Rio Forty Degrees - Camila Donatti (ecologist) - Hopkins Art Show 2010

A painting of a cherry tree in full blossom adorns one wall. On a table beneath it, ceramic fingers reach from a blue-glazed ceramic basket. Opposite these hangs an intricately decorated guitar.

Cake - Carolyn Tepolt (invasive species biologist) - Hopkins Art Show 2010

The third annual Hopkins Marine Station Amateur Art Show was held this past weekend in Monterey, California. Hopkins is Stanford University's marine biology satellite campus, next door to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, home to a tight-knit community of ocean-obsessed weirdos. (I've been one.) The overlap between colleagues, roommates, and friends is so thorough that you tend to share grocery lists and pipette tips with the same people. It’s hard to stop talking about science, even at bars.

"I thought an art party would really foster conversations outside of this normal routine," says Jason Ladner, who did his graduate work on coral genetics at Hopkins. Around year four, he got sick of thinking about science all the time and found an escape in art. "I figured there were probably other people that could use a similar escape"–and in 2010 the first Amateur Art Show and Garden Party was born. Ladner wrote in his invitation, "This is a very low-key event where the term 'amateur' is stressed and the term 'art' is very loosely interpreted." It was a hit.

Tiger - Ana Sofia Guerra (undergraduate working on fish parasites) - Hopkins Art Show 2012

At the party's third incarnation on April 14, 2012, scientists mingled over cups of sangria and reveled in their conversational freedom. Ladner has moved on to post-doctoral work and this party was hosted at the home of Judit Pungor, a graduate student studying octopus vision. One partygoer observed with wonder that very little of the art has a scientific theme. In addition to the guitar and the slightly disturbing ceramics, displays included hand-sewn clothing and a rainbow knitted blanket.

But not all scientists can suppress their nerdiness just because they're making art. Squid student Hannah Rosen (yes, she's in my old lab) painted an octopus tap dancing, with a squid on the piano. When asked, "Why not a tap-dancing squid and a piano-playing octopus?" Rosen answered, "The idea of a tap-dancing octopus just spoke to me."

But the airy certainty of an artist's statement quickly devolved into a scientific assessment of habitat and behavior. Since octopuses can crawl on land but squid can't, the octopus is the logical choice for the tap-dancer.

Tap-Dancing Octopus - Hannah Rosen - Hopkins Art Show 2012

As if that weren't enough, Jupiter hangs in the night sky behind the theatrical cephalopods. "Are they on Europa?" I asked Rosen. She confirmed that, indeed, the scene takes place on Jupiter's frozen ocean moon.

Art by scientists, it turns out, can be everything that art by non-scientists can be: whimsical or solemn, accessible or obscure, technical or conceptual. And scientists are just as surprised as anyone to find that out. The best thing that you hear at these parties, over and over again, is: "I didn't even know she did that!"

Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers (1889)

Most admirers of van Gogh's iconic "Sunflower" paintings gaze upon the golden inflorescences without any awareness of the scientific conundrum they pose. But researchers from the University of Georgia have finally cracked the case with a paper published in PLoS Genetics.

Buttercup taken at Tilden Park in Berkeley, California by Calibas

Orchid taken by Alex Tievsky SaveThePoint

The puzzle begins with the fact that all flowers are either radially or bilaterally symmetrical. A buttercup is an example of radial symmetry; it looks the same no matter how you rotate it. An orchid, on the other hand, has bilateral symmetry, like a human face–the left and right sides look the same, but you can tell whether it's right side up or upside down.

Here's the sneaky thing: a lot of seemingly radially symmetrical flowers are actually clusters of tiny bilaterally symmetrical flowers, or florets. In fact, this is true of one of the biggest flower families, Asteraceae, which includes such familiar friends as dandelions, daisies and, yes, sunflowers.

Then the sunflower makes things extra complicated by building its cluster out of two kinds of florets: bilaterally symmetrical ray florets, and radially symmetrical disk florets. This may sound confusing, but it's obvious as soon as you look for it: the classic sunflower is a ring of petals (ray florets) surrounding a big disk that will become filled with seeds (fertilized disk florets). The ray florets are infertile–they're just there to help attract pollinators.

Now at last we can consider van Gogh, and his double-flowered sunflowers. They're mutants.

A double-flowered mutant has no true disk florets, only concentric rings of ray florets–a profusion of petals. Consequently, the plant loses a lot of its fertility. You might wonder, can the opposite occur? Indeed, in tubular-rayed mutants ray florets are replaced with radialized, fertile disk florets.

Mark Chapman and his colleagues have just discovered that one particular gene, called HaCYC2c, causes both mutations. If HaCYC2c is over-expressed, it creates double-flowered van Goghs. If the gene's function is lost, however, you get tubular-rayed flowers.

I particularly love this study because at least the first part of their methods is totally accessible to anyone who's studied Mendelian crosses in high school biology. See:

Okay, maybe it's a bit tricky. If you want to puzzle it out but you're rusty on Mendel, here's a primer.

Of course, you don't need to understand Mendelian crosses–or the super-sophisticated genetic mapping that Chapman et al. use later–to appreciate van Gogh's art. Nor do you need to be an Impressionist fan to appreciate sunflower genetics.

But I think we can all appreciate that it's not often a famous painting is included in Figure 1 of a scientific paper.

Figure 1. Entire inflorescences (A, C, E) and individual florets (B, D, F) from wildtype (A, B), double-flowered (C, D) and tubular (E, F) sunflower individuals. Florets are arranged left to right from the inner florets to the outer florets. (G) “Sunflowers (Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers)” by Vincent van Gogh (1888) with double-flowered heads pointed out with arrows. Panel G was obtained from Steve Dorrington on flickr (available at http://flic.kr/p/8SsPYb) and is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) License.

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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Photo Credit: Ask A Scientist

Let me tell you about my experience at last night's Ask a Scientist: How Computers Look at Art last night (December 3rd) at the Axis Café in San Francisco. Full disclosure – I run a science café, so consider me a fan. However, I was determined to just be one of the crowd last night.

KQED QUEST has covered science cafés before, including a history of the movement. On to my story… I arrived at Axis Café about 630 PM to an almost full house (~50 people). After ordering some food and a glass of wine at the bar, I hunkered down in a cozy chair. I people watched the youngish good looking crowd for a few minutes before overhearing a conversation in front of me. A couple of women mentioned it was there first time at a science café. To both, the format sounded cool, but both they couldn't convince friends to join them. We talked for a few minutes; mainly they said most were scared off because this seemed like a science class, definitely not for the average person. No matter how you frame it, science in café still sounds like a lecture to most. What followed was hardly a lecture.

David Stork grabbed a mic and launched into a discussion on the Vermeer painting "The Girl With the Pearl Earring." His research uses computer modeling to analyze light and shadows on paintings. After skipping the math, he showed the painting nearly perfectly displayed shadows if from one light source. This confirmed what many art historians wondered, there was a model for that famous painting who sat in Vermeer's studio. The speaker was definitely moving along pretty fast, but luckily there were lots of questions to slow him down.

Professor Stork continued on, showing how this technique could also identify fakes (i.e. the cover from a Star Magazine with Brad & Angelina). Most famously, this new technique has called into question the Hockney-Falco thesis on how renaissance artists drew their subjects (using a lens of sorts).

What's amazing is that I knew nothing, nada, zip, zilch about art history and computer modeling prior to 7 PM last night. I still don't know much, but enough to talk about it with my wife and friends. That's the brilliant thing about these informal science events, the information sticks with you. It was definitely a fun way to spend a couple hours on a Wednesday night. Maybe there's a new adage out there: Science + Conversation = Fun. A glass of wine doesn't hurt that equation either.

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