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Cancer cells that resemble stained glass windows. Tiny fruit flies wrestling the nectar from the corpse of a bee. Canyons, bathed in sunset, that look like whorls of cotton candy.

For the past 10 years, 91����’s annual Art of Science competition has honored the striking visuals — not just results — that our scientists and students have discovered along the way to answering their burning questions. This year, Art of Science is celebrating a decade of the competition, drawing in nearly 100 submissions from students, staff and scientists alike.

The 2026 entries range from bird’s eye views of 91����’s own Nature Preserve to the glowing greens and blues of hippocampal neurons. Here is a closer look at four of this year’s submissions.

Living rivers

White plumes spiral and trickle down a cerulean backdrop, almost resembling the frills of jellyfish tentacles or paint poured into water. But these “Arctic Arteries,” entered by senior Emily Cook, are actually elevation models capturing Alaska’s iconic Yukon River.

As a geophysics and seismology student, Cook is fascinated with the great outdoors. She is especially enamored by the ever-changing rivers braiding their way through Alaska’s terrain.

Last summer, Cook interned at the Alaska Center of Energy and Power (ACEP) to research geothermal energy and how to convert it into storable fuel, such as hydrogen or methanol. When she wasn’t researching or working a 9-5 in the office, Cook spent the rest of her days in 24-hour sunlight.

She drove up to one of the most remote national parks in the United States with two jerry cans of gas in the car, passed through a town with a “skeeter meter” that tracked how bad the mosquitos were that day, and even swam in the Yukon itself, right below the billion-dollar Alaskan oil pipeline running above the silty waters.

“You hit the Brooks Range, and it’s these giant, jagged peaks that are just shooting out at you,” she recalled. “You’re on this dirt road, and giant oil trucks are rushing past you, spraying up dirt. You’re hitting potholes, going up and down. It’s very varied, but really rugged and beautiful.”

Alaska is a testament to constant change. The roads were bumpy, some of them due to permafrost thaw. The rivers are never quite the same, their banks changing with floods and time. Seeing firsthand how closely Alaskans relied on their rivers for everything from food to transport, Cook was inspired to create her Art of Science entry using open-sourced LiDAR data, visualizing the Yukon and its ancient history.

“Rivers are the lifeblood of the state. Being able to visualize that in an artistic way was something that I found compelling,” she said.

LiDAR data is usually collected by drone or plane, which sends pulses of light down to Earth and back up. Researchers can use this information to create an accurate model encapsulating, for example, changes in terrain and elevation.

Cook imported the data into a program called QGIS, which allowed her to play with different values, color gradients and data boundaries to visualize the Yukon’s centuries-old flow.

“I enjoy being able to bridge different worlds into my work. Through my schooling and projects I’ve done in the past, I know how to use LiDAR data, I know how to use QGIS and ArcGIS, I know how to create these maps. That’s the scientific portion,” Cook said. “But I can also bridge that with a project like this. Maybe I don’t need to add a scale bar with a north arrow and a caption beneath it. Maybe it can just be the image and the cool pattern.”

Even before attending 91����, Cook knew she enjoyed the outdoors. During her first year at the University, she joined the First Year Immersion stream for Geospatial Sensing, while also taking a class called “Earthquakes and Volcanoes” — adding, “What cooler-sounding class can I take than that?”

Within the week, she had signed up to major in geophysics, and she hasn’t looked back since. After graduation, Cook will work in Colorado for the summer as part of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s engineering geophysics team. She’ll join the U.S. Geological Survey in New York this fall.

Cook’s Art of Science entry is not just a commemoration of a time she loved in her life, but also an ode to the constant change and connection that rivers offer both land and people.

“The LiDAR and color scale component is the less important part,” she said. “The more important part is the water that flows in the Midwest is the same water that’s going to flow at the Delta of the Mississippi, thousands of miles south. It’s all so connected and integrated, these vessels of sediment and nutrients.”

Tiny wasps and tinier parasitoids

First-year doctoral student Zachary Prete was picking his way through the leaves near the Nature Preserve one fall day, when he found a tiny “traffic jam” of wriggling caterpillars, clamoring beneath an oak leaf. The picture he snapped ended up as one of his submissions to the World Around Us category.

Prete’s research in the Department of Biological Sciences doesn’t concern caterpillars but rather, oak gall wasps. There’s no need for special equipment or netted, stinger-proof hoods to find these wasps, because they’re far too tiny to hurt humans. Prete needs nothing more than some Ziploc bags and a Sharpie.

“We will collect the gall, which is the structure that the wasp forms, and then we hold it in the lab in environmental chambers, in basically little deli cups with some holes it in so they can have some airflow,” he said. “Then we basically just wait until something comes out of it.”

These galls are structures that form where wasps lay their eggs in various parts of oak trees, whether the branch, leaf, or even acorn. They can come in many shapes and sizes: a bushel of red grapes, fuzzy and wooly little burrs, or even pithy like a plum.

Waiting for something to emerge from these galls is a bit of a gamble: sometimes it could be an adult wasp, other times an even tinier parasitoid that has attacked and killed its original host. (Prete also submitted an up-close image of said parasitoid to Art of Science’s Visualizing the Unseen.)

In New York state alone, according to Prete, there are likely more than 80 different species of oak gall wasps. There is so much diversity that a lot about these wasps is still unknown or undescribed.

“There’s also other things about the life histories of both the gall wasps and the parasitoids that I believe are unknown, where we don’t know when the best time to collect a gall is to get the most parasitoids is, necessarily,” Prete said. “They’re so small, it’s a bit hard to get that information.”

Analyzing galls, however, may hold some more answers. Prete, who is working in the lab of Associate Professor Kirsten Prior, is studying the variation of oak gall wasps across different environments, as well as how those affect parasitoids in response.

“How does the morphology or traits of the oak gall wasps vary across a number of environmental gradients? One of those will be latitude, others might be things like rainfall,” he said. “We could also look at how they vary across different host plants. That’s the main question I’m trying to answer right now.”

Tracking down these galls requires a scrutinizing eye and a trip from the top of the East Coast all the way to the bottom.

Prete’s field work so far has taken him to more than 60 sites in eight states: from New York to Florida, with stops in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas along the way. He has seen spider-filled marshes in South Carolina, where the trees reflected off the waters, and butterflies that fluttered through the air farther south. In each state, Prete and his team would hunker down for several days and try to hit a number of different parks at once.

“We could be there for a couple hours and maybe find 10 galls, whereas at another site, we could be there for an hour and find hundreds,” Prete said.

Prete traces his interest in ecology to the summer camp he attended while growing up near the Carey Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. Though he works with wasps at the moment, he isn’t sure he will always be hunting for galls in oak trees. But as long as he can continue his path in community ecology, looking at and better understanding the world around him, Prete would be satisfied.

“Look closer. Try and notice the small things,” Prete said. “As far as the research, it’s also important to study things we don’t know a lot about yet.”

Soldering and “shop rats”

What resembles a snapshot of a miles-long junkyard of discarded electronic parts is, in reality, just a collection of tiny circuit board components, all of which fit inside a box around the size of your phone.

Colleen Jennings’ submission to The World Around Us is an up-close view of the aftermath of soldering practice. This little coffin of discarded resistors and electronic components can be found in a corner of the Watson Fabrication Lab, as part of curriculum that trains students in the basics of soldering.

“We have a whole week of students just coming in and building stuff,” said Jennings, an instructional support technician. “Throughout that process, all of us are wandering around, checking in on them, making sure they’re not burning anything or putting something on backwards.”

The Fab Lab is almost always busy, filled with the hum of machines and 3D printers and students — some of whom are affectionately referred to as “shop rats” for their constant presence in the lab — filtering in and out daily.

Students, whether first-years or seniors, can come in to work on course-related projects. Meanwhile, 91����’s motorsports team might be building race cars next door. Soldering is a much quieter activity.

“Soldering, for me, tends to look quiet and meditative. It feels a lot like crochet or knitting, where you’re focused in and you’re looking very closely at the object as you’re working on it,” Jennings said.

When working with such tiny components, many of which are hardly larger than the tip of your fingernail, mistakes are common. That’s why students who are learning to solder for the first time practice on dummy circuit boards, where mistakes are no big deal — and in fact, are collectible.

“I thought that it would be cool to eventually epoxy into a coffee table,” said Jim Canzler, who also instructs at the Fab Lab. “I used to work at Universal Instruments that made machines that put components on circuit boards, so the testing would make mountains.”

When the errors come, instructors also teach students how to de-solder their work. That process involves using a vacuum that resembles a hot glue gun, putting its heated tip to the problem component, and wiggling it as the suction pops it out with a hiss.

“I’m new here, so I can say I have never seen a shop that functions in this way, with this many support staff and this amount of resources. This is a really unique asset here,” Jennings said.

Canzler, like the other lab instructors, has practiced hands and years of expertise. The process is a lot messier for students, many of whom, coming in, have never tried fusing metal or making circuits blink before.

But despite how intense these processes can get, Watson students rise to the challenge. Seeing the lightbulb moment — sometimes literally, when students finally figure out how to make something light up — is also Canzler’s favorite part of the teaching process.

“We guide them along the way, give them do’s and don’ts, which sometimes they ignore and pay for,” he said. “But it’s part of learning. I’d have to say that’s the best part.”

Infinitesimal possibilities

Jamie Wu’s first attempt at immunocytochemistry resembled a group of friends awaiting their turn at a video game. She hunched in a dark basement over a giant microscope that looks more like a hundred machines cobbled into one, fiddling with its finicky knobs, while the rest of her classmates huddled in one mass around her.

Immunocytochemistry, ICC for short, is a technique that visualizes the physiology of cells using fluorescent antibodies. Then a biology major in the First-Year Research Immersion stream for biomedical chemistry, Wu was chosen by her professor to demonstrate ICC for her peers.

“I felt so accomplished, because at the end, I just learned something completely new. I’d never done anything like this before,” said Wu, who is now a sophomore. “It turned out so well. I was so happy.”

The result of her efforts is a brilliant splash of neon colors that resembles a handful of galaxies suspended in space and stardust. Only, these are actually the nuclei, mucus, and cell walls of dead cancer cell lines, ruptured by microplastics.

Though stunning and colorful, microplastics haunt the image only in effect, showing up as broken lining or eroded nuclei. Wu said there is no consensus in the field about how harmful microplastics might be. But her image tells the visual story of how these microplastics can degrade our cells.

“We are all taking in microplastics as we speak. Really, this is just to further this kind of wishy-washy field of study right now, corroborating the fact that, actually, these microplastics do affect our cells,” Wu said.

What takes an instant to render on the computer screen took weeks of work. First, Wu must culture her cells, feeding them bright pink liquid food and waiting for them to differentiate. Then, she moves them from tube to tube after they get too crowded in one. Even breathing too hard over the samples could contaminate them.

Once the cells have grown, Wu needs to kill them. She uses a mixture of chemicals to stiffen the cells and remove their proteins, allowing tiny amounts of cocktails to pass through their porous membranes and stain the tissue. These concoctions must be incubated for hours, after which they’re mixed with dyes or polyclonal antibodies derived from animals like goats and mice. These antibodies are what enable the stains to stick to the cells, colors shining once the microscope activates the dyes with UV light.

All this maneuvering and pipetting, meanwhile, is done in the dark to preserve the fluorescent dyes. Scientists sit hunched over on stiff chairs, with the sounds of the neighboring Clean Energy FRI stream hammering away in the background.

The process can be tedious, Wu said, but the community huddles make it exciting. Contamination happened often enough that her 16-student stream bonded through commiseration.

“You really do get these once-in-a-lifetime friends in FRI,” she said.

Wu has been doing research since her freshman year of high school, making agar plates and painstakingly carving out designs that would guarantee the cells could stick to the plates. She likened it to arts and crafts, except her medium of choice is cells and dye.

“I just like to think biology is super-interesting,” she said. “You can see that cells make such complex but also logical structures. But it’s just nature.”

Wu’s Art of Science entry commemorates her first days in the lab trying out a new scientific technique. But, like its namesake, it also illustrates the infinite possibilities not only in the craft of research, but in our own bodies.

“Cells are not just circles and dots. They have complex structures inside as well. People really should know more about it or get into research because it’s important, obviously, to our livelihoods. These cells make up us,” Wu said. “Humans are complex, socially, psychologically, physically. I don’t know — life is just beautiful.”