Identical twins Mike and Doug Starn presented the Structure of Thought series as part of their installation Gravity of Light, which mixed photography, video and sculpture. Based in Beacon, New York, They have made numerous works featuring light as a "life force" and drawing parallels between plants and the human body.



This image from Structure of Thought depicts a branching tree resembling the microscopic dendrites of neurons.



(Image: Mike and Doug Starn/National Academy of Sciences)

This virtual sculpture, PET Study 2 (Lung Cancer), was made by the collective (art)n, based in Chicago, in a series of steps. First, a PET scan of lung cancer was embedded into a digitised model of the lungs. The lungs were then mapped onto the figure, a virtual model made from a Man Ray photograph of the painter Francis Picabia.



The model was then rendered as 64 separate images, each from a slightly different perspective. Once assembled, the 64 images appear to exist in three dimensions when viewed through an intervening screen. This approach – building up the sculpture as a succession of layers – is similar to how medical scans build an image of the body in a series of planes.



(Image: Ellen Sandor, Keith Miller, Janine Fron, Jack Ludden, (art)n with Jim Strommer, School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles/National Academy of Sciences)

California's Salton Sea is eerily beautiful, as shown by this 1999 chromogenic print by Terry Falke. But all is not well at this huge artificial lake: tens of thousands of birds and over 2 million dead fish were found in the area over the 12 months before Falke made his picture.



The Salton Sea was created when levees on the Colorado river broke during a flood in 1905. This accident was turned to the good when, in the 1950s, the resulting lake was stocked with fish. The fish in turn attracted millions of migrating birds, and the "sea" became a valuable natural habitat, despite its artificial origins.



Now higher temperatures and changing irrigation patterns mean the lake is evaporating rapidly. Its remaining water is becoming increasingly saline, making it inhospitable to birds and fish; pollution borne by the Mexicali New river is also affecting the environment. The sea's unusual history has made it difficult to determine what actions, if any, should be taken to save it.



(Image: Terry Falke/National Academy of Sciences) Advertisement

The work of artist Alfredo Arreguín explores Mexican culture and natural landscapes, as well as the environment and animals of the US Pacific north-west.



Arreguín was prominent in the Pattern and Decoration art movement, originating in New York in the mid-1970s. Pattern and Decoration artists used mainly brightly coloured geometric figures in their works, reacting against the idea that decorative art was somehow inferior to "fine" art.



Works like Hero's Journey, shown here, use pre-Aztec images, Mexican tiles and geometric patterns to create intricate, brightly coloured canvases.



(Image: Alfredo Arreguín/National Academy of Sciences)

New York-based artist Justine Cooper's work investigates the intersection between science, medicine and culture. This photograph, Blood Red Butterflies, was taken with a vintage large-format camera in a storage area of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where Cooper spent a year as artist in residence. Her work there gave the public a rare look at parts of the collection they wouldn't usually see. (You can see more of Cooper's pictures in this gallery.)



(Image: Justine Cooper/National Academy of Sciences)

Jim Sanborn works with topological projections to evoke a sense of mystery and the forces of nature. Sanborn created this piece in 1995, by projecting the repeated word lux – Latin for "light" and also the international system unit for luminous emittance – onto the landscape at Blue Mesa, Utah.



Sanborn is best known for his 1988 sculpture Kryptos, which was installed at the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Kryptos contains an encrypted four-part puzzle which has yet to be completely solved.



(Image: Jim Sanborn/National Academy of Sciences)

Joy Garnett takes images of natural and human-made disasters she finds on the internet and reinterprets them in thick oil paintings. Her work explores the tensions between the fleeting images of mass media and the more settled and visceral power of paint.



This image is from the series Strange Weather, in which the New York-based artist recast media images of New Orleans in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina as evocative paintings.



(Image: Joy Garnett/National Academy of Sciences)

Katherine Sherwood's paintings explore the evolution of medical imagery. This work is based on sketches by Italian physician Camillo Golgi, who in 1873 developed a method of staining nerve tissue so that the complex structure of the brain could be seen. Golgi's method was later used by Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal to study the organisation of the nervous system. Sherwood teaches painting and drawing at the University of California, Berkeley.



(Image: Katherine Sherwood/National Academy of Sciences)

It may look like the double helix of DNA, but a closer look reveals that the strands are spiralling grapes and pears. Artist Mia Brownell of Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven paints fruit floating in space in the dramatic chiaroscuro style of the Dutch old masters. The shapes and spirals in her works bear a striking resemblance to coiling chains of DNA, amino acids and protein chains.



(Image: Mia Brownell/National Academy of Sciences)