Science Art | The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Scientific illustration of a spiny lobster nymph dyed blue-green for the microscope., all legs and bubble-body and eyes (or tails?) on long stalks.

Science Art: Evibacus princeps, 2019

26 February 2023 grant 0

It’s a wickle baby slipper lobster! That color came from it being prepared on a slide so it could be examined under a microscope. The […]

Scientific illustration of a pterosaur, a flying dinosaur-like animal called Mimodactylus. It has broad, white, black-rimmed wings and is soaring above a sandy islet in a bright blue lagoon of prehistoric Afro-Arabia.

Science Art: Mimodactylus in life, 2019.

19 February 2023 grant 0

This is a painting of Mimodactylus libanensis soaring over what Nature (where it was first published) called “Afro-Arabia,” a continent that existed many millions of […]

Scientific illustration in the form of a black-and-white photo of a device used to test how an engine uses up lubrication oil, consisting of a long shaft ending in a gear, lined with rows of tubes and nozzles, with a row of small bottles along the front.

Science Art: Test Apparatus, 1960

12 February 2023 grant 0

A test apparatus, as used for the article “Modification of Force Feed Lubricators” in the 1960-05 edition of Lubrication Engineering. The idea was to study […]

Scientific illustration of a Mars Science Laboratory - that is, a steel capsule not unlike a 1950s concept of a flying saucer - starting to meet resistance in the thin Martian air, with visible plumes of white atmosphere spraying from its underside.

Science Art: Deceleration of Mars Science Laboratory in Martian Atmosphere, 2011

5 February 2023 grant 0

An image from NASA/JPL-Caltech depicting a capsule starting to slow down in the Martian atmosphere. All we see is the outer structure, which seems mostly […]

A scientific illustration of a DNA molecule, twisting away in front of a wet-looking background.

Science Art: DNA Double Helix, by the National Human Genome Research Institute

29 January 2023 grant 0

An image of the machine that builds our bodies, bit by bit. From the National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, located at […]

Scientific illustration of a rabbit, bright-eyed and determined, outrunning an owl, claws outstretched and hungry beak open wide.

Science Art: Just Missed Him, by G.E. Lodge, 1898.

22 January 2023 grant 0

I wasn’t sure if this really counted as a scientific illustration, despite finding it in the Biodiversity Heritage Library, since most of the other plates […]

Scientific illustration of colorful sea anemones practically glowing in orange, yellow, and red against the blackness of an undersea cave or rock face.

Science Art: Corynactis Viritis (et al), Phillip Henry Gosse, 1860.

15 January 2023 grant 0

These are sea anemones, from History of the British Sea-Anemones and Corals by Phillip Henry Gosse. They are, according to the caption below: 1-5 Corynactis […]

Scientific illustration of... well, there's a lot going on here. We've got a mythical-looking figure in a loincloth, sort of half-Zeus (his right hand is holding lightning bolts) and half-Hephaestus (his left hand, to our right, is on a large switch) Along the lower right of the image there are insets of various early 20th-century electrical devices. To the left and across the bottom is a block of text advertising a course in electrical science in the form of a book by S. Gernsback (doubtless a relative of the publisher, Hugo Gernsback) and H.W. Secor. It only costs a dollar!

Science Art: Experimental Electricity Course, 1916.

8 January 2023 grant 0

This is how you advertise a science book. At least, it was how Hugo Gernsback did in the pages of The Electrical Experimenter in September […]

Science Art: Papillons, from Larousse Universe, 1922

1 January 2023 grant 0

Thanks to an unexpected gift from an old friend, I was just reading an article in the print edition of Scientific American about the Sora […]

Scientific illustration of an ad touting nuclear power, in a 1950s/1960s style, showing a cheerful Santa over a young boy reaching for a colorful atomic model under the words "Science by Santa: Remember bad kids get coal, Good kids get Uranium which produces 3 million times more power and 10 million times less waste for their christmas lights." (With the odd capitalization in the original text.)

Science Art: Science by Santa: Remember bad kids get coal, Good kids get Uranium….,

25 December 2022 grant 0

Uranium, which produces 3 million times more energy and 10 million times less waste! I honestly have no idea if this PSA is real or […]

Scientific illustration: a B&W image of the interior of a spacecraft and an astronaut, with a small, orange item floating in midair off to the middle right - a tiny Snoopy doll used to measure relative weightlessness inside the cabin.

Science Art: Snoopy Hitches Ride to Space Aboard Artemis I, November 2022

18 December 2022 grant 0

This is a NASA-released image of a very important piece of space technology. That small, color-corrected orange thing is a tiny plush Snoopy doll used […]

An aerial photo of flowing streams of lava, steam and smoke rising above the black stone and glowing orange lava. Photo from the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, taken by the Civil Air Patrol.

Science Art: Mauna Loa Northeast Rift Zone Eruption – November 28, 2022, Civil Air Patrol

11 December 2022 grant 0

Rivers of lava glow a burning orange, sending white plumes up from a black stone landscape. This is a photograph of Hawaii – a place […]

Scientific illustrations of spiny seashells, ghost white against a saturated black background.

Science Art: Scabrotrophon Species, Roland Houart, 2003.

4 December 2022 grant 0

These are seashells – murexes from the deep waters off Vanuatu called Scabrotrophon inspiratum. Belgian researcher Roland Houart wrote about them (and as far as […]

Scientific illustration of a telescope array capturing a gamma-ray burst: dark skies and glowing energy fields. Superbossa.com and C. Righi.

Science Art: MAGIC telescopes detected the highest-energy gamma rays from a Gamma Ray Burst…, 2019.

27 November 2022 grant 0

This is an illustration of MAGIC telescopes capturing images of very intense gamma rays. “MAGIC” refers to the twin Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) […]

Scientific illustration of elephant seals in Baja California, Mexico, seen as a photo of a diorama in the American Museum's "Hall of Ocean Life."

Science Art: Elephant Seals of Guadaloupe Island

20 November 2022 grant 0

This is a likeness of the elephant seals of Baja California, Mexico, as displayed in 1933 in the newly opened Hall of Ocean Life in […]