From experimental art, photography and image generation to microscopy and science by Richard Wheeler.

I run a research lab in the University of Oxford, with a focus on parasite cell biology, microscopes, and computational analysis.
These are my oft-requested diagrams of trypanosomatid parasites. They're heavily inspired by the amazing illustrations of trypanosomatids by Keith Vickerman , like this classic , though with a more modern twist. Both aim to be fully accurate diagrams, targeting a specialist text book or review paper level. They're drawn based on on lots of papers, both by others and by me, plus many hours on…
It's been a busy year starting my lab... But in more important news, T. brucei, T. cruzi and Leishmania stickers!
“Why are they swimming backwards?” This is one of the most common questions I get asked whenever I show a video of Leishmania parasites swimming. Swimming Leishmania at 200 frames per second (8× slower than actual speed) If you look at Leishmana with a high speed video it's easy to see they tend to swim 'tail-first', with the flagellum sticking forward into the direction of travel. Sperm, probably…
Figure 1. HeLa cell nucleus happiness scale. HeLa cells expressing FUS eGFP were asked how they felt. The morphology of the nucleus and nucleolus, visible via FUS eGFP localisation, was used to infer happiness. The response was ranked by two independent experts, and used to build a HeLa happiness scale.
You can download the full set via Deviantart Software used: Blender
For an organism to become a parasite it has to adapt to live in a host. This might mean it needs to grow faster, invade cells or tissues, or avoid being killed by the immune system. It can also 'forget' how to live outside a host. It can forget how to search for food, how to survive the cold, and how to avoid drying out. We can learn how parasites adapt to infect hosts by looking at the nearest…
One hundred years ago Asa Schaeffer blindfolded his friend and challenged him to walk in a straight line. He did three loops of a spiral, before tripping over a tree stump. This wasn't a cruel prank, it was an experiment, and all people are surprisingly bad at this simple challenge. More modern experiments showed it is lack of external reference points that trips people up. Blindfolded in a…
Things change fast in Ghana! Three years ago, I helped teach a course for young African scientists in the University of Ghana in Accra. This January I got the chance to do the same again, and it has been fantastic. The University of Ghana is becoming a centre of great science in West Africa, with huge contributions by Gordon Awandare and his West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious…
The website for one of my new major research projects is now live! TrypTag .org TrypTag is a project to tag every gene in the trypanosome genome with a fluorescent marker to see where it goes in the cell. Do you have no idea what I'm talking about? Read on to see what all that jargon means! Trypanosomes are one of the parasites my research involves. They are single cell parasites that live in the…
How complex and structured is the inside of a cell? It's hard to imagine, but the internal organisation of cells is typically precisely controlled by molecular skeletons and scaffolds, giving cells the shape they need to function. We can discover the 3D organisation of the inside of cells using electron tomography ; a process where you capture a series of images with an electron microscope, with…
My review paper about ergodic analysis came out on Thursday. Does ergodic analysis sound terrifying? It's actually quite a simple concept and it is a powerful method for extracting information about the dynamics of a cell division cycle from a single snapshot of cells at random stages of the cell cycle. Ergodic analysis is particularly useful if a time-lapse video is impossible, for example if the…
The Pebble Time is finally out! This fantastically simple, yet massively functional, little smartwatch is now shipping to the Kickstarter backers who pledged their renewed support to the company that produced the original Pebble . I've been lucky enough to be beta testing a developer preview model of the Pebble Time, and have had it on my wrist for the last few weeks. I used this time to put…
Light-year, and DNA. Not two scientific terms you expect to see on the same page, but over your lifetime your body will produce around one light-year of DNA! That is about one trillion kilometres. Don't believe me? Let's do some maths: Every cell in your body has two copies of your genome, held in 23 pairs of chromosomes. The human genome is approximately three billion (3×10 9 ) base pairs of DNA.…
[Obligatory partial solar eclipse post, as seen from Dresden, Germany]
What makes a video look smooth? Your eye is extremely sensitive to problems with videos, and for any video to look smooth it has to have: A high frame rate A steady camera Roughly even brightness each frame Normally these are easy to get. Any modern camera will give a decent frame rate, and the exposure time for each shot will be accurate, giving an even brightness of images each frame. Camera…
This blog post is about a Tengwar font I designed. It automatically converts text as you type into accurate Elvish script. You can download it for free here . Just make sure you enable ligatures, contextual alternates and kerning for best results! While writing his Middle Earth books, JRR Tolkein invented an entire alphabet for the elves called Tengwar. His attention to detail was incredible,…
Trypanosomes and Leishmania are the two tropical parasites that I do most of my research on. These cells seem to have a lot of modularity in controlling their shape, and have quite a lot of flexibility in reshuffling where particular structures (made up of many organelles) sit within the cell. The base of the flagellum , the whip-like tail which the cell uses to swim, is also the site where the…
What if cities looked like this? The 1920s view of cities of the future was glorious; huge buildings towering into the sky, multi-layer roads, rail and pavements, airships and aircraft, and the bold geometry of art deco. Sadly this world never came into existence. But what if it had? What would 1950s New York have looked like? I re-imagined this forgotten future based on the view from the Empire…
Ocean tides are one of the most amazing but overlooked natural wonders of our planet. As the Earth rotates relative to the sun and the moon, their gravity drags the Earth's water about, raising and lowering it in synchrony with the heavens. The importance of tides reaches further than just surfing, sunbathing and shipping: Tides are the reason the moon is drifting away from the Earth at 3.8 cm per…
Have no idea what this is about? Try reading about cilia and hedgehogs ...
Using a block of wood and a plane Keith Skretch made something amazing. He snapped a picture of the wood, then planed a thin layer off, snapped another picture, planed another layer off, and repeated this hundreds of times. In the resulting timelapse/stop motion video you fly through the wood structure, and can see knots and grain in the wood ripple by. Waves of Grain from Keith Skretch on Vimeo…
About a year ago two redditors happened to take a photo of the same lightning bolt, but from different places, and I use them to make a 3D reconstruction: 3D Lightning . Well, it happened again ! The two source images. This time the lightning bolt struck one World Trade Center (Freedom Tower), and two people got a shot of it from over the river. A little adjustment for the rotation of the image…
Many classic games like Transport Tycoon , Rollercoaster Tycoon and Theme Hospital have pixel art graphics using a limited number of colours. These graphics are tricky to draw and take a lot of skill, especially when trying to draw accurate 3D shapes from different angles and getting the perspective and shading right. So I made PixelTool to help out! What is PixelTool? PixelTool is an online voxel…
You will have seen the instant internet classic of a dinosaur crashing a wedding ... I got married this year and just had to do the same. Fortunately my wife agreed! I am a biochemist, but cloning a dinosaur to crash my wedding would have been a bit of a challenge, so I had to stick to the graphics approach instead. So how do you get a dinosaur to crash your wedding? Step 1: Recruit an…
What does a year in the life of a computer look like? Well, something like the map below! This is a map every bit of of mouse movement, every mouse click and every keyboard press I have done on my home and work computer over every day of a whole year. 2013-2014 [click for a bigger view] To make it I wrote a little python script using pyHook to grab inputs in Windows, which I compiled to an .exe…