Bacteria as Art

Professor Eshel Ben-Jacob of Tel-Aviv University and Professor Herbert Levine of UCSD's National Science Foundation Frontier Center for Theoretical Biological Physics watched bacteria solve problems in the petri dish for years. They have isolated some of the world's smartest bacteria, with implications for drug resistance.  In doing so, they caught bacteria in the act of creating beautiful art. 

"While the colors and shading are artistic additions, the image templates are actual colonies of tens of billions of these microorganisms," according to the researchers. "The colony structures form as adaptive responses to laboratory-imposed stresses that mimic hostile environments faced in nature.   How cool is that! 

Check out this gallery: http://star.tau.ac.il/~eshel/gallery.html

Images from Professor Eshel Ben-Jacob (Tel-Aviv University)