Gallery of close-up photos of scientists holding small things in their rubber-gloved fingers. I wish I could articulate my fascination with these pictures, something about the essence of discovery, the seed of wonder? It's close up so it's under enhanced scrutiny by the viewer. Maybe it's the difference between this little thing being a big deal, and yet being so tiny. What's the difference between a photograph of the Large Hadron Collider and a photograph of this "artificial fairy" above? You can hold it in your hands, and not just your hands, in between your fingers. And also it's being held, controlled, protected, by the very hands that made it. Maybe just because it's the scientists fingers, not their face or their lab coat or their million dollar petaflopping supercomputers, but their fingers. The physical products of scientific endeavor, the pinnacle of human technology, being held by the most simple piece of "technology" on this Earth -- the human hand.
Above image: Artificial fairy - Hao Zeng, Jianfeng Yang, Jianfeng Yang at Tampere University - 2023
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Gnat Robot includes a 2 mg gyroscope, 3 mg microprocessor, and 1 mg visual optic flow sensor - Fuller, Yu & Talwekar U of Wash - 2022 [link] |
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Graphene device grown on a silicon carbide substrate chip - Jess Hunt-Ralston at Georgia Institute of Technology - 2022 [link] |
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Printable transparent plastic - James Ponder Georgia Tech - 2022 [link] |
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Recycling batteries - Chen Feng and Marilyn Sargent at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - 2023 [link] |
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Electricity-generating laminate for ambient energy harvesting - University of Melbourne - 2023 [link] |
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Enzymatic recycling platform efficiently deconstructs raw PET plastic - Dennis Schroeder NREL - 2022 [link] |
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Emma Rothkopf 20 microliter sample at Brown University - 2023 [link] |
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Thermally resistant copper sandwich - Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering - 2023 [link] |
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Smart bandage by Caltech - 2023 [link] |
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Prototype fuel cell wrapped in fleece - Fussenegger Lab at ETH Zurich - 2023 [link] |
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Covalent organic framework material - Gustavo Raskosky at Rice University - 2023 [link] |
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