We’re used to looking in windows, but what if they were able to look back?

The image above captures a moment from the new window display on show at Wellcome Trust HQ – an art installation called “Eye Contact”. This artwork consists of over 650 coloured boxes lit by over 16,000 LEDs, which together form two giant pairs of eyes.

We encounter thousands of electronic images every day, via our phones, computers, projectors and televisions. But how does the digital screen mediate our reactions to what we see? Do we experience different emotional responses seeing faces via Skype or YouTube, than we would if we were truly face to face with them?

This installation by Peter Hudson, a recent graduate from Camberwell College of Arts, probes these questions of perception and recognition. It will be winking and blinking at passersby for the next year.

To create the work, Peter recruited 68 members of Trust staff to volunteer to have footage of their eyes recorded. He then transformed this into the heavily pixellated video display that is on show in the windows of our building on Euston Road.

The eyes will change and move throughout the day, displaying the idiosyncrasies of each individual’s gaze. At sunset, the eyes will ‘sleep’, remaining closed during the night, unless they are awoken by a passing pedestrian.

You can see the eyes for yourself in the window of the Gibbs building, at 215 Euston Road, or read more about the Wellcome Trust windows commission on the Wellcome Trust website. A full list of staff members who participated is available on Peter Hudson’s website.

The image above is an artistic impression of a microscopic view of the fungus Aspergillus fumigatus, a common organism in the environment typically found in compost heaps and decaying vegetation. The green flower-like structure is the conidial head that produces thousands of spores (conidia), which can be released into the atmosphere.

It is estimated that all humans inhale at least several hundred conidia each day; typically these are quickly eliminated by the immune system in healthy individuals. However, in immunocompromised individuals, the fungus can cause severe and often fatal invasive infections, mainly arising in the lungs. Aspergillus fumigatus is also a ubiquitous aeroallergen affecting millions of susceptible adults and children. Severe asthma with fungal sensitization may affect between 3 and 13 million adults worldwide.

This image is from an original painting by the artist Peter Thwaites, a Land Agent/Chartered Surveyor by profession, based in Dorset. Peter has always used the medium of painting and drawing to record the natural world around him. He is self-taught, having been encouraged by one of the founding members of the Society of Wildlife Artists.

Peter has a love and understanding of macroscopic fungi and has produced many paintings of mushrooms and toadstools. However, much of the beauty of nature exists in microscopic form and so here, based on a series of light and electron microscopic images he was given, Peter has captured the elegance of the architecture of this fungus as a subject that is beyond the resolution of the human eye.

This painting, along with paintings of two other pathogenic fungi (Candida albicans and Cryptococcus neoformans), was commissioned by the Medical Mycology and Fungal Immunology Consortium to promote medical mycology research and increase public understanding of the clinical importance of fungal infections. The other aims of the Consortium, led by the Aberdeen Fungal Group at the University of Aberdeen and funded by a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award, are to promote cross disciplinary research across the UK, to build capacity in the medical mycology sector and to train a new generation of scientists from countries of low- and middle- income with high endemic burdens of fungal disease.

Image credit: Peter Thwaites

This week’s image is of a sculpture of the Ebola virus, created by artist Luke Jerram.

It is an unusual, and artistic, take on Ebola. With the virus continuing to spread in West Africa and the responses from the global health community regularly in the news, we’ve found that journalists and health writers have been requesting images of the virus, but they are not easy to come by.

Made entirely of glass, Luke’s sculpture is approximately one million times larger than the virus itself, and is part of a series of similar glass-works called Glass Microbiology.

All the pieces in this series are transparent and colourless, in deliberate contrast to artificially coloured scientific images. Being smaller than the wavelength of light, viruses in fact have no colour. To create the series, Luke worked in consultation with virologists from the University of Bristol, and photographs of his work have been used in medical journals, media stories, and one has even appeared on the front cover of Nature.

Not only is this a precise visual representation of Ebola, its jewel-like finish carries great beauty. This complex tension between the beauty of an object and what it represents lies at the heart of Luke’s sculptures, which have been created as a means of contemplating the global impact of disease.

This particular artwork was commissioned by a museum in Holland last year, but will be on display in the redeveloped Reading Room at Wellcome Collection in 2015.

Image Credit: Luke Jerram

Most of us can recall familiar music in our heads; some of us can imagine original music. But when that musical imagination spills over into musical intrusions, earworms or hallucinations, the experience can be disorientating at best, and at worst frightening. Recipients of a Wellcome Trust Arts Award, vocal ensemble The Clerks, present a new performance piece entitled ‘Phantom Voices’, a provocative take on the phenomenon of musical hallucinations. Edward Wickham, who devised the project, explains more…

Many of us experience what might be called ‘musical imaginings’ in the form of the everyday phenomenon of the ‘earworm’ which has led to surveys concluding, unsurprisingly, that Kylie Minogue’s “I just can’t get you out of my head” is a leading contender. But there is much greater range: from the musician or composer who is capable of controlling and manipulating her musical imaginings, through to the person who hears music as if from an external source and cannot control it. The spectrum is wide and yet there is still remarkably little research into the various ways musical imagination operates.

In an attempt to address this, we’ve joined forces with Charles Fernyhough and his ‘Hearing the Voice’ team at the University of Durham to find out whether the conditions that provoke musical hallucinations are similar to those associated with voice-hearing.

We also want to improve our understanding of how we remember and imagine music in our heads. We want to explore questions such as: do musical hallucinations have something of the same quality as verbal hallucinations? To what extent are they a function of memory, and to what extent are they an expression of a creative imagination?  We want to explore the various ways in which our musical imagination can spill out, become undisciplined and uncontrolled.

We are doing this in two ways. Hearing the Voice have set up a questionnaire to gather people’s experiences of musical imaginings, which you can complete online. But we have also developed a musical programme – a concert presentation featuring music old and new. Working with composer Christopher Fox, we lead our audience through a series of musical ‘hauntings’, a sequence of interrelated songs, all stemming from the same source, which take us from the present back into the Middle Ages, via Bach, Heinrich Isaac, bluegrass, a Victorian temperance song and folk song. Each song is a re-imagining of the original, appropriating material from the song but reinventing it in different idioms.

At the same time, the audience will also be haunted more directly, by pre-recorded speech – including the testimony of people who have direct experience of the phenomenon – music and sampled noises, to evoke the experience of voice and music hallucinations. Members of the audience are encouraged to download an MP3 track and listen to it simultaneously with the performance.

We encourage you to get involved – either by participating in the online questionnaire or attending one of our performances.

Join us at Spitalfields Music Winter Festival on Monday 15th December at 9.30pm – we look forward to seeing you there.

To find out more about this Wellcome Trust funded project please visit the Phantom Voices website. Find out more about voice hearing in Mosaic’s podcast documentary Voices in the Dark, featuring the Hearing the Voice team and other researchers looking at the phenomenon. Charles Fernyhough and his team also took part in a Reddit AMA, answering questions about hearing voices and their research. 

Photo credits: The Clerks (top and bottom images), Musical Notes – by Epic Fireworks on Flickr, CC-BY

For our Image of the Week this week we have a special guest post from artist and researcher Rebecca Harris…

This image shows part of my commission for the Eden Project’s new permanent exhibition ‘Invisible You: The Human Microbiome’ opening late April 2015. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, I am creating a hand and machine embroidered textile wall-hanging depicting a pregnant figure, which explores how microbes form us.

Our bodies are an enormous microbial communities, which work together to keep us healthy and as such we are referred to as an eco-system.  Using this analogy of the body being like a geographical area, I established a method of representing the two-dimensional body with a three-dimensional effect similar to that the contours lines of a topographical map.

Translating medical imaging techniques (like MRIs) into machine stitch, I trace around each ‘slice’ of the body and the ‘landscape’ created is the chartered area of trillions of microbes to be explored and discovered. Covering this terrain are thousands of tiny hand embroidered stitches, French knots, to represent the microbial communities, which create a beautiful and seductive surface of ‘colonies’ occupying our ‘landscape’.

Working with Professor Michael Wilson, from UCL, we have ensured that the colours I use represent the main types of microbes.  I wanted to give the viewer the sense of the varying settlements around the different parts of our bodies.

As many hours are yet to be spent sewing these tiny ‘microbes’ I am taking the work out into my local community to sit and sew, whilst talking about the ideas with interested viewers.  The first date is at the Eden Project on 10th and 11th February.  More details about these events can be found on my artist page.

Image credit: Rebecca D Harris.

Laurène Pijulet-Balmer, Under Your Skin Creutzfeldt-Jakob, 2013

This week sees the opening of ‘History is Now: 7 artists take on Britain’ at the Hayward Gallery, featuring the first ever art exhibition to explore the BSE crisis and how it affected the UK in the 1990s – and ever since.

One of the images featured in the exhibition is by Laurène Pijulet-Balmer, an illustrator whose series ‘Under Your Skin’ couples microscopic detail of diseases and viruses with classic fashion and cinematic illustration styles. The series was an attempt by Laurène, a self-confessed hypochondriac, to overcome her own fear of disease by finding the beauty in the shapes and colours revealed under a microscope, and then inserting them into a face, where they cannot be hidden away or ignored.

This image above is based on the human equivalent of BSE, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), and others in the series include herpes, rotavirus and toxoplasmosis. Each illustration is the product of painstaking research into microscopic disease imaging, looking at different scales, colours, layers and shapes.

The idea for the series sprang from a design project that involved drawing virus-inspired shapes, based on Ernst Haeckel’s 1862 book “Art Forms from the Ocean” – one of the earliest examples of illustrative art and science. At the same time Laurène was working on a portrait for a friend when she began drawing cells instead of the face. She’s not sure why, but we’re glad she did!

She took this further, and later combined her work on viruses with illustrations of faces, as a way of presenting microorganisms in a more familiar light, and bringing them out of the unknown.

Image credit:  Laurène Pijulet-Balmer / Wellcome Images

Wellcome Images is one of the world’s richest and most unusual collections, with themes ranging from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science. Over 100,000 high resolution images from our historical collections are now free to use under the Creative Commons-Attribution only (CC-BY) licence.

Dharavi in Mumbai, India, is one of the largest informal settlements in the world. This month, it was transformed into the Alley Galli Biennale, a festival of art, health and recycling. The festival is the culmination of two years of passionate collaboration and has been supported by the Wellcome Trust. Helen Latchem looks after the Wellcome Trust’s international public engagement work and she visited the Biennale for its opening. This collection of vibrant photographs captures the spirit of the festival – the artists, scientists and activists who are taking part - and Helen explains why international engagement is so important…

Community engagement with biomedicine in low-income settings is fundamentally important, not only because health research is best directed and informed by people who are facing health challenges every day, but also because researchers working in areas like Dharavi need ways of engaging people with their research and ultimately changing things for the better.

This project began by looking at women’s health issues but has developed into something much deeper which delves into the underlying systems from which these problems, and many others, are born. It reveals, questions and celebrates many of the factors at play in a vast community like Dharavi, both medical and personal, but also environmental, cultural, economic and political.

I was only in Mumbai for two days, and I’m finding myself struggling to convey the power that this type of project has in portraying the complexity of the lives of Dharavi residents. It not only uncovers some of the intricacies of how people navigate the challenges and opportunities of their world, but also beautifully demonstrates that it is a world of huge contrasts.

As part of the festival, a stunning modern installation by artist Nitant Hirlekar called ‘Hope and Hazard’ explored the positive impact that Dharavi-based industry has on India’s economy, yet at the same time highlights the negative impact much of this labour has on the health and wellbeing of the residents. Workers in Dharavi are fundamentally connected to the system but yet in many ways as ‘slum’ dwellers, they are not recognised by it.

This project has grown into something bigger and more far-reaching than I think anyone ever expected. Beauty, art and telling stories have caught the imagination of people in Dharavi and this is spreading out into Mumbai and the rest of the world. Nayreen Daruwalla and David Osrin – the project directors – the core project team, local creatives and volunteers should be immensely proud.

I arrived at the inauguration event on Sunday, having been told on the way that the audience was modest like a ‘small wedding’, and was faced with hundreds of people engrossed by a drama piece about TB using giant puppets. It not only made me realise that weddings must be huge here but also that there was more interest and enthusiasm in that giant dusty ‘theatre’ than I’d seen at a lot of UK engagement events.

The exhibition spaces of the Biennale are tucked away in the alleys of Dharavi and visitors can happen upon them whilst going about their day. I found that the volunteers at each exhibition were so keen to articulate to me, despite the language barrier, the value and importance of the artworks to them. In particular with the images of women in colourful saris from a project ‘Provoke and Protect’ which were like magic eye pictures – on first viewing so happy and vibrant – until the Hindi was translated for me, and the message became clear: “Stop Rape”.

You can visit the Dharavi Biennale website here. This project is funded via a Wellcome Trust International Engagement Award and is featured as a case study on our website.

Image credits: Benita Fernando ©Dharavi Biennale, Sneha

Watching – an opera for children, about sleeping

As the first spring bulbs start to push through the soil and signal that the time for hibernation is over, throw off the lethargy of winter and explore some of the fantastic Wellcome-supported events that are on this month. For those of you not quite full of the joys of spring just yet, there are also plenty of online options to tantalise you and get the cogs whirring again… 

Exhibitions

Forensics: The anatomy of crime – Wellcome Collection, London – until 21st June
Our latest free exhibition explores the history, science and art of forensic medicine. It travels from crime scenes to courtrooms, exploring the specialisms of the people involved in the delicate processes of collecting, analysing and presenting medical evidence. It draws out the stories of victims, suspects and investigators of violent crimes, and our enduring cultural fascination with death and detection. The exhibition is free, but timed tickets will be in operation at busy times.

The Institute of Sexology – Wellcome Collection, London – Until 20th September
From Alfred Kinsey’s complex questionnaires to the contemporary National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal), ‘The Institute of Sexology’ investigates how the practice of sex research has shaped our ever-evolving attitudes towards sexual behaviour and identity. The exhibition is free, but timed tickets will be in operation at busy times.

Unseen: The Lives of Looking – The Queen’s House, Greenwich, 5th March-26th July

Contemporary artist Dryden Goodwin creates his first feature-length film, considering the act of looking. Charting a series of close encounters by the artist, the film focuses on three individuals with a particular relationship to looking: a planetary explorer, an eye surgeon and a human rights lawyer. The artist’s own gaze reflects on their endeavours, through his intense drawing and filmmaking activity. The solo exhibition will include drawings produced during the production of the film, as well as artefacts used by all four lookers in their work.

Roman Medicine Roadshow – Big Bang Fair, Birmingham – 11th-14th March
The Roman Medicine Roadshow, explores the science of medicine, bones and healing in the Roman world. This exhibition allows participants to take part in Roman surgery, explore the science of bones and take part in a CSI-style investigation to solve a gruesome 1st century murder… The exhibition will be part of the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham, the largest celebration of science, technology, engineering and maths for young people in the UK.

Lens – Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge – 16th-21st March
Glass artist Livvy Fink and poet Ezra Rubenstein have come together through a collaboration between the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy and Cancer Research UK, to present a series of works exploring the relationship between macro-structures and micro-structures. The works are inspired by the most distant galaxies and the cells within us, frozen moments occurring somewhere between liquid and solid states, where light is diffused through a myriad of intricate surfaces, suspended within glass.

5Hz – Arnolfini, Bristol – 20th March-6th April
5Hz is an interactive exhibition that invites audiences to experience a new human language, by imagining an alternative evolution of voice and creating a language that strengthens human connection. Interactive events and installations will include live choral performances and a sound chamber where visitors can try the language themselves. There will also be a programme of workshops, activities, talks and discussions that will explore aspects of human voice. 5Hz is is the result of a collaborative research process with psychologist Laurence White, cognitive neuroscientist Nina Kazanina, and musicologist Emma Hornby.

LIFELOGGING – Science Gallery, Dublin – until 17th April
A lab in the Science Gallery exploring new ways to track everything from heartbeats to heartbreak, this free exhibition features novel methods for capturing and visualising data, people and the impulses connecting them. Each week, different researchers will takeover the post in the gallery to carry out an analysis on topics such as the size of our digital footprint.

Welcome back, Medicine Man! – Wellcome Collection (permanent exhibition)
After a curious journey of redevelopment, we are delighted to re-open the ‘Medicine Man’ gallery at Wellcome Collection. Avid collector Henry Wellcome created one of the world’s great museums: a vast stockpile of evidence about our universal interest in health and the body. Come and explore a cross-section of extraordinary objects from his collection, ranging from diagnostic dolls to Darwin’s walking stick, and from Napoleon’s toothbrush to George III’s hair.

Performances

Fiction – Battersea Arts Centre – 3rd-21st March
Fiction is the second performance by Glen Neath and David Rosenberg using binaural sound and absolute darkness. It is an anxious journey through the sprawling architecture of our dreams and an exercise in empathy.

This Room – various venues – 16th March-24th May
In This Room, theatre-maker Laura Jane Dean reveals the actualities and artefacts of a therapeutic process. Working with neuroscientists and a CBT therapist, Laura attempts to understand what it means to be ill, what it might mean to get better and invites us all to ask ourselves, “am I okay?” The next performance is at Cambridge Science Festival on 16th March, followed by the Maudsley Hospital in London on 15th April.

Watching – Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh – 18th-21st March
Watching is a new opera, which is aimed at families in Edinburgh. An exciting collaboration between academics, scientists, theatre practitioners and primary schools, Watching will raise awareness of the links between sleep and academic performance. In a series of workshops, children will explore sleep from historical, biomedical, musical, dramatic and literary perspectives, and rehearse a new opera, culminating in four full-scale performances open to the general public.

Shh…BANG! – various venues – 29th March-27th May
A delicate dance-theatre performance for ages 3+, playfully exploring silence and noise. “Quiet” lives in a muffled world of clouds and softness. Next door, “Loud” collects more and more noises and wild sounds. In drawers and suitcases there are boings, splashes, bangs and swooshes. How can these two possibly find a way to listen to each other? Shh… BANG! is created by Peut-etrre Theatre.

Phoenix Dance: Tearfall – various venues – until 28th May
Tearfall is an exploration of science through dance, inspired by the biochemical make up of tears, and how their appearance and composition is affected by different emotional states. It looks at the differences between how tears function and how they are perceived, asking why we cry, and what happens when we laugh until we cry? The next tour date is 3rd March at the Curve Theatre in Leicester.

Events

Biophilia screening – London Electronic Arts Festival – 6th March
Bjork’s Biophilia Live will be screened at the London Electronic Arts Festival as part of ‘Beats on Film’, and will be followed by a panel talk: ‘Technology and Electronic Music: Past, Present and Future’, with Will Gregory (Goldfrapp), Freida Abtan  (Music Computing, Goldsmiths), and Guy Harries (Music Technology, UEL).

Awake – Oxford Science Festival – 9th March
Awake explores the findings of the largest ever study of awareness during anaesthesia through music, poetry and discussion in an evening to challenge your very concept of consciousness. Featuring a panel of experts from medicine and research as well as a poet and a composer, who have put together a new musical work based on actual patient experiences of awareness under anaesthesia.

What makes you laugh and cry? – Science Museum, London – 11th March-18th April
How do you feel when you hear someone laugh or cry? Do you sometimes find yourself joining in? Go along to Live Science at the Science Museum, where the new researchers in residence from University College London discover more about how we respond to other people laughing and crying. Live Science is part of the Who Am I?

What is Evidence? – Wellcome Collection – Thursday 12th March, 7pm-8.30pm
A discussion event on what counts as ‘evidence’ in a courtroom. Do forensic scientists, lawyers and the public all have the same understanding of truth and reasonable doubt? Does our notion of ‘evidence’ change over time? A conversation on how objects, witnesses and science fit into the legal process.

Sexology Season Brighton and Manchester – 2nd-25th March
We are partnering with the SICK! Festival in Brighton for the next part of our national Sexology Season. The eclectic programme (including theatre, dance, film, literature and debates) will explore to what extent we are free to explore and enjoy our sexual desires and how much our experience is affected by social codes and personal fears. The Manchester Season also continues until 30th March.

Packed Lunch: Child health – Wellcome Collection – 18th March, 1pm-2pm
Simon Cousens is the lead investigator on a research project in Burkina Faso, West Africa, which aims to investigate how mass media campaigns could improve the health of children under five. Can public health messages really make a difference? Join Simon to hear how the work is going and for a broader discussion about applying statistics to neonatal and child health in low-income settings.

Madness in Civilisation – 25^th March, 6.30pm-7.30pm
For the 2015 Roy Porter Lecture, pre-eminent historian of psychiatry Andrew Scull will discuss the history of the encounter between reason and unreason. His lecture will focus on the 18th century, reflecting the interests of the late medical historian Roy Porter, and will look at the ways cultures responded to the seemingly irrational, psychotic and insane.

Library Insights: Graphic sex – Wellcome Collection – 26^th March, 3pm-4pm
A taste of sexuality, sexism, censorship, gender identity and sexually transmitted diseases in comics, pulps, graphic novels, magazines, undergrounds, comic strips and postcards, from Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘Lysistrata’ and the ripped shirts of ‘Doc Savage’ to Adam Hughes’s ‘Wonder Woman’ and gay marriage in ‘Astonishing X-Men’.

A Long Table on the Ins and Outs of Sex – Wellcome Collection – 26th March, 7pm-9pm
Conceived by Lois Weaver and inspired by Marleen Gorris’s film ‘Antonia’s Line’, the Long Table is an experimental open public forum that’s a hybrid of performance, installation, roundtable discussion and dinner party, designed to facilitate dialogue by gathering together people with common interests.

Online

Mosaic – compelling stories about the science of life
Celebrating its first birthday this month, Wellcome Trust’s long-form publication Mosaic has more than 50 critically acclaimed features and documentaries exploring the hot issues in science, life, medicine and health – with a new story every week.

The Collectors
A new immersive digital story about the pursuit of knowledge and the compulsion to collect, following Mindcraft: A century of madness, murder and mental healing. The Collectors traces the history of six collectors – including John Tradescant, Francis Bacon, Marie Stopes and Henry Wellcome – whose curiosity drove them to accumulate objects, information, knowledge and notoriety, with some extraordinary consequences.

Sex by Numbers
Based on data from the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal), our interactive infographic invites you to playfully explore these enlightening stats about sex. Have a play with the stats and tweet your results #sexbynumbers

Mind the Sex
As part of our national Sexology Season, Manchester-based women from the Seymour Poets worked with poet and stand-up comedian Jackie Hagan, illustrator Emma Brown Owl and researcher Kathryn Abel to explore sex, mental health and wellbeing and express their insights in a set of digital and printed postcards.

Still on…

History is now: 7 artists take on Britain – Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre – 10th Feb-26th April
In the first ever exhibition in an art gallery to investigate bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and its impact, Turner Prize nominee Roger Hiorns curates a section of History Is Now at the Hayward Gallery. Hiorns provides an artistic exploration of the disease and its human equivalent, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) incorporating biomedicine, agriculture, animal husbandry, food production and consumption.

Investment – Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool – until 15th March
Grab your last chance to see Tabitha Moses’ exhibition, ‘Investment’, which has been extended until March due to a fantastic visitor response. The exhibition is based on Tabitha’s experience of infertility, assisted conception, and successful donor egg IVF.

Brainsex – until 10th April
Timandra Harkness’s Brainsex comedy show starts a UK tour from 20th February, with the first show in Belfast.

In the flesh – Courtesy of Gemma Tickle/Mosaic

This week we’re celebrating the 1st birthday of our long-form science journalism publication Mosaic. We’ve had a spectacularly successful 12 months, with over 50 stories published that have reached in excess of eight million readers – on our site, and via other outlets who have taken advantage of our Creative Commons licensing to share stories with their audiences. Peta Bell is the Art Director for Mosaic and we asked her to select a favourite image from the past 12 months and tell us how she goes about illustrating the varied (and often complex) stories that Mosaic publishes…

Coming up with images for Mosaic really is a collaborative process.

The subject matter is always well researched from the writers’ end, so I find the most efficient way to produce imagery is to wait to read the copy before finding the right image-maker and commissioning images.

Images need to cover not only the essence of the piece, but also need to be factual correct and relatable – even if the end result is quite conceptual, like the image above.

This particular piece by Gemma Tickle was commissioned for a story on circumcision and what Gemma pulled out of the text was how clinical the procedure was. She was interested in the idea of infection, disease and cleanliness when it came to circumcision, and whether it was done for a religious or an economic reason.

Gemma decided she wanted to make phallic forms using plasticine, plastic and wood, and play around with reflections to bring the piece together. The image above shows a phallic object made from wood, which not only plays the physical form of a penis, but also the slang for penis. It’s simultaneously silly and clever – and a fun fact about it is that it was made by a man with the surname “Wood”.

The series of images in the article was also produced, made and photographed by women (photographed by the wonderful Kate Jackling), which made for a few awkward conversations on set but I genuinely feel worked out to be the most objective and creative way of dealing with the subject matter.

You can see the full set of images that this image is part of and read the full story “The troubled history of the foreskin” on the Mosaic website. Mosaic publishes a new piece each week on a Tuesday, and you can keep up to date with them on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Image credit: Gemma Tickle for Mosaic Science

“Fascinating, sad, macabre… also delicate, detailed and beautiful” – just some of the words used to describe the overall winner in the Wellcome Image Awards 2015. Announced at at ceremony at Wellcome Trust HQ this evening, Michael Frank’s image of a pregnant pony’s uterus took the top prize. Here we share the full collection of winning images…

“As far as standout images go, the image of the horse’s uterus with the fetus still inside was incredible, and just sticks in my mind,” said James Cutmore, Picture Editor of BBC Focus magazine and one of the judges of this year’s awards. “It evokes many different emotions at once.”

Pregnant pony uterus – Michael Frank, Royal Veterinary College

Pregnant pony uterus – Michael Frank, Royal Veterinary College

The photograph shows the uterus of a pregnant New Forest pony. Approximately five months into the pregnancy, the developing pony is outside the uterus, but remains attached by its membranes and umbilical cord. This is a historical specimen from a culled animal that happened to be pregnant at the time. It is preserved in formalin at the Anatomy Museum of the Royal Veterinary College.

Goat stomach chamber – Michael Frank, Royal Veterinary College

Goat stomach chamber – Michael Frank, Royal Veterinary College

You may be aware that cows have a number of stomach chambers, but did you know the same is true for sheep and goats? This second winning image by Michael Frank shows the second of four stomach chambers (the reticulum) of a goat. The inside of the reticulum forms a honeycomb pattern, which is home to the bacteria that help break down food.

Boll weevil – Daniel Kariko

Boll weevil – Daniel Kariko

Looking like something you might expect in a Star Wars film, this image shows the head of a boll weevil under a scanning electron microscope. The boll weevil has a long curved snout, but don’t be deceived by the apparent friendly demeanour in this portrait – boll weevils can destroy entire cotton crops, despite only being 6-8 mm long .

Immune cell detects disease – N Dieckmann and N Lawrence, University of Cambridge

Immune cell detects disease – N Dieckmann and N Lawrence, University of Cambridge

This super-resolution micrograph shows a natural killer cell (left) examining a second cell for signs of disease (right). Natural killer cells are part of the immune system and can recognise and destroy infected or cancerous cells by releasing toxic chemicals that cause them to self-destruct.

Cat tongue – David Linstead

Cat tongue – David Linstead

Have you ever been licked by a cat? Then you’ll be familiar with the rough sandpaper texture of cats’ tongues. This polarised light micrograph shows a cross-section through part of a cat’s tongue – with the round bumps (papillae) that are responsible for that scratchy texture visible. The photographer, a retired scientist, exercises his passion for microscopy by looking at classic Victorian slides (such as this sample) with a new perspective.

Tuatara skeleton – Sophie Regnault

Tuatara skeleton – Sophie Regnault

This micro-CT scan shows the skull and front legs of a tuatara – a rare species of reptile found only on certain offshore islands of New Zealand. These mid-sized reptiles are all that is left of an ancient group of animals that shared the Earth with the dinosaurs. These creatures get their name from the Maori word meaning ‘spiny back’, reflecting the presence of spines along the animal’s neck, back and tail.

Curvature of the spine – Mark Bartley, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Curvature of the spine – Mark Bartley, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Are you sitting comfortably? How is your posture? This photograph of a 79-year-old woman’s back shows an abnormally curved spine. Known as kyphosis, or ‘dowager’s hump’, the upper back and shoulders are rounded forwards. Although kyphosis can occur at any age, it is most commonly seen in elderly women and may be caused by a range of things including poor posture, injury, osteoporosis, cancer and cancer treatments, infection, a birth defect, and degenerative or endocrine diseases.

Delivering medicine to the lungs – Gregory Szeto, Adelaide Tovar and Jeffrey Wyckoff, Koch Institute, copyright MIT

Delivering medicine to the lungs – Gregory Szeto, Adelaide Tovar and Jeffrey Wyckoff, Koch Institute, copyright MIT

This confocal micrograph shows microparticles (pink) on a set of mouse lungs. The microparticles can carry medicines, and are being studied to see whether they can deliver these drugs to the lungs. Current anticancer therapies have many toxic side-effects, so researchers hope that these microparticles could one day deliver anticancer medicine in a much simpler, more targeted way – for example, in an inhaler – with fewer side-effects.

3D-printed lungs in ribcage – Dave Farnham

3D-printed lungs in ribcage – Dave Farnham

Photograph of 3D-printed human lungs inside their ribcage. This image shows a 3D-printed copy of the lungs and ribcage belonging to a patient called Caroline, diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma. Two-dimensional images from CT scans were converted into a 3D computer model by the artist, who was then able to print a 3D copy.

Mouse brain – Luis de la Torre-Ubieta, Geschwind Laboratory, UCLA

Mouse brain – Luis de la Torre-Ubieta, Geschwind Laboratory, UCLA

This micrograph of nerve cells inside a section of adult mouse brain wouldn’t look out of place on the wall of an art gallery. The brain has been sliced into thin sections, with one of the pieces seen here. After being sliced, it was chemically treated to make the tissue transparent so that structures deep inside could be more easily seen. This technique is being used to map the complex wiring of whole brains.

Mapping brain wiring – Dr Flavio Dell’Acqua

Mapping brain wiring – Dr Flavio Dell’Acqua

This picture shows bundles of nerve fibres inside a healthy adult living human brain, captured using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). MRI was used to virtually slice the brain into left and right halves – the front of the head faces the left side of the image. Information on the network of connections was collected by a type of MRI (diffusion imaging) that tracks the movement of water molecules.

Fruit-fly nervous system – Albert Cardona, HHMI Janelia Research Campus

Fruit-fly nervous system – Albert Cardona, HHMI Janelia Research Campus

An organism’s nervous system controls everything it does, from breathing and moving to thinking and feeling. Reminiscent of a Jackson Pollock painting, this image shows part of the central nervous system of a fruit fly (D. melanogaster). Transmission electron micrographs were used to create a digital colour-coded map of the area.

Delivering medicine to the brain – Khuloud T Al-Jamal, Serene Tay and Michael Cicirko

Delivering medicine to the brain – Khuloud T Al-Jamal, Serene Tay and Michael Cicirko

A single brain cell (coloured green and pink) with a rectangular cut enabling observation of how tiny, nanometre-sized carbon nanotubes (coloured red and brown) interact with its surface. These nano-sized cylinders are made of carbon atoms, and are being researched for their ability to act as carriers to deliver drugs or genes to cells – for example, anticancer medicines to a tumour.

Old anatomy model – Anthony Edwards, St James’s Hospital, Dublin

Old anatomy model – Anthony Edwards, St James’s Hospital, Dublin

Old anatomical models like these provide a way for people to look under the skin and see what’s below. Often used to educate students or explain medical procedures to patients, they have varying levels of detail – some have removable parts, to show how things fit together. This particular model was about to be thrown away when the photographer rescued it to take one last photograph to honour the service it had provided to medical students at Trinity College Dublin.

Children’s multi-sensory unit – Geraldine Thompson, Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Children’s multi-sensory unit – Geraldine Thompson, Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Photograph of an interactive multi-sensory unit used to distract and comfort anxious children receiving treatment in hospital. It can provide a relaxing environment while stimulating different senses. For example, patients can watch colours change in the bubble tube while touching the outside to feel it gently vibrate. Multi-sensory stimulation can also help people with learning disabilities, autism and dementia.

Chemical reactions in the kidney – Jefferson R Brown, Robert E Marc, Bryan W Jones, Glen Prusky and Nazia Alam

Chemical reactions in the kidney – Jefferson R Brown, Robert E Marc, Bryan W Jones, Glen Prusky and Nazia Alam

Colour-coded map of part of a mouse kidney as it metabolises food. Three small molecules – the amino acids aspartate and glutamine, and the antioxidant glutathione – produced by the metabolic processes are visible (coloured red, blue and green, respectively). The brighter the colour, the more of that molecule there is in the cell. This image was created using a technique called computational molecular phenotyping and shows how metabolism can vary between cells in the same organ at a given point in time.

Newly discovered parasitoid wasp – Andrew Polaszek, Natural History Museum

Newly discovered parasitoid wasp – Andrew Polaszek, Natural History Museum

This image shows a new genus of parasitoid wasp that was recently discovered in the rainforests of Borneo – a single female wasp was found mixed in with thousands of other insects. This tiny parasitic wasp – only 0.75 mm in length – lays its eggs inside other insects, then after hatching, the larvae feed on their host, eating it alive from the inside out.

Pollen grains – Maurizio De Angelis

http://www.wellcomeimageawards.org/2015/newly-discovered-parasitoid-wasp

Illustration of pollen grains being released from a flower in the Asteraceae family – is one of the largest families of flowering plants – commonly known as the aster, daisy, sunflower or composite family. Pollen grains come in all shapes and sizes, but they are usually between 0.01 and 0.1 mm in size.

Greenfly eye – Kevin Mackenzie, University of Aberdeen

Greenfly eye – Kevin Mackenzie, University of Aberdeen

Not an octopus, but a scanning electron micrograph of a eye of a greenfly. Aphids have a pair of curved compound eyes that bulge out of the head and have a wide angle of view. These are made up of thousands of repeating units known as ‘ommatidia’, each with a tiny lens on the front surface, working together to produce a mosaic image. This allows the fly to see very quick movements, but not fine details or objects that are far away.

Purkinje cell – Professor M Häusser, Sarah Rieubland and Arnd Roth, UCL

Purkinje cell – Professor M Häusser, Sarah Rieubland and Arnd Roth, UCL

This stunning image looks like coral, but is actually an electron micrograph of part of a particular type of nerve cell found in the brain called a Purkinje cell. The finger-like projections in this elaborate network act like tiny sensors, picking up information and passing on messages to help control and coordinate muscle movement. This one is from the cerebellar cortex of a rat brain, and in order to see the dendritic tree, the Purkinje cell was filled with a visual marker before being imaged.

If you want to get up close to these images, you can visit one of the exhibitions of the winners at 11 science centres, museums and galleries, around the country. From the Eden Project in Cornwall to Satrosphere in Aberdeen, and as far afield as the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, USA – read more about this year’s participating venues on the image awards website.