We all know engineering is useful, functional, even ingenious. But the engineering photography competition we hold each year provides us a chance to wander outside its merely utilitarian aspects into dimensions such as beauty, humour and even humanity to find unexpected connections and poetic resonance.

As one of the judges, one quality I look for in the images is some added dimension, a richness, the capacity to trigger a cascade of unrelated ideas. Quite by accident this year a few of the photos shared an unplanned underwater theme.

The winner (above) appeared to be a starfish. There was a column, perhaps from a pier, encrusted with coral and barnacles.

Then there was a strange ghost fish, the likes of which might range in Challenger Deep.

Of course they were none of these things: they were images of carbon nanotubes and graphene, but the forms that emerged at these micro- and nano-scales are familiar from elsewhere in nature.

The winning photo shows a fine pentagonal shape – I lecture on geometry and a question I ask the audience is: “When did you last see a pentagon?” They’re quite rare. They can be found in passionfruit flowers, or the shape of one of the most well-known buildings on the planet. But pentagons in the wild are something of a collector’s item – and this a fine example.

Second prize went to a re-imagining of a van Gogh painting, as the artist may have painted had he a larger canvas. Based on a playful use of mathematics, a computer algorithm analyses a pattern and style and extrapolates it to fill a larger area. It demonstrates the new science of machine learning that is now entering our lives, from junking spam emails to the product or content recommendations websites suggest.

Third prize went to Francis the Engineer, an image that represented the human dimension of engineering. The children’s smiles are fabulous, but emphasise not just happiness but relief at having their essential need for clean drinking water met. Engineering is not all about jet engines, smartphones and nanotubes.

The glass shear pattern is striking, like a flow of lava, or molten sugar, there are hints of rainbows among the sumptuous red – so many positive resonances from what is essentially a piece of broken glass.

The similar stretch and swirl image of fluid dynamics reminds me of the timeless pleasure of watching the flicker of bonfire flames, but freeze-framed so you can admire their inner structures: paisley patterns and curling vortices – all this found in what is essentially the inside of an engine chamber.

The two images of graphene revealed symmetrical patterns of clover and flowers. The four-leafed clover is a symbol of good fortune, and here there are fields of them, looking like a some architect’s plan of futuristic tower blocks.

The red flowers have six-fold symmetry, and although we rarely give prizes to images created on a computer (it is so much easier to make pretty virtual shapes than to actually build them at the nanoscale) this one pleased with its interconnecting shapes, representing the electrical flow across a graphene lattice.

An old bridge over the River Cam at the back of the engineering department in Cambridge, supported by two truss beams: the photo shows what is known as the “web” of the beam, the vertical face between handrail and deck. And within the web, the photo captures another: the spider’s web shares the same structural principles – the flow of tension within the silk matches that acting on the steel diagonals. I sometimes think that bio-mimetics is often accompanied by overblown rhetoric, but the unspoken simplicity here appealed to me.

This nano-scale image is decidedly other-worldly, unlike any landscape I ever saw despite its title. Perhaps it’s where they leave planets to dry before sending them out into the universe. I like how an image of something so small can so readily conjure the impression of something so vast. Perhaps we have the microscope the wrong way round.

The same applies to the magnetic field image: taking aside the extraordinary iridescent colours produced by birefringence (the property of refracting light in different ways), it is an image of something so small as to be almost invisible, yet we see only the Earth itself. I think William Blake said something about that once.

You can see the complete set of photos here.

Allan McRobie is Reader in Engineering at University of Cambridge.

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Mark Lorch, University of Hull

If you’ve ever sat opposite a doctor and wondered what she was scribbling on her notepad, the answer may soon not only be medical notes on your condition, but real-time chemical preparations for an instant diagnostic test.

Thanks to the work of a team of researchers from California Polytechnic State University, recently published in the journal Lab on a Chip, chemicals formed into pencils can be made to react with one another by simply drawing with them on paper. The team may have taken inspiration from colouring books for their take on a chemical toolkit, but their approach could make carrying out simple but common diagnostic tests based on chemical reactions – for example diabetes, HIV, or tests for environmental pollutants – much easier.

The project started with an established technique called paper-based microfluidics. This uses the capillary effect of paper to carefully mix together what are called reagents – those chemicals mixed to form a reaction, or to measure the presence or absence of a substance. The capillary effect in action is easily seen by dropping two inks of different colours onto a piece of tissue paper. As the liquid is absorbed by the paper the colour drops spread out until they merge with one another and form a colour blend. In the same way two or more reagents can be mixed with water on a strip of paper.

In this case, the difference is that the reagents aren’t added to the paper via droplets. Instead they’re applied via pencils, meaning that without specialist equipment anyone can set about creating chemical reactions by simply using them on the paper.

The team made the reagent pencils by pulverising a mixture of graphite (just as you’d find in normal pencils), test reagents and polyethylene glycol, which helps to keep the reagent dispersed throughout the mixture, as is used for the same reason in toothpaste. They compressed the mixture into pellets and mounted them into mechanical pencil holders bought from the high street stores.

The reaction paper pad was created by using a waxy ink to print small connected enclosures onto filter paper. The reagent pencils could be used to colour in these areas within the enclosures – when water was added to the paper, the reagents dissolved and, confined by the waxy ink, were forced to diffuse towards one another and react.

Real world uses for real world problems

The team demonstrated a potential use of the reagent pencil technique by using it in place of a common test used by diabetics to check their blood glucose levels, which involves reacting a pinprick blood sample with a chemical solution and examining the result.

One pencil was constructed with a mixture of enzymes, one called horseradish peroxidase (HRP) and the other glucose oxidase (GOx). A second pencil contained a reagent called ABTS. When combined in the presence of glucose these react together to give a blue-coloured product. Comparing the results from their pencils on the pad with the more traditional dropper method used by diabetics the team found the results were identical.

The image shows, on the left, the reagents applied via droplets of solution. On the right, the reagent pencils were used. The top row shows the paper at the beginning of the test, the bottom row the result. Applied to the left enclosure, the sample solution carries the two reagents together which react. The coloured product produced is, as shown on the graph, identical between the two methods.

This is of course extremely easy to set up. Traditional diagnostic tests require training, while this pad and pencil system requires no more than skill than required to colour within the lines. The reagents are extremely stable once made into pencils – usually they would degrade in a matter of days as liquids, limiting how and where the tests can be made. However the reagent pencils showed no sign of degrading after two months.

So this pencil tool kit has obvious advantages: a kit of reagent pencils, much like a box of colouring pencils, is easily transported, without the chemicals degrading. Kits could be designed with particular tests in mind – and the reaction mix can be adjusted by applying more or less, without the need or equipment to make-up complex solutions. There’s scope to monitor environmental pollutants, carry out diagnostic tests in remote locations – not to mention teach chemistry in primary schools.

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Much like a painting, a photograph has the ability to move, engage and inspire viewers. It could be a black-and-white Ansel Adams landscape of a snow-capped mountain reflected in a lake, with a sharpness and tonal range that bring out the natural beauty of its subject. Or it could Edward Weston’s close-up photograph of a bell pepper, an image possessing a sensuous abstraction that both surprises and intrigues. Or a Robert Doisneau photograph of a man and woman kissing near the Paris city hall in 1950, a picture has come to symbolize romance, postwar Paris and spontaneous displays of affection.

No one would question that photographs such as these are works of art. Art historians can explain the technical and artistic decisions that elevate photographs by the masters, whether it’s Weston’s use of a tiny aperture, Adams’ printing techniques or Doisneau’s distinctive aesthetic. It’s clear that Pepper No. 30 belongs in a museum, even if a selfie posted on Facebook doesn’t.

Oddly enough, it was not always this way. Photography has not yet celebrated its 200th birthday, yet in the medium’s first century of existence, there was a great deal of debate over its artistic merit. For decades, even those who appreciated the qualities of a photograph were not entirely sure whether photography was – or could be – an art.

Science or art?

In its first incarnation, photography seemed to be more of a scientific tool than a form of artistic expression. Many of the earliest photographers didn’t even call themselves artists: they were scientists and engineers – chemists, astronomers, botanists and inventors. While the new form attracted individuals with a background in painting or drawing, even early practitioners like Louis Daguerre or Nadar could be seen more as entrepreneurial inventors than as traditional artists.

Before Daguerre invented the daguerreotype (an early form of photography on a silver-coated plate), he had invented the diorama, a form of entertainment that used scene painting and lighting to create moving theatrical illusions of monuments and landscapes. Before Nadar began to create photographic portraits of Parisian celebrities like Sarah Bernhardt, he’d worked as a caricaturist. (An aeronaut, he also built the largest gas balloon ever created, dubbed The Giant.)

One reason early photographs were not considered works of art because, quite simply, they didn’t look like art: no other form possessed the level of detail that they rendered. When the American inventor Samuel F B Morse saw the daguerreotype shortly after its first public demonstration in Paris in 1839, he wrote, “The exquisite minuteness of the delineation cannot be conceived. No painting or engraving ever approached it.”

A photograph of a haystack, with its thousands of stalks, looked visually staggering to a painter who contemplated drawing each one so precisely. The textures of shells and the roughness of a wall of brick or stone suddenly appeared vividly in photographs of the 1840s and 1850s.

For this reason, it’s no surprise that some of the earliest applications of photography came in archaeology and botany. The medium seemed well suited to document specimens that were complex and minutely detailed, like plants, or archaeological finds that needed to be studied by faraway specialists, such as a tablet of hieroglyphics. In 1843, Anna Atkins produced Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions – considered the first book illustrated with photographs.

Finally, the genesis of a painting, drawing or sculpture was a human hand, guided by a human eye and mind. Photographers, by contrast, had managed to fix an image on a metal, paper, or glass support, but the image itself was formed by light, and because it seemed to come from a machine – not from a human hand – viewers doubted its artistic merit. Even the word “photograph” means “light writing.”

Critics weigh in

Before the photograph, painted portraits had almost always flattered the client and conformed to the fashions of the day; meanwhile, the earliest photographic portraits didn’t.

Elizabeth (Lady) Eastlake, one of the foremost 19th century writers on photography, listed many of the photograph’s shortcomings when it came to rendering the female face. In a black and white photograph, blue eyes looked “as colourless as water,” she wrote, blonde and red hair seemed “as if it had been dyed,” and very shiny hair turned into “lines of light as big as ropes.” Meanwhile, she noted that the male head, with its rougher skin and beard or moustache, might have less to fear, but still suffered a distinct loss of beauty in the photographic portrait. To Lady Eastlake, the photograph, “however valuable to relative or friend, has ceased to remind us of a work of art at all.”

Debate over photography’s status as art reached its apogee with the Pictorialist movement at the end of the 19th century. Pictorialist photographers manipulated the negative by hand; they used multiple negatives and masking to create a single print (much like compositing in Photoshop today); they applied soft focus and new forms of toning to create blurry and painterly effects; and they rejected the mechanical look of the standard photograph. Essentially, they sought to push the boundaries of the form to make photographs appear as “painting-like” as possible – perhaps as a way to have them taken seriously as art.

Pictorialist photographers found success in gallery exhibitions and high-end publications. By the early 20th century, however, a photographer like Alfred Stieglitz, who had started out as a Pictorialist, was pioneering the “straight” photograph: the printing of a negative from edge to edge with no cropping or manipulation. Stieglitz also experimented with purely abstract photographs of clouds. Modernist and documentary photographers began to accept the medium’s inherent precision instead of trying to make images that looked like paintings.

“Photography is the most transparent of the art mediums devised or discovered by man,” wrote critic Clement Greenberg in 1946. “It is probably for this reason that it proves so difficult to make the photograph transcend its almost inevitable function as document and act as work of art as well.”

Still, well into the 20th century, many critics and artists continued to view photography as operating in a realm that was not quite fine art – a debate that even continues today. But a look back to the 19th century reminds us of the medium’s initial shocking – and confounding – realism, even as photo portraits printed on calling cards (“carte de visites”) were becoming as fashionable and ubiquitous as Facebook and Instagram today.

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Since they were pioneered by Robert Hooke 350 years ago, microscopes have been extending our vision. In the 21st century, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and confocal microscopy, which uses a pinhole to remove out-of-focus light and allows 3D structures to be built from multiple images, have pushed the boundaries of resolution. Further still, nanoscopes that use fluorescence to circumvent limitations in SEM are already winning Nobel prizes.

The Wellcome Images Awards 2015 are a showcase of the best in science imaging techniques, and this year’s crop of winners gives a rich glimpse into a world normally unseen by the human eye. And as we learn more about the intricacies of our bodies and the world around us, the images transform abstract ideas and the constantly moving machine of our bodies into works of art and visual drama. Four nominees for this year’s prize tell us how they got their image.

Robert Marc, Calvin and JeNeal Hatch Presidential Endowed Chair, University of Utah

We have been perfecting a technology for imaging the metabolism of cells. The core principle is microscopically visualising arrays of up to a dozen different small molecules and computationally fusing these into readable colour images. The molecules are detected by immune probes developed in my laboratory and each mixture of molecules forms a cellular “signature” colour.

The molecules in this image are mapped into image colour channels: aspartic acid as red, glutathione as green and glutamine as blue. Aspartic acid links amino acid and energy metabolism. Glutathione is our primary defence against oxidative damage. Glutamine is a molecular “battery” that stores and distributes amino groups to other molecules.

The image is a thin slice through the various kinds of filtering cells of the mouse kidney. Surprisingly, the images reveal that all tissues, not just kidney, are rainbows of different cell types, each with a unique metabolism. This contradicts our expectation that metabolism is roughly the same in all cells and opens the door for a new generation of molecular tests of cell state in health and disease. Though the kidney yields a spectacular and fiery display, we have yet to craft a theory that explains it.

Gregory Szeto, Koch Institute, MIT

This image is one in a series we captured to examine the distribution of engineered, micrometer-sized drug particles (red) targeted to mouse lungs (blue, green). Scale in science and engineering is fascinating, and as technology has advanced, we’ve increased our ability to take both smaller and larger images with detail and range. Using fluorescent imaging and a confocal laser microscope, we imaged whole lungs at different times to determine where drug particles go.

Information at the organ scale is important when designing particles to obtain even, specific and prolonged delivery of drugs throughout the organ. We can now use whole organs (as opposed to traditional thin slices of tissue on glass slides) to image distribution at this level while also acquiring information about smaller details. This same set of images (more than 1,000 total condensed into a single 2D image) can be made into an interactive 3D model where we can zoom in and out of the organ to find out where our particles are aggregating and distributing, potentially down to single cells.

Speaking as both a scientist and an artist (avid photographer and writer), there is a great deal of overlap between the two areas. Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) are often set apart from other fields, particularly arts and humanities. In reality, there is so much art in STEM: the visual beauty of an experiment image is not unlike a moving painting or photo; the elegance of manuscript text can rival that of the best prose. Ultimately, innovative scientific research is driven partially by the same intuition that often drives and inspires great art. Striking visuals are just one way for us to stir curiosity in everyone about the work that we love.

Michael Hausser, Professor of Neuroscience, University College London

This is an image of a single Purkinje cell in the cerebellum captured using a focused ion beam scanning electron microscope. This kind of electron microscope is relatively new to biology, and uses two beams to image neurons within a block of brain tissue: the first beam etches away the top few nanometers of tissue, and the second beam then captures the image. In this way, neurons and circuits can be imaged at extremely high (nanometer) resolution, while keeping the block of tissue intact (without the loss of resolution and distortions resulting from conventional knife-based sectioning of tissues for electron microscopy).

I find this image endlessly fascinating: not only does it reveal the incredible richness and complexity of the dendritic tree of an important cell type (the processing carried out by Purkinje cells is crucial for precisely timed learned movements); but it also exhibits a beauty that is both ethereal yet precise, like a Japanese woodcut.

Khuloud Al-Jamal, Senior Lecturer in Nanomedicine, King’s College London

The blood-brain barrier is a protective layer of cells that regulates entry of molecules to the brain. Despite acting as a protective mechanism, it also acts as a barrier to delivering drug therapies to the brain. Astrocytes, specialised star-shaped glial cells (non-neuronal cells that support and protect), outnumber neurons over fivefold. These cells contiguously tile the entire central nervous system (CNS) and exert many essential complex functions.

Astrocytic tumours are the commonest type of cancer of the brain. Over the past 40 years systems to deliver drugs to treat these cancers have emerged. Carriers that have been investigated have ranged in size from 10 to 1,000 nanometres. One example of such carriers is a carbon nanotube, a hollow cylinder made from a continuous unbroken hexagonal mesh of carbon molecules, first explored by electron microscopist Sumio Iijima in 1991.

Our image is a scanning electron micrograph of an astrocyte cell (coloured in brown), with a diameter of about 20 micrometers, and captured in the process of taking up carbon nanotubes (green colour). New approaches to brain drug delivery will be the key to unlocking the brain and tackling neurological disorders that would otherwise remain incurable.

Best of the rest

Albert Cordona, Janelia Group Leader, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Mark Bartley, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust

Cutting-edge imaging techniques may delve into the smallest worlds but photographs still powerfully capture our dramatic outer shell as this clinical photograph of an elderly woman’s curved spine shows.

Michael Frank, Photographer, Royal Veterinary College

If you’ve never eaten tripe but have wondered what a stomach looks like, here’s an image of one taken from a goat.

Kevin Mackenzie, Microscopy Manager, Institute of Medical Sciences, University of Aberdeen

A scanning electron micrograph of a greenfly’s eye.

Nele Dieckermann and Nicola Lawrence, University of Cambridge

Natural killer (NK) cells in our immune system are at the frontline of our immune response and are rapidly deployed by the body to fight infections or growing tumours.

Luis de la Torre-Ubieta, Postdoctoral Fellow, Geschwind Lab, UCLA

To see startling Wellcome Images 2014 showing strange and beautiful science up close, click here.

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