly unmoving.

Sayama, however, is no astronomer. He is a professor of systems science.

Before submitting his photo to Art of Science, he plugged it into a programming language called Mathematica, which he often uses to demonstrate computational image analysis to his students.

Northern lights captured near Brooktondale, N.Y., on Oct. 10, 2024 (top). Image analysis by Mathematica remapped the pixels in the original image into a red-green color space (bottom), revealing color trajectories of the aurora. Image Credit: Hiroki Sayama, SUNY Distinguished Professor, School of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering. A picture is essentially a conglomeration of pixels. Mathematica took each pixel in the photo and mapped it out based on its corresponding color. What results is a data plot revealing the swirling, hidden trajectories and patterns within the aurora.

"Computers are yet another microscope or telescope. That's kind of my opinion either way," Sayama said. "By using computational tools, you can visualize the hidden information in everyday life."

Sayama describes himself as a creative individual, with an academic path that has taken him many places, from Tokyo to upstate New York, and from systems science to artificial life - a field where researchers attempt to replicate living systems.

There's no burning question for which Sayama wishes to spend his career chasing down an answer. Rather, he hopes to work on questions that never really have answers, an itch that's been present since childhood.

"Everyone wants to have the answer in the shortest period of time. They want to converge. I want to do the complete opposite," he said. "I want to create something that never converges."

It's a bit difficult to explain this concept when writing grant proposals, he admits, but Sayama says this is his response to an existence that endlessly changes. Similarly, that imagination is a key asset in his work, where he likens equations to creative writing and draws connections between the complex networks that string together the world around us.

If you stretch your imagination, he said, perhaps the photons entering our atmosphere during the Northern Lights are yet another network, in which we're just a speck.

"That is a trajectory made of stardust that came from a star, becoming part of our world. Then maybe tomorrow, you'll eat something that is made of that," he said. "In that sense, it's a very big network. Two celestial bodies talking to each other."

With his submission, Sayama doesn't have a greater story than that to tell - really, he just played around, he said - but what unites these researchers and teachers is the moments throughout their careers where beauty arises in their work.

"Science is not without arts, and arts are not without science," Sharma said. "Science is a newer field than arts. All these scientists - Newton, Galileo, etc. - were just inspired by what they saw, the beauty of nature and the universe."

Showcasing that beauty, in Lipo's view, is one other way to bridge science and the public.

"It's a very nice thing to bring creative, artistic activity together with scientific inquiries," Sayama said, "because eventually, it's all about our intellectual curiosity."