Under your skin and Red Hole

Photo credit: Michaela Frye
Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research, Cambridge
UK
www.cancer.org.uk

All over the surface of your skin are squashed keratinocytes (care-ah-tin-oh-site), cells that make the protein keratin, the stuff of your hair and nails. These cells are an important protection against the outside world. You shed them daily. Within a month your body has made a new layer. The red boundaries are cell membranes. The blue blobs are DNA in the cell nuclei.

Scale: Whole cells are about 5-10 microns big

This work has been selected for exhibition at the Royal Albert Hall in May 2008. Listen to the Red Hole created by students from Park View Community School, Durham Community Business College and Sion-Manning RC Girls School with composer Duncan Chapman.

Far away, in a galaxy not yet researched lies the Red Hole. This deadly creation has an enormous apetite. Eventually the whole universe will get gobbled up if we don't react quickly. The Red Hole will consume anything including satellites and novas although its main meal is stars. The Red Hole attracts stars with a blue magnetic force laid inside the hand. The bright red colour of the hand is thought to be flourescent. According to satellite images we think that the stars somehow get hypnotised but await further research on this theory. The Red Hole is 87 light years wide and 172 light years long and it grows progressively, the more it consumes. We were inspired by our hand shape because we identified a hand hidden in the Red Hole's partner image the human skin cell.