Science Is Art

Science Is Art: Look Closer

A dragonfly at Bako National Park, Borneo where there are 275 named species recorded and many more yet to be discovered. Forty percent are endemic to the region.
~ Nicolas Devos, Biologist and Wildlife Photographer

In order to answer our most fundamental questions, science needs to find a place for the arts within the experimental process.

But maybe science already is art. The two have always been so intricately connected, they are fundamentally aspects of the same entity. Culture. Life. Now and then I'm reminded of their intersections when I run into scientists like Nicolas Devos.

Nicolas is a post-doc from the the National Research Foundation of Belgium who studies evolution, phylogeny and phylogeography of land plants. He is currently a visiting scholar at Duke working on bryophytes after spending two years in South Africa studying Asteraceae. But that's only the surface... one part of the story.

Nicolas also has a passion for wildlife photography. I came across his work by chance last year and was immediately captivated and inspired. You see, while I've known many professional photographers featured in magazines and galleries, his images stand out as special because they capture ephemeral moments in nature through the eyes of a biologist