Winning Salt Grain
A grain of salt took first prize in Swansea University's 2012 Research as Art competition. This close-up look came from a laboratory study of the salts that form on jet turbines in midflight.
Children of the Gold Rush
Anthropologist Ele Fisher took this picture of Fatuma and her friends in a gold mining settlement in Tanzania. Mining offers these children's families income, but mining camps are often rife with poverty and child exploitation, Fisher writes.
It's in a Book
Is reading the best medicine? Alison Williams of Swansea University runs a reading group at a cancer center. Here, she juxtaposes a book against both modern medicines and medicinal plants, suggesting the therapeutic value of reading.
Knitted Enzyme
Who says science and the domestic arts don't mix? Josie Parker knitted a representation of the enzyme CYP51. Many antifungal compounds target CYP51, but mutations in the enzyme can make those antifungals useless.
Loading Up
This visualization shows iron ore and coke (a coal product), being loaded into a blast furnace. Computer models are used to simulate the packing of such a furnace, which is too hot for direct observation.
Series of Tubes
Nathan Cooze put this tableau together to illustrate the jigsaw puzzle of his research project, "A Property Comparison of Cold Formed and Hot Finished Steel Conveyance Tubes’ sponsored by Tata Steel Tubes." His thesis is surrounded by the tubes in question.
Blue Flow
This image models the flow of water downstream of a tidal stream turbine for generating hydroelectric power from the ocean.
Turtle Tides
The movements of floating buoys translate into this colorful map, one of the 2012 Research as Art honorees. Understanding these currents allows researchers to understand how baby sea turtles drift and disperse across the seas.
Search for a Mutation
Molecular neuroscientist Sian Wood needs a lot of coffee when he scans the DNA sequences of patients with the rare disorder hyperekplexia. Hyperekplexia is marked by muscle stiffness and life-threatening breathe-holding episodes. A single genetic variation among 3 billion, circled here, is responsible for the disorder.
Fjord in Focus
Icebergs melt in a Greenland Fjord as pink clouds reflect in the water. "t’s hard to describe the beauty and inspiration of the places in which we work," said photographer and glaciologist Tavi Murray." I am a scientist rather than an artist or photographer but a landscape like this talks directly to my soul."
Undergraduate Prize
Anjali Kadam took Swansea University's undergraduate prize in the Research as Art competition. Kadam portrayed the disillusionment of British youth with the U.K. government.
