NY Hall of Science

595,996,800,000,000,000,000,000,000

An unimaginable number. And yet, that’s the approximate amount of molecules that I currently have in my body.

I also know that broccoli is 4% carbohydrates, 5% fat, 3% protein, and 91% water, while an elephant is 2% carbohydrates, 7% fat, 21% protein, and 68% water. A bacteria is 5% carbohydrates, 3% fat, 16% protein, and 70% water. Comparatively, a human has 1% carbohydrates, 17% fat, 16% protein, and 61% water. Fascinating. The rockets in the Rocket Park made you feel as if you were right next to a NASA rocket launching.

I had seen some of the exhibits at the NY Hall of Science once before, but I decided to attend the museum again for a very different purpose this time: To view the Science Inspires Art: The Cosmos exhibit. The images, exhibits, and the colors simply took my breath away. I had always been fascinated by what lay beyond our world, and have previously competed in the Astronomy category of the National Science Olympiad on my high school team, so having that background knowledge really enhanced my experience, if I was able to recognize a certain astronomical object in an exhibit.

Furthermore, I viewed the photographs of the 2013 annual Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition winners and will include a few of them below. I had a few favorites in this exhibit. The first is a picture of Barbilophozia sp. (a leafy liverwort, byrophyte plant) and cyanobacteria under 50x magnification (the first picture), which received 8th place and was taken by Magdalena Turzanska of the Institute of Experimental Biology, Department of Plant Developmental Biology in the University of Wroclaw, Poland, using the epi-autofluorescence under UV light, z-stack reconstruction technique. The

The second picture is the Macrobrachium shrimp (ghost shrimp) eye under 140x magnification, and was taken by Vitoria Tobias Santos, of Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, using stereomicroscopy and received 11th place.

The next one received 9th place and is by Mark A. Sanders, of the University of Minnesota, USA, and it pictures an insect wrapped in spider web at 85x magnification, using Confocal, Autofluorescence, and Image Stacking techniques. The last picture received 7th place, and is by Dr. Jan Michels, of the Institute of Zoology, Functional Morphology and Biomechanics, Germany, and pictures the adhesive pad on a foreleg of a ladybird beetle (Coccinella septempunctata) at 20x magnification using Confocal Autofluorescence.

The photograph that placed first is a very impressive work of art, pictured below. It was taken by Wim van Egmond, of the Micropolitan Museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Pictured is a marine diatom, the chaetoceros debilis, which is a colonial plankton organism, magnified to 250x using Differential Interference Contrast and Image Stacking. Diatoms are one of the vital oxygen producers on earth and are a fundamental link in our food chains. The photograph was definitely impressive, with its contrasting bright yellow and dark blue colors, as well as the shadows throughout. The stacking technique used allowed the audience to view the diatom in a 3-dimensional scope.