Science as art: beautiful world under the microscope

By Mike Fricano 

This beautiful image is not an artsy photo of a pink flower. It’s a picture of an electrically conductive molecule captured with a scanning electron microscope.

This image, titled "Tetraaniline in Full Bloom," won first place in the Materials Research Society’s "Science as Art" competition this spring for Yue Wang, a member of Ric Kaner's lab and former IGERT fellow. In addition to being beautiful, this molecule has potential for sensors and organic supercapacitors because of its shape and electrical conductivity. The "flower" in the upper right is actually aggregated sheets of doped aniline oligomers and the black and white leaves are flexible sheets.

Who knew the microscopic world could be so spectacular?

Source: UCLA Newsroom