Category: Projects

This is a cross section of my fingernail. I chose this item because I wanted to see weird, alternative views of my body. We see our fingernails everyday; clipping them is sort of a chore. I wanted to explore what kind of physical record the fingernails produce (thinking about how rings can be viewed as a long-term record within trees). They’re made of keratin, and, according to Donna Beer Stolz, these structures will form differently between nails, horns, etc. from different organisms. It was amazing to see these layers and the cavernous layers in my fingernail clipping. What kind of differences could there be between human nails? Donna and I discussed possible differences across different people’s nails, especially how the surface of the nail might change.

I am a cheese obsessed, so for the SEM photography assignment, I decided to look closer to the secret life of a piece of brie cheese.

Brie is an off-white, soft-ripened cheese, usually made from cow’s milk that has a bloomy rind of white mold or ‘penicillium candidum,’ a fungus used in its fabrication along with a mesophilic lactic acid culture. Since brie is a very creamy cheese, I was pretty worried about the dryness of the sample before my appointment with Donna. Besides this, the brie cheese that comes to the US, though produced in France, is a stabilized version that has been aged at least 60 days and may not contain such a varied culture. Luckily, we discovered a slumberous community of life forms under the golden surface.

The close-up images show the branches of the fungus rising over a forest of spores. They are responsible for breaking down the fats and proteins of the dairy, causing the runny texture of the brie over time.

After photographing my sample, I had the privilege of analyzing the spider web sample that Donna found stuck to duct tape in her laboratory. I could not finish this post without sharing the treasures that we found there.