Art Forms in Nature: radiolaria from Haeckel and Blaschka to 3D nanotomography, quantitative image analysis, evolution, and contemporary art.

The illustrations of the late nineteenth-/twentieth-century scientist/artist Ernst Haeckel, as depicted in his book Art Forms in Nature (originally in German as Kunstformen der Natur, 1898-1904), have been at the intersection of art, biology, and mathematics for over a century. Haeckel's images of radiolaria (microscopic protozoans described as amoeba in glass houses) have influenced various artists for over a century (glass artists Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka; sculptor Henry Moore; architects Rene Binet, Zaha Hadid, Antoni Gaudi, Chris Bosse and Frank Gehry; and designers-filmmakers Charles and Ray Eames). We focus on this history and extend the artistic, biological, and mathematical contributions of this interdisciplinary legacy by going beyond the 3D visual, topological, and geometric analyses of radiolaria to include the nanoscale with graph theory, spatial statistics, and computational geometry.

Ka-me: a Voronoi image analyzer.

Summary: Ka-me is a Voronoi image analyzer that allows users to analyze any image with a convex polygonal tessellation or any spatial point distribution by fitting Voronoi polygons and their dual, Delaunay triangulations, to the pattern. The analytical tools include a variety of graph theoretic and geometric tools that summarize the distribution of the numbers of edges per face, areas, perimeters, angles of Delaunay triangle edges (anglograms), Gabriel graphs, nearest neighbor graphs, minimal spanning trees, Ulam trees, Pitteway tests, circumcircles and convexhulls, as well as spatial statistics (Clark-Evans Nearest Neighborhood and Variance to Mean Ratio) and export functions for standard relationships (Lewis's Law, Desch's Law and Aboav-Weaire Law).

Availability: Ka-me: a Voronoi image analyzer is available as an executable with documentation and sample applications from the BioQUEST Library (http://bioquest.

Bioinformatics education dissemination with an evolutionary problem solving perspective.

Bioinformatics is central to biology education in the 21st century. With the generation of terabytes of data per day, the application of computer-based tools to stored and distributed data is fundamentally changing research and its application to problems in medicine, agriculture, conservation and forensics. In light of this 'information revolution,' undergraduate biology curricula must be redesigned to prepare the next generation of informed citizens as well as those who will pursue careers in the life sciences.