“Harry Potter and the Lesson in Latin”

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Savanna Ratky:

I created a short comic using crayons and pens to draw on paper. I made it Harry Potter themed, as that is a series that I enjoy, and that I thought most readers would relate to. I specifically made this about the iconic scene where Hermione, Ron, and Harry are trying out a new spell and Ron mispronounces it as LeviosA. Hermione then corrects him by saying “it’s LeviOsa not LeviosA’. The concept I chose to make the work about was specifically the use of “bacterium’ and “bacteria’, which are commonly missued by people. Bacterium is the singular version of bacteria.

Civilization is Born – Matt Andrews

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Title:

“Civilization is Born” by Matt Andrews

Artists Statement:

A virus is in some respects a pure expression of information made manifest. It is like a book, it exists and anything that happens because of what it contains is dependent on the life which reads it.

The only difference between humanity now and humanity a hundred thousand years ago is the information, be it science, culture, or other knowledge which we have accumulated and spread among ourselves.

In this piece I have drawn inspiration from viruses, to that end I havbe created a scene in a 3D program where I modeled the delivery protein structure of a virus bacteriophage including the icosohedral head, tail, base plate, and tail fibers, all of which I have scaled up to a size closer to that of a human, the DNA has been replaced with a book.

 

Some larger renders of this scene:

Civilization is Born

Art Project: Rise of Vilithrax

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Dan Mulkey

To preface, I have been the Dungeon Master for my friends’ Dungeons & Dragons campaign this semester, which involves creating worlds and adventures, then playing them out with characters and dice within the rules of the system. While reviewing viral structure in class, I was struck by the polyhedral nature of the viral capsid, noticing that it was evocative of a D20, the most prolific die in the game and the most evocative of D&D as a concept. Using a bit of copper wire and a D20, I fashioned this small bacteriophage figure with literally $2 and 10 minutes of my time.

Of course, even I would consider this barely worth a C, so I also decided to take a bit of viral inspiration and fashion a Dungeons & Dragons encounter designed after a viral outbreak.

 

The problem I ran into was it being difficult to design a monster for D&D that you can’t hit with a sword, so I created a few variants on the bacteriophage design:

The first I dubbed a “crawler”, a bacteriophage without a tail, roughly the size of a small dog. These would hunt down nearby creatures (symbolizing cells) and attack with a small mouth on their underside. They would then inject “viral DNA” which, after a “lag phase”, would assemble itself into a new crawler using the host’s biomass, slowly making them sicker and more invalid. It would then burst out of the host’s chest in a spray of viscera, killing them instantly. This represented a lytic viral attack. Another variant, the “acolyte”, would have the viral DNA incorporated into their own biomass, evolving them into a sort of bacteriophage/humanoid hybrid, with their tail hidden under robes and manifesting tail fibers like a viral centaur. This was intended to be representative of a lysogenic cycle, though in this case the host is empowered by the incorporation of viral DNA.

Over the course of a 6 hour session, the heroes successfully quarantined the city, isolated healthy survivors, and detained Vilithrax, the mad priest who initiated ground zero of the infection in a crowded church. Time will tell if some phages escape the city and wreak mayhem in the rest of the world.

Art Project

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The diversity of the microbial world is not only astounding, but awe inspiring. Life as we know it would not be possible without this vast microbial community and oxygenating our atmosphere, cycling our nitrogen, and fixing our carbon. These and so many other processes, allow us to inhabit this Earth and continue to thrive. However, there is still the <1% of microbes which are classified as pathogenic to humans. These microbes, do not help our quality of life but rather, can cause disease and death in our populations.

 

Since 2015 the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) publishes a yearly list of pathogens. These pathogens are those which have been identified to pose the greatest public health risk due to their “epidemic potential and for which there are no, or insufficient, countermeasures.’ (World Health Organization, 2018). The pathogens which are the subjects of my portrait collage are those of the 2018 R&D Blueprint List of priority pathogens. (https://www.who.int/blueprint/priority-diseases/en/)

For my art project I have done small portraits of the pathogens listed by the W.H.O.. It should be noted that these are in no particular order. All of these pathogens are in need of further analysis as well as analysis for treatment methods which would be imperative for stalling an outbreak. One should also note that there is a “Disease X’ within this collage. There is no true disease called Disease X, but rather the potential that an as of yet unknown pathogen that could cause widespread disease epidemics is out there. It is my hope that even though my artistic abilities and nudges to 70’s rock bands may not be the best, they can introduce this information to a broader audience. Since not everyone spends their free time looking at the W.H.O. website.

-Samantha Smith

Micro Magnets

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Art Project: Micro Magnets

by Emily Reast

For this project I’ve made a series of color coded clay magnets representing different   types of microbes. I want to show that microbial life can be interesting, presenting diversity, and that it can be beautiful (even if I’m not the best artist). The green magnets represent bacteria, the blue yeast (fungi), the orange and red viruses, and the purples archaea. I’ve included some features such as flagella and pili on several of the magnets to make them appear slightly more realistic. Of course the different microbes are not accurate in their relative size to each other, but I had limited resources and didn’t want to make any of the art actually be microscopic. Furthermore, the quality of being magnetic allows the microbes to change orientations and colony formation on the surface to which they stick. The photo attached to this post is the magnets stuck to my dorm room door here on campus.

Lab 6 WAR -Micro to Macro

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Jimmy Maynard F03

 

War is my artistic intent with these two painting. The first one is of a bacteriophage which represents the on going war between bacteria and viruses that is going on all around us but cant be seen by our naked eyes. The second is the type of war we hope to never see such as Pakistan and India who both have nuclear weapons and seen to always engaging in conflicts like the downing of two of Indias Air Force fighters just a few days ago.

As far as the materials used, most of the materials did not work. The inside capsid head of the bacteriophage I used my own bacterial isolate that despite being gram negative will not grow EMB plate or the MAC plate. I used E. coli because it has that nice black outline effect.