These glass capillaries contain liquid solutions of silver nanoprisms synthesized by artist Kate Nichols. Image courtesy of Kate Nichols.

Originally inspired by the work of Northern Renaissance painters, one could also describe artist Kate Nichols as a “Renaissance” artist herself. Nichols applies a wide variety of skills and media to her creations, most recently with her pieces that incorporate her experimentation with nanotechnology.

Nichols was fascinated with the rich, bright hues of the Morpho butterfly, and sought to replicate those vivid colors in her work. Through research, she learned that the butterfly wings' brilliant blue color arose through structural color, and that nanotechnology could help her obtain this vibrant palette.

After writing an e-mail to scientist Paul Alivisatos and expressing her interest in nanotechnology, he enthusiastically supported her endeavors (Alivisatos is also a photographer) and Nichols became the first artist-in-residence at the Paul Alivisatos Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Working in the laboratory setting didn't come naturally to her as she had no background or formal training in science.

"I spent the first part of my experience in the laboratory reading scientific papers that would describe specific procedures. And I would get so frustrated that I couldn't achieve the same results. It takes a lot of practice to be able to be up and running in a material science chemistry lab," says Nichols.

But over time and through the guidance of her colleagues, Nichols learned to synthesize nanosilver particles to create the beautiful colors she uses in her work.

Learn more about Nichols and her work in Color By Nano: The Art of Kate Nichols.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

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(left) A cell imaged with an optical microscope. (right) The same cell imaged by allowing the cell to absorb UCNPs and then irradiating it with infrared light. Each nanocrystal is one thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair. Image courtesy of PNAS.

Thus proceeds Michael Crichton's 2002 thriller, Prey, as the protagonists face off against a malicious swarm of flesh-hungry nano-robots that are the offspring of a most unholy marriage of biological, computer science, and engineering research efforts.

Real science capabilities lag somewhat behind, but researchers succeeded recently in demonstrating an exciting new class of nanoparticle with potential applications in biological imaging. The new crystals, more formally known as lanthanide-doped upconverting nanoparticles (UCNPs), were fabricated and studied under the direction of principle investigators Bruce Cohen and James Schuck at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Molecular Foundry, and results were published on June 18^th in a paper by Shiwei Wu and others in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Happily, while Crichton's nanoparticles coordinated an attack on a your vital organs, these particles behave more like benign light bulbs. After allowing a living cell to absorb the UCNPs, researchers shine infrared laser light on the cell, and the nanocrystals within light up like a Christmas tree in red or green arrays of dots. These, in turn, can easily be spotted using an optical microscope and used to map out particle distributions within a cell, yielding information impossible to obtain by other methods.

The method, known as single-molecule imaging, has been demonstrated using other nanoparticle types, but UCNPs are unique because of their uncommon brightness and stability, and because they are powered by infrared light. This is both good for the studied cells, because infrared light is less damaging than visible or X-ray frequencies, and good for the people measuring them, because it can probe more deeply into tissue than other types of light. In fact, one prospect for future research is the imaging of entire animals.

Reflecting on the research effort's long-term goals, Cohen commented that cross-disciplinary sharing of ideas is crucial. "In general, we'd like to bring nanoscience to the larger scientific community, especially biology, where few researchers have had much exposure to it," he said. "Our goal is to make interesting and useful new materials that will let them do all sorts of experiments that would otherwise be impossible."

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