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Arty Eating and Drinking Featured Photoworthy

Booze is Beautiful Under the Microscope

American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “Here’s to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.” While you may be aware that alcohol can bring out the beauty of a great many things, you may be surprised to know that there is an inner beauty to it. American firm Bevshots from Tallahassee, Florida creates wonderfully psychedelic artworks by placing a variety of alcoholic beverages under the microscope.

To create their images, a drop of the drink — be it a beer, a Bloody Mary, coffee liqueur, Zinfandel, or just straight whiskey — is placed on a slide in an airtight container and dried for up to four weeks. The residue is then viewed under a laboratory microscope and magnified up to a 1,000 times. The resulting micrographs show the crystallised carbohydrates that have turned to sugars and glucose. Each drink seems to have a wonderfully unique and colourful structure to it. Have a look at some of these alcoholic works of art after the jump.

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Arty Awesomeness Eating and Drinking Featured Science & Technology Weirdness

Food as Seen Through an Electron Microscope

We’re big fans of how the scanning electron microscope can show the smallest of details. If you liked the last set of in-depth SEM images, you may like the works of Caren Alpert.

As a child, Alpert was fascinated with the back-page quiz of “3-2-1 Contact” Magazine, a quiz that tasked the viewer to identify the items in a selection of close-up images. The photographer (and food lover) has always been interested in the smaller details and has been photographing food for over eight years. After seeing an image taken with an SEM, Alpert was inspired to use the scientific equipment to capture images of the foods that we ingest on a regular basis. The magnification is between 45 and 850 times and the resulting images look like alien landscapes, delicious alien landscapes. Her project is entitled Terra Cibus and can be viewed on her website, which you can find through Google.

[via Laughing Squid]

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Animal Kingdom Arty Awesomeness Featured Science & Technology Weirdness

Amazing Electron Microscope Images

A photomicrograph (or micrograph) is an image that is taken through a microscope, and we’ve covered a few of those on the blog including Nikon’s “Small World” competition, a traveller’s tale in a strange microscopic world, and an incredibly close-up look at insects. If you missed any of those, click here to see them.

North American scientific instruments company, FEI, is in the business of supplying electron microscopes to a various industries and it is the fantastic images taken by their line of scanning electron microscope (or SEM), that we’ll show you today. According FEI, their SEMs can magnify 20 to 1,000,000 times better a light microscope and can be used in tasks that contain long scientific words such as 3D cellular ultrastructure, macromolecular localization, and 3D tissue imaging.  The proof is really in the details. Hit the jump to see some of the FEI’s microscopic images.