Science Art:The Images of Research competition reveals some pictorial gems of experiments carried out by UCD science students, writes Claire O'Connell
EVERY RESEARCHER will recognise it instantly: that special picture which suddenly appears during the course of their work. It might be eye-catchingly beautiful, even to those who do not know its origins. It might effortlessly capture the essence of a project or concept. Or it might highlight a quirk, a side-avenue that your research opened up.
Unfortunately, such arresting and informative images are often destined to languish on laptops, or be hidden away in shelf-bound theses.
However, some break loose each year when University College Dublin invites its staff and students to submit entries to their Images of Research competition.
This year's winner, "Ray-zor sharp vision", was chosen by a judging panel - which included experts in research, communications, art and photography - from over 300 entries. It captures the unusual-looking iris of a ray fish caught off the Irish coast.
It's a striking sight that literally caught the eye of PhD student Edward Farrell from UCD's school of biology and environmental science, who was working on a survey ship when the ray was hauled aboard.
Farrell's research focuses not on rays, but also on the biology of the smooth-hound fish. He heard that he had won the competition while at sea gathering survey data.
FINDING NANO
The ocean floor holds a great many secrets and Lee Toms from UCD's school of geological sciences is sampling the sea-bed off Ireland's west coast for clues about climate change of old.
This image above of calcified nanofossils comes from a core of sediment taken from the Porcupine Bank on the sloped continental shelf. PhD student Toms analyses the layers of sedimented mud in the cores which were laid down across 400,000 years.
He is looking for indications of climate change and expanding what we know about climate and ocean conditions in this important area of the Atlantic.
"Darker mud comes from colder periods when there were rafts of icebergs in the Atlantic, while lighter mud is from warmer periods, like the one we are in now," explains Toms, whose work is funded by Science Foundation Ireland. The tiny coccolithospheres shown here can help date when the layers of mud were deposited. These ones, which showed up under the scanning electron microscope, are about 120,000 years old, explains Toms. "The [fossils] often fall apart when they get deposited, but I came across this one and thought it was a nice image," he says.
MEASURING METHANE AT GRASS LEVEL
The cows pictured above might look like they are about to blast off into space, but the "rocket packs" on their backs are actually devices for measuring methane.
The gas is a by-product of digesting grass, which is fermented by micro-organisms in the cows' digestive systems.
Bovine belching sounds like a harmless enough activity, but it's not entirely victimless.
Methane makes up around 13 per cent of Ireland's greenhouse gas emissions and its production in the cow's gut also represents an energy loss for the animal, explains Dr Tommy Boland, a lecturer in ruminant nutrition at UCD's school of agriculture, food science and veterinary medicine.
That's why he and colleague Dr David Kenny want to reduce "enteric" methane production in beef herds and improve the animals' energy efficiency.
Their work, which is funded by the Department of Agriculture, looks at dietary strategies such as adding methane-inhibiting compounds, or soya oil, to feeds and the impact of grass quality on methane production.
The cows, pictured at UCD's farm in Newcastle, Co Dublin, are quite happy with the arrangement, according to Boland.
"They have no objections to the backpacks at all. They adapt very readily," he says.
