#scientific-illustration

#scientific-illustration

David Morrison continues his hyperrealistic explorations of flowers, seeds, and plants, capturing the intricacies and alluring textures found throughout nature in lush colored pencil.

A maggot's age and species can give essential information to forensic entomologists investigating murders. Combing through these fly larvae, investigators can potentially learn when and where a crime happened, whether the body has been moved or whether toxins were involved. For example, blowflies are among the earliest insect colonizers of corpses; they typically sniff out and lay eggs on a dead body within minutes to hours.

EntoPedia is a wearable digital collection system designed by Junfei Teng to reframe insect 'collecting' as documentation, turning everyday encounters into moments of observation, learning, and shared knowledge without physical capture. The project received the 2026 French Design Awards Gold (Professional) in Product Design, Educational Toys & Games, recognizing its approach to ecological education through wearable interaction and community-built datasets.

This short captures Tim Bovard, the staff taxidermist for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, as he reflects on over five decades spent perfecting his craft. Sparked by a childhood fascination with the museum's dioramas that never faded, Bovard has devoted his career to shaping what he calls the 'illusion of life' - a process that requires both scientific precision and imaginative interpretation.

On a spring day in 1694, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek - the father of microbiology - used a magnifying lens to look at a candle through the dissected eye of a dragonfly. But instead of seeing 1 candle flame, he saw hundreds of tiny flames, repeated over and over. But spoiler alert - this is not how insects see. Hi, I'm Niba, and today we're going to explore how insects really see the world.

Hosted at the Royal Institution, the lion, which died of old age and was then donated to science, will be dissected to demonstrate how animal biology works. Medical and veterinary students will be used to seeing such demonstrations, but doing the same for the voyuristic public might not seem very scientific, but it certainly does tick the classic idea of public demonstrations of science to educate the curious.