Flower Power

Accidents can sometimes be beautiful. Briana Whitaker and Briana Carstens of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, snapped this photograph as a quality-control step in their experiments to study the forces that cells, such as those that stitch together skin wounds, exert. They visualize these forces by watching how forests of 10-micrometer-tall polymer pillars bend when they place the cells on top of them. Ideally, the pillars should stand straight up, but on this occasion most of the pillars had fallen over. Amazingly, though, they'd all collapsed into a flowerpetal-like pattern.

Image credit: Russell Taylor, Briana K. Whitaker, and Briana L. Carstens, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill