Tag Archives: jewellery

Chaos science, 3d printing, and jewellery

Caption: The chaotic shapes depicted in this image, printed in bronze, are the first the group have made. They represent the first step in the transformation from chaos to manufacturable forms. Credit: Francesca Bertacchini, Pietro S. Pantano, Eleonora Bilotta

This reminds me of Viking (and maybe Celtic too) jewellery but it’s all based on chaos theory according to a January 24, 2023 news item on phys.org (Note: Links have been removed),

The further out in time, the more unreliable a weather forecast. That’s because small variations in initial weather conditions can completely change the entire system, making it unpredictable. Put another way, in the “butterfly effect,” an insect can flap its wings and create a microscopic change in initial conditions that leads to a hurricane halfway around the world.

This chaos is seen everywhere, from weather to labor markets to brain dynamics. And now, in the journal Chaos, researchers from the University of Calabria explored how to turn the twisting, fractal structures behind the science into jewelry with 3D printing.

A January 24, 2023 American Institute of Physics news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, describes the difficulty of transforming chaos into jewellery,

The jewelry shapes are based on the Chua circuit, a simple electronic system that was the first physical, mathematical, and experimental proof of chaos. Instead of an ordinary circuit, which produces an oscillating current, Chua’s circuit results in oscillations that never repeat.

“These chaotic configurations, called strange attractors, are complex structures that had never been observed before,” said author Eleonora Bilotta. “The depictions of such structures are strikingly beautiful, continually shifting when the point of view is changing. Jewelry seemed to be the best way to interpret the beauty of chaotic shapes.”

At first, the team tried to employ goldsmiths to create prototypes of the twisting, arcing patterns. But the chaotic forms proved too difficult to manufacture with traditional methods. In contrast, additive printing allows for the necessary detail and structure. By 3D-printing the jewelry, the team created a counter-mold for a goldsmith to use as a cast.

“Seeing the chaotic shapes transformed into real, polished, shiny, physical jewelry was a great pleasure for the whole team. Touching and wearing them was also extremely exciting,” said Bilotta. “We think it is the same joy that a scientist feels when her theory takes form, or when an artist finishes a painting.”

The jewelry can also be used as an educational tool, providing students the ability to develop their scientific knowledge and artistic creativity. By building Chua’s circuit, they can manipulate chaos and discover the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. While designing the jewelry before sending it to be printed, they can tweak the parameters to generate different shapes according to personal taste.

In the future, the authors want to explore representations of chaos using spheres instead of lines. They also plan to create images of chaotic patterns and have developed an exhibition that can be adapted for international museums.               

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Jewels from chaos: A fascinating journey from abstract forms to physical objects by Francesca Bertacchini, Pietro S. Pantano, and Eleonora Bilotta. Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science Volume 33 Issue 1, 013132 (2023) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0130029 Published online: 24 January 2023

This paper is behind a paywall.

You say SciArt, I say art/sci (tomayta/tomahtoe)

Whether it’s called SciArt or art/sci, it’s a thrill to be exposed to the broad range of pieces being shared in #SciArt, the Science Art Tweetstorm. Here’s more from Kimberly Moynahan’s March 2, 2016 posting on her Endless Forms Most Beautiful blog (Note Links have been removed),

Here, for the 2nd year in a row, is #SCIART, the Science Art Tweetstorm organized by the Symbiartic crew at Scientific American Blogs.

Now, if you imagine that “science art” means only scientific/medical illustration, infographics and notebook sketches, then you are in for a treat!

A quick scan of the #sciart hashtag shows works spanning every imaginable medium and genre — science-themed jewelry and clothing, 3-d renderings, sculptures and models, sketches and paintings, murals, tattoos, cartoons, photographs, videos and well ..

Her post has many examples copied from the feed. Do enjoy!

You can find #sciart here and there’s more about this twitterstorm in a March 1, 2016 post by Glendon Mellow for the Symbiartic blog,

Last year [2015], during the 1st week of March, the Symbiartic crew asked artists who create work inspired by science to follow 3 simple rules, and tweet every day:

  1. Tweet 3 pieces of your own #SciArt
  2. Retweet 5 pieces of #SciArt by other people
  3. Make sure to hashtag them with #SciArt

Katie, Kalliopi, and I were hoping to see a few thousand tweets by the end of the week, and instead we saw almost 29,000 tweets. More importantly, scientists, science communicators and science fans got to see the incredible amount of artwork that we here on Symbiartic know is out there.

The event was reported on by Nature, Gizmodo, and a number of artists’ own blogs. More importantly was how happy it made everyone: thought-provoking art about science made by varied skill sets took over Twitter and proved the platform isn’t just an outrage machine.

So we’re doing it again. And we’re hoping it will lead to bigger and better events that we, along with other #SciArt bloggers, have been working on. You can sign-up for our newsletter if you want to be the first to find out more.

A few more tips:

  • Go bananas: You can go ahead and post more than 3 pieces of your own work each day.
  • The field is open: last year we saw works-in-progress, sketches, finished paintings, sculptures, glassworks, fabric-art, bioart, and so much more. Science encompasses all the coolest subjects in the universe so jump in there and share.
  • Credit artists: If you’re from a school, museum or institution and want to show off that amazing sciart installation in your foyer, just make sure you tag the tweet or somehow credit the artist.
  • Keep it simple: A tweet with the the title of the work, the image, and a link to your online store or a blog post is fantastic. Don’t forget the hashtag #SciArt!
  • Reporters can join in: If you’re a writer or site that interviews and shows #SciArt, go ahead and post those links!
  • Dig into your back-catalogue: works being shared don’t have to be new. Even if you shared them last year, chances are they’re new to someone!
  • Repeat tweet: the audience on Tuesday morning isn’t the same as on Saturday afternoon. Go ahead and tweet your work a second time.

Here are a few pieces I saw on the feed today (March 3, 2016),

This is a fast moving feed.

ETA March 4, 2016: For anyone interested in the Canadian SciArt and the March 2016 twitterstorm, there’s a March 4, 2016 posting by Liz Martin-Silverstone featuring a number of Canadian contributions to the #SciArt Tweet Storm.

Solid gold smoke?

Aerogels seem to enchant even scientists who sometimes call it ‘solid smoke’ (my Aug. 20, 2012 posting). This latest aerogel is made of gold according to a Nov. 25, 2015 news item on Nanowerk,

 A nugget of real 20 carats gold, so light that it does not sink in a cappuccino, floating instead on the milk foam – what sounds unbelievable has actually been accomplished by researchers from ETH Zurich. Scientists led by Raffaele Mezzenga, Professor of Food and Soft Materials, have produced a new kind of foam out of gold, a three-dimensional mesh of gold that consists mostly of pores. It is the lightest gold nugget ever created. “The so-called aerogel is a thousand times lighter than conventional gold alloys. It is lighter than water and almost as light as air,” says Mezzenga.

A Nov. 25, 2015 ETH Zurich press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides more information about the ‘gold smoke’,

The new gold form can hardly be differentiated from conventional gold with the naked eye – the aerogel even has a metallic shine. But in contrast to its conventional form, it is soft and malleable by hand. It consists of 98 parts air and only two parts of solid material. Of this solid material, more than four-fifths are gold and less than one-fifth is milk protein fibrils. This corresponds to around 20 carat gold.

Here’s what it looks like,

Caption: Even when it seems unbelievable: these are genuine photographs, in which nothing has been faked. E.g. the 20 carats gold foam is lighter than milk foam. Credit: Gustav Nyström and Raffaele Mezzenga / (copyright) ETH Zurich

Caption: Even when it seems unbelievable: these are genuine photographs, in which nothing has been faked. E.g. the 20 carats gold foam is lighter than milk foam.
Credit: Gustav Nyström and Raffaele Mezzenga / (copyright) ETH Zurich

The press release provides more technical details,

The scientists created the porous material by first heating milk proteins to produce nanometre-fine protein fibres, so-called amyloid fibrils, which they then placed in a solution of gold salt. The protein fibres interlaced themselves into a basic structure along which the gold simultaneously crystallised into small particles. This resulted in a gel-like gold fibre network.

“One of the big challenges was how to dry this fine network without destroying it,” explains Gustav Nyström, postdoc in Mezzenga’s group and first author of the corresponding study in the journal Advanced Materials. As air drying could damage the fine gold structure, the scientists opted for a gentle and laborious drying process using carbon dioxide. They did so in an interdisciplinary effort assisted by researchers in the group of Marco Mazzotti, Professor of Process Engineering.

Dark-red gold

The method chosen, in which the gold particles are crystallised directly during manufacture of the aerogel protein structure (and not, for example, added to an existing scaffold) is new. The method’s biggest advantage is that it makes it easy to obtain a homogeneous gold aerogel, perfectly mimicking gold alloys.

The manufacturing technique also offers scientists numerous possibilities to deliberately influence the properties of gold in a simple manner. ” The optical properties of gold depend strongly on the size and shape of the gold particles,” says Nyström. “Therefore we can even change the colour of the material. When we change the reaction conditions in order that the gold doesn’t crystallise into microparticles but rather smaller nanoparticles, it results in a dark-red gold.” By this means, the scientists can influence not only the colour, but also other optical properties such as absorption and reflection.

The new material could be used in many of the applications where gold is currently being used, says Mezzenga. The substance’s properties, including its lighter weight, smaller material requirement and porous structure, have their advantages. Applications in watches and jewellery are only one possibility. Another application demonstrated by the scientists is chemical catalysis: since the highly porous material has a huge surface, chemical reactions that depend on the presence of gold can be run in a very efficient manner. The material could also be used in applications where light is absorbed or reflected. Finally, the scientists have also shown how it becomes possible to manufacture pressure sensors with it. “At normal atmospheric pressure the individual gold particles in the material do not touch, and the gold aerogel does not conduct electricity,” explains Mezzenga. “But when the pressure is increased, the material gets compressed and the particles begin to touch, making the material conductive.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Amyloid Templated Gold Aerogels by Gustav Nyström, Maria P. Fernandez-Ronco, Sreenath Bolisetty, Marco Mazzotti, Raffaele Mezzenaga. Advanced Materials DOI: 10.1002/adma.201503465 First published: 23 November 2015

This paper is behind a paywall.

Gold Light jewellery courtesy of gold nanoparticles and designers in Spain

Nanowerk is featuring a Dec. 21, 2012 news item about a jewellery project from the Institut Català de Nanotecnologia (ICN) Note: Links have been removed,

The Centre for NanoBioSafety and Sustainability (CNBSS) organised the premiere of Gold Light, the first quantum jewellery product, last week at the Hotel Mercer, in Barcelona [Spain]. Gold Light is the fruit of a collaboration that combines Barcelona’s long artisanal tradition with Nanotechnology developed by Institut Català de Nanotecnologia (ICN)’s Inorganic Nanoparticles Group. Gold Light is an extraordinary jewellery product, unique for both its innovation and its aesthetics.

The ICN’s Dec. 13, 2012 news release provides more detail (which originated the news item on Nanowerk),

A multidisciplinary team, including jewellery designer Roberto Carrascosa, artist Joan Peris, production designer Francesc Oliveras, and art business manager Jose Luis Fettolini, developed Gold Light over the course of a year, based on specialist knowledge from the Inorganic Nanoparticles Group. The final product exploits the aesthetic potential of noble-metal nanoparticles and their special interaction with light. Jewellers traditionally work with precious metals, which in their smallest form exist as nanoparticles(at smaller sizes, metal particles lose their metallic properties). Gold Light, composed of gold nanoparticles, represents the advent of quantum jewellery, where quantum is used in the literal sense. Their work on Gold Light has also served as a case model for the CNBSS to evaluate the regulatory mechanisms and corporate obligations for the development and marketing of a product that contains nanoparticles. For the CNBSS, the venture served as a study in the safety-by-design of a nanoproduct, through advice from attorney Ignasi Gispert.

Here’s what one of the pieces looks like,

The distinctive colours of Gold Light jewellery derive from different types of gold nanoparticles.

The distinctive colours of Gold Light jewellery derive from different types of gold nanoparticles.

You can see more on the Gold Light jewellery website but you won’t find any technical information about the colour differences or information about how to purchase.