Creative Reactions - Madison Edition

It’s not about your level of skill in science or art—it’s about connecting, sharing experiences, and learning from one another.

Aesthetic values offer a common ground for communities to come together and discuss culture and understand ourselves better through perspective ideas put to canvas. "Sermo index animi" (Speech is the index of the mind), but what happens when we replace words with artistic medium?

How did living organisms, in all their amazing (and beautiful) complexity arise? Although evolution is well able to explain increases in complexity over time, the ability to evolve at all seems to depend on genetic and cellular systems that are, themselves, super complex. The solution to this puzzle, I will argue, is that biological evolution evolved from a simpler precursor process, chemical evolution, that can spontaneously emerge in many plausible planetary settings. This framework is increasingly supported by theory and has stimulated new laboratory experiments. If we can learn how chemical evolution emerges and how it generates the elements needed to transition to biological evolution we will not only understand the history of life's appearance on Earth, but also gain perspective on other forms of life that might exist elsewhere in the Universe.

Sydney Bradley is a PhD candidate in Cellular and Molecular Biology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research focuses on how bacteria adapt to environmental stress, combining evolutionary biology, genomics, and bio-engineering. Through an art+science fusion, she explores how complex biological systems can be transformed into visual experiences that invite curiosity, connection, and a new way of understanding life at microscopic scales.

Still brewing!