Simplified Science Publishing Resources

Best AI Image Generators for Scientists

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 14:50:40 GMT

Artificial intelligence image tools provide a fast way to produce visual explanations of complex concepts. However, most scientific journals do not allow AI-generated art in their publications without significant customization.

This article reviews how you can ethically use AI image generators to improve your scientific communication by using AI vector images as the base for your own unique illustrations.

Can I Use AI Images in Research Articles?

The short answer is "NO"! But there is an ethical loophole. You can use AI artwork as long as you customize the images to meet the scientific journal requirement for publishing unique designs. Below is an example of how you can download an editable AI vector image and make adjustments using design tools so that it becomes your own drawing that follows the copyright rules for scientific publications.

Top Three AI Image Generators for Scientists

In the rapidly evolving landscape of scientific research, clear visual communication has become more crucial than ever. Traditional illustration methods are giving way to AI-powered tools that can generate vector graphics in minutes rather than hours. For scientists who need precise, scalable illustrations for papers, presentations, and posters, AI vector generators offer an unprecedented combination of speed, quality, and professional polish.

Vector graphics are particularly valuable in scientific contexts because they are editable and maintain crisp quality at any scale—from thumbnail diagrams to large conference posters. Unlike AI raster images that become pixelated when enlarged and contain errors, vectors ensure your molecular structures, anatomical diagrams, and technical schematics remain sharp and professional across all media.

Here are the top three AI vector image generators that are revolutionizing how scientists create visual content in 2025.

Recraft: Quality Free Design

Recraft stands out as the most scientist-friendly AI vector generator currently available with good free options. What makes it exceptional for research applications is its focus on producing clean, technical-quality vectors that rival traditional illustration software output.

Key advantages for scientists:

Allows 10-15 free vector image downloads a month
Professional styling options: The platform offers scientific illustration styles that align with academic publishing standards
SVG export capability: Direct export to SVG format ensures compatibility with editing and scientific publishing workflows

Costs

Free: Create 10-15 vector images a month
$9/month: Create 100+ images a month

Recommended Recraft settings

Create a new project → Select "Image" → Vector Art → Select one of the styles below:

Cartoon (best output for scientific use)
Vector art
Sunburst Pop
Cloud Curve

Examples of good prompts for Recraft

human lung anatomy
virus icon

VectorArt.ai: The Library

VectorArt.ai distinguishes itself by combining AI generation with an extensive library of templates and elements. The largest AI generated vector image library and AI vector art generator provides scientists with both custom generation capabilities and access to pre-made scientific graphics.

Key advantages for scientists:

Template library: Extensive template and icon library
Custom AI generation: Ability to create unique vectors when existing templates don't meet specific needs
SVG format support: Direct download in scalable vector format ideal for scientific publications

Costs

Free: Create 1-2 images a month
$29/month: Create over 1,000 images a month

Recommended VectorArt.ai Scientific Settings

Illustration Set → Playful Strokes
Illustration Set → Line Art

Examples of good prompts for VectorArt.ai

Human heart anatomy
Symmetrical human lung anatomy medical illustration
Symmetrical virus icon

Adobe Illustrator & Firefly

Adobe's top two AI vector art tools are in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Firefly software.

Adobe Illustrator: Contains built-in AI vector generation capabilities and represents the gold standard for scientists who need the most sophisticated vector creation and editing tools. The text-to-vector feature creates fully editable vector graphics powered by Adobe Firefly generative AI, seamlessly integrated into the industry-standard vector editing environment.

Adobe Firefly: Includes enterprise-level reliability to AI-generated vectors, with features specifically designed for professional and academic use. Adobe Firefly is the first major AI image generator to incorporate Content Credentials—digital "nutrition labels" for images that reveal how and when images were created or edited. This transparency feature is particularly valuable for scientists who need to maintain clear documentation of their visual materials.

Costs:

Adobe Illustrator: Create unlimited AI images and is included in Adobe Illustrator design software for $23/month
Adobe Firefly: Create unlimited AI images for $10/month

Recommended Scientific AI Settings:

Prompt: Use simple words without scientific jargon
Content Type: Use default settings for “Subject” or “Icon” with low to medium complexity.
Style Reference: Not necessary
Effects: Flat Design
Color Type: Optional, add your hex codes or swatches if you want

Examples of good Adobe Illustrator Generate Vectors tool prompts:

human lung anatomy
virus medical illustration

Master Vector Editing for Scientific Applications

While AI vector generators can produce impressive initial outputs, the ability to refine and customize these graphics is crucial for meeting specific scientific publication requirements. Simplified Science Publishing offers specialized online courses that teach researchers how to edit and enhance AI-generated vector graphics using Adobe Illustrator and other design tools.

The training programs focus specifically on scientific applications, covering essential skills like transforming raw AI outputs into publication-ready figures, using vector design tools and layers for complex multi-panel layouts, and organizing all figures for a scientific paper within a single Illustrator file.

The courses also provide access to extensive libraries of customizable scientific templates and vector images, allowing researchers to combine AI-generated content with professionally designed elements. This combination of AI generation capabilities with structured editing skills enables scientists to create sophisticated, publication-quality graphics that meet the exacting standards of academic journals and professional presentations.

AI Image Tools for Researchers Summary

AI vector generators are democratizing scientific illustration, allowing researchers to create professional-quality graphics without extensive design training or expensive software licenses. As these tools continue to evolve, we can expect even greater integration with scientific databases, automated figure generation from research data, and enhanced compatibility with academic publishing workflows.

The investment in learning these tools now will pay dividends throughout your research career. In an increasingly visual scientific landscape, mastering vector design is becoming as essential as any other research skill. I recommend learning how to quickly assembling complex scientific illustrations by combining pre-made elements with customized AI-generated components to create your own impressive graphics for grants, publications, and presentations.

How to Ethically Use AI Image Generators for Research Publications:

Step 1. Choose the right AI image generator for your research. The best AI vector generator for your scientific work depends on your specific needs and workflow requirements. Consider starting with the free tiers of these platforms to evaluate which interface and output style best matches your research communication needs.

Step 2. Edit the vector artwork for scientific applications. Upload the AI image file into a vector graphics tool such as Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, Inkscape, or Canva and customize the illustration. Scientific journals do not allow the use of AI generated artwork unless you adjust the image to be your own original design.

Create professional science figures with illustration services or use the online courses and templates to quickly learn how to make your own designs.

Scientific Presentation Guide: How to Create an Engaging Research Talk

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 17:26:06 GMT

Creating an effective scientific presentation requires developing clear talking points and slide designs that highlight your most important research results.

Scientific presentations are detailed talks that showcase a research project or analysis results. This comprehensive guide reviews everything you need to know to give an engaging presentation for scientific conferences, lab meetings, and PhD thesis talks. From creating your presentation outline to designing effective slides, the tips in this article will give you the tools you need to impress your scientific peers and superiors.

Step 1. Create a Presentation Outline

The first step to giving a good scientific talk is to create a presentation outline that engages the audience at the start of the talk, highlights only 3-5 main points of your research, and then ends with a clear take-home message. Creating an outline ensures that the overall talk storyline is clear and will save you time when you start to design your slides.

Engage Your Audience

The first part of your presentation outline should contain slide ideas that will gain your audience's attention. Below are a few recommendations for slides that engage your audience at the start of the talk:

Create a slide that makes connects your data or presentation information to a shared purpose, such as relevance to solving a medical problem or fundamental question in your field of research
Create slides that ask and invite questions
Use humor or entertainment

Identify Clear Main Points

After writing down your engagement ideas, the next step is to list the main points that will become the outline slide for your presentation. A great way to accomplish this is to set a timer for five minutes and write down all of the main points and results or your research that you want to discuss in the talk. When the time is up, review the points and select no more than three to five main points that create your talk outline. Limiting the amount of information you share goes a long way in maintaining audience engagement and understanding.

Create a Take-Home Message

And finally, you should brainstorm a single take-home message that makes the most important main point stand out. This is the one idea that you want people to remember or to take action on after your talk. This can be your core research discovery or the next steps that will move the project forward.

Step 2. Choose a Professional Slide Theme

After you have a good presentation outline, the next step is to choose your slide colors and create a theme. Good slide themes use between two to four main colors that are accessible to people with color vision deficiencies. Read this article to learn more about choosing the best scientific color palettes .

You can also choose templates that already have an accessible color scheme. However, be aware that many PowerPoint templates that are available online are too cheesy for a scientific audience. Below options to download professional scientific slide templates that are designed specifically for academic conferences, research talks, and graduate thesis defenses.

Step 3. Design Your Slides

Designing good slides is essential to maintaining audience interest during your scientific talk. Follow these four best practices for designing your slides:

Keep it simple: limit the amount of information you show on each slide
Use images and illustrations that clearly show the main points with very little text.
Read this article to see research slide example designs for inspiration
When you are using text, try to reduce the scientific jargon that is unnecessary. Text on research talk slides needs to be much more simple than the text used in scientific publications (see example below).
Use appear/disappear animations to break up the details into smaller digestible bites
Sign up for the free presentation design course to learn PowerPoint animation tricks

Scientific Presentation Design Summary

All of the examples and tips described in this article will help you create impressive scientific presentations. Below is the summary of how to give an engaging talk that will earn respect from your scientific community.

Step 1. Draft Presentation Outline. Create a presentation outline that clearly highlights the main point of your research. Make sure to start your talk outline with ideas to engage your audience and end your talk with a clear take-home message.

Step 2. Choose Slide Theme. Use a slide template or theme that looks professional, best represents your data, and matches your audience's expectations. Do not use slides that are too plain or too cheesy.

Step 3. Design Engaging Slides. Effective presentation slide designs use clear data visualizations and limits the amount of information that is added to each slide.

And a final tip is to practice your presentation so that you can refine your talking points. This way you will also know how long it will take you to cover the most essential information on your slides. Thank you for choosing Simplified Science Publishing as your science communication resource and good luck with your presentations!

Data Storytelling Techniques: How to Tell a Great Data Story in 4 Steps

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 04:33:33 GMT

Data storytelling is a powerful tool that makes your data visualizations memorable and easy to understand.

Data storytelling has become an increasingly popular method for sharing complex information. Whether you are a journalist, business professional, or a scientist, this article will review four easy steps that you can follow to create an effective data story.

What is Data Storytelling and Why Should I Care?

Data storytelling is the method of translating data analyses into an understandable and engaging story that makes it memorable for the audience. Common types of data storytelling include infographics, data visualizations, and scientific illustrations.

Creating good data stories is important because complex data and analytics can be difficult for people to understand. By using data storytelling techniques, you can help a wider audience understand the main points of complicated information and it can be a powerful tool to influence people's decisions.

Data Storytelling Example

The image below shows a data storytelling example that uses bar charts and color design to highlight the main characters of a story about graduate rates for bachelor degrees. The graph on the left shows general information about graduate rates for bachelor degrees from the National Center for Education Statistics. When looking at the original data graphic, it takes a while to realize that the most meaningful information in the graph is that the private for-profit institutions have a much lower graduation rate.

The optimized graph on the right shows the exact same data, but instead uses data storytelling techniques to create a clear narrative that makes the most important information stand out. The main character of the data story is the high drop-out rate at private for-profit institutions compared to the other types of public and private institutions, so this has the boldest color that stands out from the rest of the data visualization. The improved graphic also simplifies the storyline by making the dataset only represent the change between graduated versus drop-out rates of all students, instead of using separate bars for different genders that had relatively similar graduation rates. By creating a clear story and using good color design, the dataset was transformed from a confusing bar graph into a clear data visualization where the main point is memorable and easy to understand.

Data Storytelling Techniques: The 4 Steps

Good stories contain four main elements: characters, setting, conflict, and resolution. In order to make a good data story, you can use these elements to frame the complex information into compelling visualizations. It may seem odd to think about your data points as characters in a story, but the steps below outline a proven technique to make your data story stand out from the crowd.

Step 1: List the characters

Create a short list of the 2-4 most important characters in your data story. These could be proteins, medications, or even methods. Think of the main data points or information as as heroes, villains, and supporting characters for the story.

For example, let's say that a biotechnology company creates a new product that improves an antibody purification process. The three main characters of this story would be the new biotech product, the competitor products, and the antibodies that become purified in the process. The hero is the biotech product, the villain is the competitor products, and the antibodies are the supporting characters.

Step 2: Define the setting

The setting of a data story could be the methods, the scientific tools used, or the scientific background information. Use the setting as the scaffolding that allows your audience to make sense of the story but doesn’t play a major role in the outcome.

With the biotechnology example, the setting is the purification process that creates the hero and the villain characters. The biotech company product simplifies the process so that there is only one step to create the new natural nanoparticle product instead of three steps, and makes the process less toxic.

Step 3: Describe the Conflict

Conflicts in data stories are often focused on describing a decrease or increase after a scientific experiment. If there isn’t a clear conflict such as data showing a robust change, you can skip this element and instead just go straight to describing the resolution or results of the data analysis.

The conflict in the biotechnology product example is the performance of the product compared to competitors. You are asking your audience: which product will be more successful at purifying antibodies?

Step 4: Propose a Resolution

In data storytelling, the resolution is a synonym for the results. Everything in the story is leading to the main result that you want your audience to understand at the end.

The resolution for our example data story is the better performance of the biotech company's product. Taking these storytelling elements into account, we can now design a full infographic with illustrations and a graph that highlights this biotech product hero’s data story (see below).

Additional Storytelling Design Tips

Color Design

Only apply bold/bright colors to the elements that you want to attract your audience's attention (e.g. the main characters of the story).
Choose colors that are accessible to people with all types of color blindness.
Read this article to learn more about choosing accessible colors for data visualizations

Choose the Right Kind of Data Visualization/Graph

To determine which kind of graph you should use for your data story, I recommend defining the main purpose of the data first and then choosing the graph that best matches the purpose. Visualizations can be grouped into five main purpose categories: explain a process, compare or contrast, show a change, establish a relationship, or other.
Read this article about data visualization tools to help you determine the purpose of your data with example charts and graphics

Use Illustrations to Emphasize Your Story

Reference:

Source for National Center for Education Statistics data: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40

Create professional science figures with illustration services or use the online courses and templates to quickly learn how to make your own designs.

Best Science PowerPoint Templates and Slide Design Examples

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 19:10:53 GMT

Professional PowerPoint templates and slide design examples for science talks, academic conferences, and graduate thesis presentations.

Most presentation templates are too cheesy for research talks. Scientists need slides that allow for quick customization and that make it easy to illustrate all the key points of a research project. This article shows well-designed scientific presentation slide examples and also links to fully customizable professional templates.

Download Science PowerPoint Templates

Whether you are creating a research presentation for the first time or have years of experience, the PowerPoint templates linked below have user-friendly slides that quickly allow you to create science talks that will engage your audience and make your main points clear.

Scientific Presentation Slide Design Examples

My top recommendation for creating effective technical presentations is to use simple slide designs and a recurring theme for the main points that allow your audience to easily follow your data story. The sections below show scientific slide design examples to help you clearly show your results.

Title Slides

The best title slide designs for scientific talks have an easy-to-understand title and an engaging image. The title slide is the first impression for your audience and is most effective when you remove excess technical terms. The title text should be much more simplified than your scientific publication. The examples below show two versions of title slides from the templates, one with a dark background and one with a light background.

Science Background Slides

After title slides, the next part of your presentation should use background slides that show both the scientific concepts and also includes slides that engage the audience with the high-level purpose of your research or related entertaining images. Don't be afraid to connect to your audience with a joke or something personal about your role in the research.

Make a Connection to a Shared Purpose

The slide to the right shows an example of how to present the higher-level purpose of your research. Consider asking your audience "why is this important" and then show the relevance of the data to to medical treatments or fundamental science questions.

Use Illustrations to Explain Scientific Concepts and Methods

Another great way to maintain audience engagement for background information is to use slide designs that incorporate illustrations and use very little text. Most people do not read slides, so illustrated images go a long way to improve audience comprehension. Explore free online courses to learn how to incorporate illustrations and images into your scientific presentations.

Main Point Slides

After presenting background information, it is important to create a series of slides that show the main point(s) of your research. Good main point slide designs use a consistent theme and do not overload each slide with too many details.

One design tip to keep your data-focused slides simple is to limit the presentation to only one to two core concepts per slide. The examples shown here illustrate how to edit the science PowerPoint template slides to create effective research slide designs with simple concepts and minimal text.

Take Home Message Slide

Good scientific presentations also include a take home message slide that clearly summarizes the one idea that you want people to remember or to take action on after your talk.

This slide should have a unique design that stands out from the rest of the slides to let your audience know that this is essential information.

Acknowledgement Slides

Finally, your talk should end with a thoughtful acknowledgement slide that matches the overall presentation theme. Make sure to include all of your collaborators and make it easy to read.

Science Talk Design Tips Summary

Good visual design is an essential part of creating effective research presentations and below is a summary of the slide design tips provided in this article. To further your science communication training, you can also consider signing up for free online courses to expand your scientific illustration and data visualization skills.

Title: Create a slide with an easy-to-understand title and an engaging image.
Background: Engage your audience with information that shows the "why" behind your work and use illustrations to make your scientific methods clear.
Main Points: Limit the information shown on each slide and use a consistent design theme.
Take Home Message: Use a slide design that is unique and catches the audience attention to present the primary message that you want your audience to remember after the talk.
Acknowledgement: Include an acknowledgement slide that thanks your collaborators and matches the overall design theme.

Create professional science figures with illustration services or use the online courses and templates to quickly learn how to make your own designs.

Free Research Poster Templates and Tutorials

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 19:58:13 GMT

Creating engaging research posters is an important skill for every scientist. This guide provides design tips and detailed tutorials for making posters using free templates.

Scientific Poster Templates

Whether you are creating a research poster for the first time or have years of experience, this article reviews helpful tips on how to create effective designs. There are also links to free poster templates and videos that show you how to create effective scientific posters in PowerPoint and Adobe Illustrator.

How to Make Good Poster Content

My top recommendation for creating an engaging poster for a scientific conference is to describe your results with simple main points that allow your audience to easily follow your research with minimal effort. The sections below describe how to use main point brainstorming to create poster titles and subtitles that improve audience understanding.

Step 1. Create Short Main Points

People don't spend much time reading the poster, so the shorter you can make the main points, the better. My favorite way to determine the main points of your research poster is to brainstorm a full list of all of your research results and then create a shorter sentences that clearly summarize the information that you want your audience to know.

The first drafts of your main points can be long sentences with jargon, but the goal is to then take these full descriptions and transform them into simple phrases that allow poster viewers to visualize the results.

My tip for creating clear main points is to reduce the number of subjects, remove descriptions, and do not use more than one or two verbs. In scientific research results, there is almost always one main point action (e.g. something increases, decreases, changes, or stays the same) involving one to three components. Below are more examples of how to do this main point simplification.

Main Point Examples:

Brainstorm: Identification of miRNAs Upregulated by Isl1-Lhx3 During Motor Neuron Differentiation
Better: miRNAs Upregulated During Motor Neuron Differentiation
Best: miRNAs Upregulated in Developing Motor Neurons

Brainstorm: miR-218 Direct Spinal Cord Target mRNAs Identified using a RISCtrap Screen
Better: Identification of miR-218 Target mRNAs
Best: Identified miR-218 Targets

Brainstorm: Inhibition of miR-218 Activity Suppresses Endogenous Motor Neuron Generation
Better: miR-218 Inhibition Suppresses Motor Neuron Generation
Best: miR-218 is Important for Motor Neuron Development

Step 2: Create an Effective Research Poster Title

The poster title is one of the first things your audience reads and plays an important role in helping people understand your results. In order to create an effective title, I recommend that you take your optimized list of main points and try to summarize them with one big picture phrase. This is also a great way to help you brainstorm the title for research publications, but keep in mind that the poster title should be more reader-friendly than a manuscript title and use less details.

Poster Title Example:

Brainstorm: miR-218 is Essential to Establish Motor Neuron Fate as a Downstream Effector of Isl1–Lhx3
Better: miR-218 is Essential in Determining Spinal Cord Motor Neuron Identity
Best: miR-218 is Essential for Spinal Cord Motor Neuron Development

The brainstorm example above was used as the title for my first-author Nature Communications paper , but unless you are in my lab or in the exact same field of research, the term "Isl1-Lhx3" may not have much meaning for you and "downstream effector" is not a common phrase. Poster titles should use more common words that are easily understood outside of my specific field of developmental biology.

Reference: All content and data examples are from my open source first-author publication in Nature Communications .

Step 3. Create Poster Sections that Support the Main Points

After the title and main points are created, you can use these short phrases as subtitles that categorize your poster into sections that help your audience digest the information. The examples below show how you can use the main points to create guideposts in the results and a clear conclusions section that simplify the scientific story.

Research Poster Design Tips

Good visual design is also an essential part of creating an engaging research poster. People pay closer attention to details when they are easy to understand and interesting to look at. This requires that you use design best practices for color design, images, and composition to improve audience understanding. Learn how to improve your scientific poster designs with the tips below.

Poster Color Design

Colors can make a poster standout from the crowd and enhance audience understanding. My recommendation is to use poster colors that follow the three rules below:

Choose a light background color does not distract from the main points, such as muted blues, reds, or greens (see example image).
Choose colors that don't have conflicts for people with color blindness.
Limit the total number of colors used and use bright colors draw attention to the most important points of the poster.

Learn more about scientific color design in this review article:

Best Color Palettes for Scientific Figures and Data Visualizations

Poster Illustrations and Images

The most engaging posters also contain custom illustrations or images that show the methods and results of your research. Most people will read the title and then look for pictures that enhance their understanding of your scientific story.

Consider creating custom illustrations to explain your methods and conclusions section using Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, or Inkscape. Check out the resources below for more information on how to use scientific illustration templates and how to create your own designs.

Scientific Illustration and Image Resources

Free Online Courses and Templates
Animal Model and Research Illustrations
Alternatives to BioRender
How to Use Scientific Images

Poster Composition and Data Visualization

Good poster design also requires that you use an engaging layout and data visualizations. The goal is to make the poster easy-to-understand by using good composition techniques that reduce clutter and use graphs that make the main point clear. Below are some helpful resources that teach you how to create designs for effective scientific storytelling and figures within your poster.

Scientific Design Resources

Create professional science figures with illustration services or use the online courses and templates to quickly learn how to make your own designs.

How to Make Professional Graphical Abstracts in PowerPoint and Adobe Illustrator

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 19:03:04 GMT

Creating good graphical abstracts for scientific papers requires using design best practices to make an illustrated summary that clearly shows the main point of your research.

The resources in this article provide step-by-step training on how to create professional-level illustrations for graphical abstracts and Excel graphs in PowerPoint and Adobe Illustrator. If you prefer to watch the graphical abstract tutorials instead of reading the steps, you can also sign up for free online courses using the link below.

Step 1: Download Free Graphical Abstract Templates

One of the easiest ways to create good graphical abstracts is to start with a template that provides the correct size and framework that makes it easy for you to make an effective design. Use this link to download twenty-four free graphical templates for PowerPoint and Adobe Illustrator . These include templates formatted for Elsevier journals.

Step 2: Choose a Template that Supports Your Data

After you download the graphical abstract templates, the next step is to choose a design that shows the main points of your scientific story. For example, if you want to highlight the methods and results of your research, you may want to choose a templates from the two panel designs. If your data has multiple concepts or results, then you may want to choose a four panel or unique template design.

My recommended way to choose a template is to sketch a draft on pen and paper to see how many sections you will need to best describe your research. The examples below show two graphical abstract design brainstorms with options for two panel and three panel templates.

Two Panel Example

The brainstorm image below shows good graphical abstract design options based on a concept that shows two main panels: the conditional knockout model/phenotype and the experiment bar graph results.

Click here to download these free graphical abstract templates for Adobe Illustrator and PowerPoint

Three Panel Example

The image below shows good graphical abstract design options based on a concept that shows three distinct panels: 1) separating patients into groups, 2) giving treatment to the patients, and then 3) showing the treatment results in a graph.

Click here to download these free graphical abstract templates for Adobe Illustrator and PowerPoint

Resize the Graphical Abstract to Match Journal Requirements:

In order to format the graphical abstract for scientific publication, you will also need to know the requirements of the scientific journal. Make sure to find the maximum width, heights, fonts, resolution, and file type requirements for the graphical abstract.

You can find different journal requirements by going to the Journal’s homepage and then finding the link to the graphical abstract guidelines from there. If you Google the journal’s graphical abstract requirements, make sure you find the most up-to-date page on the website.

For example, Elsevier academic journals require that graphical abstracts are 1328 x 531 pixels. In contrast, most other journals require that it matches the maximum figure sizes of approximately 180 mm width (double column on a regular sheet of paper). Make sure to check the specifications before moving on to the next step of adding designs and data to avoid having to reformat the file.

If you still aren't sure how you want to organize your graphical abstract information, read these articles for more insights on how to represent your data:

Step 3: Add Designs and Data to the Graphical Abstract

After you have your graphical abstract template saved as your draft document, the next step is to add the designs, data, and text. No matter which design software you are using, there are three main methods you can use to create the graphical abstract design.

Recommended Methods to Add Designs and Data to Graphical Abstracts:

Download customizable images and template designs that have appropriate copyright rules.
Download images from online databases such as Simplified Science Images
Make sure that the images have high resolution and are permitted for use in scientific publications without attribution.
Draw your own illustrations.
Draw illustrations using Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, PowerPoint, Inkscape, Google Draw, or other design tools
Build your skills with free online courses and digital illustration workshops
Import and optimize graphs from software such as Excel, GraphPad Prism, etc.
Graphing software have a lot of design options that will allow you design and export graphs that match your graphical abstract color, size, and spacing.

Step 3: Add Designs and Data to the Graphical Abstract

Recommended Methods to Add Designs and Data to Graphical Abstracts:

Download customizable images and template designs that have appropriate copyright rules.
Download images from online databases such as Simplified Science Images
Make sure that the images have high resolution and are permitted for use in scientific publications without attribution.
Draw your own illustrations.
Draw illustrations using Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, PowerPoint, Inkscape, Google Draw, or other design tools
Take courses in scientific design
Import and optimize graphs from software such as Excel, GraphPad Prism, etc.
Graphing software have a lot of design options that will allow you design and export graphs that match your graphical abstract color, size, and spacing.

Step 4: Export Files for Scientific Publications and Presentations

After your graphical abstract design complete, the final step is to export the file for your scientific publication, presentations, and posters. Every design tool will have different settings for exporting different file types. Below are my recommended export tips for commonly used graphical abstract design tools:

Adobe Illustrator: Save the graphical abstract as a TIFF, EPS or PDF file for publication and as a large PNG for presentations and posters. Make sure you only export the artboard that has the proper dimensions and use RGB color settings and 300 ppi (pixels per inch).

PowerPoint: Save the files as a TIFF for publications and as a PNG for presentations. Make sure you increase the width to at least 2000 using the Page Setup settings to ensure that the file has a high resolution.

Affinity Designer: Save the graphical abstract as a TIFF, EPS or PDF file for publication and as a large PNG file for presentations and posters. Use RGB color settings and 300 ppi (pixels per inch) for a high resolution file.

Graphical Abstract Design Summary

Graphical abstracts are an increasingly important communication tool for scientists. This article reviewed four steps to help researchers create impressive designs:

Step 1. Download free graphical abstract templates

Step 2. Choose a template that best supports your data story

Step 3. Add designs and data to the graphical abstract

Step 4. Export high resolution files for publications, presentations, and posters.

Create professional science figures with illustration services or use the online courses and templates to quickly learn how to make your own designs.

BioRender Alternatives: Scientific Illustration Software Comparisons

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 18:23:25 GMT

Comparison of BioRender and other popular scientific illustration software costs, pros, and cons.

Every year, scientists create posters, presentations, and figures that use images to help communicate the methods and results of their research. Organizing images and creating quality data visualizations are essential skills that are often overlooked in graduate school training. This article provides detailed information to help researchers decide which tools they want to use to create their own impressive science drawings.

Science Illustration Tool Comparisons

There are an increasing number of software options available for researchers to use to create their scientific figures and graphical abstracts . The chart below compares the pros, cons, and costs of the most commonly used design tools. The annual costs are calculated for versions that include access to high-resolution exports of the final images and scientific designs.

BioRender

Annual Cost: $420 - 1,188

BioRender is a high quality image database and design tool that allows researchers to arrange standardized scientific images into attractive illustrations that can be used in scientific figures, graphical abstracts, posters, and presentations. It has been a fantastic tool that has expanded scientists' ability to quickly communicate their research.

However, the downside to this tool is the high cost for high resolution downloads that are required for publications, the lack of customization options, and the fact that it requires you to learn how to format your designs within their own software before exporting the images. This can make it challenging to format the final scientific figures and is limiting when you want to customize the designs to highlight your specific results or methods. Learn more about the BioRender Alternatives below.New Paragraph

Download Images and Templates

Annual Cost: Free - $200+

One cost-effective way to create your own designs is to download high-resolution vector images that you can use to customize your scientific graphics. This requires that you search image databases to find designs that are relevant for scientific use and do not have copyright/licensing restrictions that require attribution or limit customization. Below is a list of image databases that I recommend using for scientific purposes and you can also read this guide on how to find the right kind of science images in Google search.

Freepik

Simplified Science

Website: https://www.simplifiedsciencepublishing.com/science-images/

Mind the Graph

SciDraw

Scientific Drawing Software

In order to edit downloaded images or if you want to create your own custom designs, the next step you need to take is to learn to use digital drawing software. If you are a researcher who wants to improve your science communication skills, I strongly recommend learning how to incorporate the images into your own custom designs using one of the software programs listed below.

Adobe Illustrator

Annual Cost: $240 - 252

Adobe Illustrator is considered the gold standard design software for scientists and graphic designers. This extensive design tool allows you to create impressive digital illustrations, figures, and posters. The downside to Adobe Illustrator is high cost and the fact that it takes time and practice to use the software efficiently. However, many scientists choose to invest in this software because it is considered the best professional tool for research-related designs. Learn more about how to get Adobe Illustrator .

Affinity

Annual Cost: Free

Affinity Designer is a free option that has comparable tools and functions to Adobe Illustrator. You can open and edit Adobe Illustrator files within Affinity and it is becoming an increasingly popular option for scientists who do not want to pay for the recurring annual costs of other tools. It still requires time to learn how to use it, but the software is intuitive if you already know how to use Adobe Illustrator. Visit https://www.affinity.studio/ to learn more.

PowerPoint

Cost: Free, $70 for single software, or $149 for Entire Microsoft Office Suite (One-Time Purchase)

PowerPoint is another affordable tool that is already widely used by the scientific community. The design features are limited compared to Adobe Illustrator and Affinity Designer, but it still has great options for customizing downloaded images, arranging scientific figures, and creating basic graphic designs for graphical abstracts and posters. I recommend buying the latest one-time Microsoft Office suite (~$149 USD for the 2021 option) and I do not recommend wasting your money on the 365 subscription. Learn more about how to get PowerPoint on your computer here .

Inkscape

Annual Cost: Free

Inkscape is a free design program that allows you to arrange images and create custom designs. Although this software allows you to save on costs, it still requires time to learn how to use the platform effectively and has fewer design options that other tools. Because of the training time required, I recommend that you spend time increasing your skills with other design tools that are more commonly used in the research industry such as Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, or PowerPoint. Visit https://inkscape.org/ to learn more.

Google Slides and Google Drawing

Annual Cost: Free with Google account

Google Slides and Google Drawing are free programs available if you sign up for a Google account. The Google Slide design options are similar to those of Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Drawing is a new software that allows you to create simple custom designs. These are good free alternatives to the Microsoft Office Suite. Learn how to create a Google Account here: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/27441?hl=en .

Scientific Illustration Software Summary

Regardless of which design tools you choose, I hope you learned more about the illustration software available to help you create engaging graphic designs for scientific and public audiences. Below is a summary of the cost and customization options for the science drawing tools reviewed in this article.

Create professional science figures with illustration services or use the online courses and templates to quickly learn how to make your own designs.

How to Make Scientific Figures and Illustrations with Adobe Illustrator

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 18:58:20 GMT

Learning how to create figures and illustrations in Adobe Illustrator can be frustrating without the right training and tools. This guide shortens the time it takes to master your design skills with options for both free and full course tutorials.

Good figure design is increasingly important to get your research published in scientific journals. Adobe Illustrator is one of the most common platforms that is used to make impressive scientific figures and illustrations. Adobe Illustrator is preferred over tools such as PowerPoint because it has powerful features that can help you make beautiful designs that clearly tell your scientific story and it let's you control every aspect of your data visualizations, such as your graphs, tables, and images.

The two main barriers for scientists to using Adobe Illustrator are the learning curve and the cost. The goal of this article is to provide training resources that will help you learn how to use the software and also tips on downloading the software through your academic institution or workplace.

Free Scientific Adobe Illustrator Training

Learning Adobe Illustrator takes time and practice and below are my top recommended free resources that can help you advance your skills.

Free Online Courses

Simplified Science Publishing offers online courses in graphical abstract design, scientific illustration, science communication careers, presentation design, research poster design and more!
Tutorial videos contain easy-to-follow instructions on how to create illustrations, optimize graphs, and format the final design for journal publications, graphical abstracts, and conference posters.

Kevin Bonham YouTube Channel

The channel has Adobe Illustrator tutorials from over 10 years ago, but they are still relevant
Kevin's tips are great for beginners who are learning how to use Adobe Illustrator for the first time
Click here to watch the first video in his series

Advanced Adobe Illustrator Training

If you want to become a scientific illustrator or take your career to the next level by adding in-demand design skills, then I recommend taking advanced courses in scientific design and data visualization. Simplified Science Publishing offers a membership with access to the professional online courses shown below and hundreds of easy-to-use templates. Learn more about the courses and templates here!

If you want to skip the courses and only download the PDF guide with the Adobe Illustrator for Scientists instructions/shortcuts, click here to purchase the guide separately for $12 .

Tips for Downloading Adobe Illustrator Software

The three main ways to download Adobe Illustrator as a scientists are:

Your institution or laboratory can share their Education License with you.
You can purchase an individual license for $19.99/month .
You can start a 7-day free trial .

For more detailed tips, check out the resource below:

How to get Adobe Illustrator for Students and Scientists

Create professional science figures with illustration services or use the online courses and templates to quickly learn how to make your own designs.

Guide to Using Science Images for Research Papers

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 18:52:28 GMT

One easy way to include science images in your manuscripts is to download and customize them for your figures.

When downloading images from the internet to use in your scientific papers and presentations, you need to be careful that they match the copyright, resolution, and sizing rules that allow them to be used in academic journals. This science image guide provides tips to help you choose the right kinds of files that you can use to create your own impressive designs.

Which image format is best for research papers?

There are two categories of images that can be used for scientific publications: editable and uneditable. Editable images that can be fully customized and scaled without losing resolution are called vector files. Uneditable images don't allow you to adjust the design or color and come in wide range of formats from low to high resolution. Both of these image types can be used in scientific papers as long as you follow the proper copyright and resolution rules. Learn more about these image types and the different uses below.

1. Editable Images

The best kind of science images are editable vector files that allow you to customize the designs to best match the main points of your research. These include image file types such as Scalable Vector Graphics (.svg), Adobe Illustrator (.ai), Affinity Designer (.afdesign), Encapsulated PostScript (.eps), and some files in PowerPoint (.pptx) if they were drawn using PowerPoint shape tools.

Editable Image Tips:

Editable images are important because some scientific journals, such as Science, require that you provide them with figures that are formatted using editable vector files.
Be cautious of using images and database tools that only offer limited design customization options such as BioRender. Partially editable images can be difficult to make an illustration that looks professional and seamless with your data and other designs.
Vector images have customizable sizes, resolution and transparent backgrounds, so you can always scale the image and insert it into any background.
Make sure you follow the copyright rules associated with your image download. Some vector image databases require attribution and others allow you to use them for any purpose.

How to Find Editable Images

The easiest ways to find editable images is to explore science image databases or use Google search. I recommend using the search terms "drawings", "vector art", or "vector images" paired with the image type keyword.

The example below shows the Google Image search results for "cancer cell drawings" with a variety of different options for downloading different types of science images. You will still need to make sure that the image is available as a vector file type to be fully editable (e.g. SVG, AI, or EPS file types). Most vector images will require some sort of payment or subscription to download the high resolution files and use without copyright issues.

1. Uneditable Images

The second best format is uneditable images. Common uneditable image types are PNG, TIFF, or JPEG formats and these can be incorporated into your scientific figures and presentations as long as they have high enough resolution and have copyright rules that allow you to use them in academic publications.

Uneditable image tips:

Check the resolution of downloaded images to make sure they are high enough to use in scientific publications without looking grainy or unclear (see the "How to check image resolution" instructions in the section below).
Try to find PNG images with transparent backgrounds to make it easier to incorporate into your scientific figures and posters.
Be very careful in checking the source of uneditable images and follow all copyright rules associated with the image. Uneditable image are more likely to have copyright rules associated with them that do not allow their use in scientific journals.

How to Find High Resolution and Transparent Images

The easiest ways to find high resolution and transparent images is to explore science image databases or use Google search. I recommend using the search terms "transparent background" and using the Google "Tools" feature to limit the search for "Large" images.

The examples below shows the Google Large Image search results for "plant cell diagram transparent background" that show a variety of different options for downloading high resolution and transparent science images.

What image sizes are best for scientific publication?

Size and resolution are important because images need to be high resolution enough to show sharp shapes and lines when it is used in a printed or digital figure. Below are tips on how to choose the right image sizes and resolutions.

Image Resolution

Resolution is the most important aspect of a downloaded image or scientific figure and affects the sharpness of the details. A low-resolution image will have around 72 PPI and high resolution images are at least 300 PPI.

Most scientific journals require images and figures to be at least 300 PPI/DPI.
The "PPI" stands for Pixels Per Inch and is used when referring to digital file resolution and "DPI" stands for Dots Per Inch and is used for printing resolution.

How to Check Image Resolution:

Windows computer: Right-click on the file, select Properties, then Details, and you will see the DPI in the Image section, labeled Horizontal Resolution and Vertical Resolution.

Mac computer: Open the image in Preview and select Tools, then Adjust Size, and find the label Resolution.

Image Size

The size requirements will depend on how you plan to use the image. Most scientific journals use a maximum figure width of 180mm, so if you only plan to use images in scientific publications, then you only need them large enough to look sharp within a 180 mm wide figure (~600 pixels wide).

If you plan to use the image in presentation or posters slides, you will need to have much larger images to not have resolution issues when shown on a big screen that is 1280 x 720 pixels or printed on a poster that is approximately 48 x 36 inches.

How Can I Find Copyright-Free Images?

Copyright laws ensure that an image is only used in a way that is approved by the image creator. The best way to ensure that you download images with copyright rules that allow you to use them for academic journal submissions is to read the fine print on the image source. The summary below describes how to find images that are allowed for use in scientific papers.

Copyright License Review

Anyone who creates their own original artwork has the right to be acknowledged as the creator of that image. They automatically own the copyright for the image, which means that legally, they have the right to decide where and how that image can be used. In order to be able to use images in scientific papers, you will need to know what kind of copyright license is being used, which you can usually find by looking for the original source of the image or by reading the fine print of the image database.

Types of copyright licenses for scientific use:

Public Domain - Images generally become public domain after 70 years after the creator's death. If the copyright is not renewed on the creator's behalf, the image can become part of the ‘public domain’, and the copyright no longer applies.
Creative Commons 4 - You can adapt and share the image in anyway you like, but this license requires attribution, so you will need to include the original creator in the acknowledgements of the research paper, posters, and acknowledged on your presentation slides.
Stock Images - Image databases that allow you to license the designs. Make sure to read the fine print on how you are allowed to use the image (e.g. personal and commercial uses).

How to Find Copyright-Free Images:

Look for image databases that have copyright licenses that allow you to use the images "For personal, academic, and commercial projects and to modify it" such as:

NOTE: Some copyright-free image databases may still require that you attribute the illustration to the original author in your scientific publication. Read the fine print to make sure you are using the image correctly!

Here is an example of Simplified Science Usage Rules for comparison to other image databases.

How to Use Downloaded Images in Publications?

After downloading images, the next step is to format them into your scientific designs. Two of the most common software tools that scientists use for figure formatting are Adobe Illustrator and PowerPoint. Below is a link to free online courses that show you how to use the downloaded images in your scientific publications and graphical abstracts.

Create professional science figures with illustration services or use the online courses and templates to quickly learn how to make your own designs.

Best Graphical Abstract Examples with Free Templates

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 19:06:31 GMT

Creating engaging graphical abstracts can improve scientific publication rates and allows you to easily share your research in presentations and social media.

Graphical abstracts are becoming increasingly essential science communication tools for presentations and publications. Many academic journals now require scientists to submit graphical abstracts and the rise of social media has made summary images a standard expectation for communicating complex information. This article shows well-designed graphical abstract examples and also provides links to free templates.

What is a Graphical Abstract?

A graphical abstract is a visual representation of a research project. The goal of the abstract is to create a clear story of your scientific method and results that is quickly understood by your audience. The best graphical abstracts use a combination of data, illustrations, and formatting to make it easy to follow the main points of the research. Below is an example of a well-designed graphical abstract that uses left-to-right formatting to show the gathering initial data from TBI patients, treating patients with two treatment paths, and patient outcomes.

Learn how to design good graphical abstracts using PowerPoint and Adobe Illustrator

Graphical Abstract Examples

One great way to start brainstorming for your own graphical abstract is to look at examples to see which ideas and formats might best fit your own research story. Below is a review of the best graphical abstract examples, as well as links to download these free templates for your own designs.

Left-to-Right Designs

My top recommended graphical abstract design uses bold title text with left-to-right formatting for the details below it. This format is easy for people to understand and can be used to compare methods to results, describe a sequence of events, or show a series of scientific conclusions. Below are examples of my recommended left-to-right designs with 1-4 columns.

Click here to download these free graphical abstract templates for Adobe Illustrator and PowerPoint

Top-to-Bottom Designs

Another good option is to use a top-to-bottom formatting. This is an especially good design idea if your data output goes from a large quantity to a small quantity or if the research results naturally go from top to bottom, such as north to south on a map or from the atmosphere to the Earth. Below are examples of top-to-bottom graphical abstract designs with 1-4 rows.

Click here to download these free graphical abstract templates for Adobe Illustrator and PowerPoint

Circular and Unique Graphical Abstracts

The final recommended formats are circular and unique formats such as timelines and Venn diagrams. These are less commonly used and should only be selected if the summary of your research is easier to understand using one of these designs than the left-to-right formatting.

Click here to download these free graphical abstract templates for Adobe Illustrator and PowerPoint

Design Tools to Customize Graphical Abstracts

Knowing how to use design tools to create custom graphical abstracts has become an increasingly essential skill for researchers. Below is an example of a graphical abstract design that was customized using biological diagram templates and a list of the top design tools that scientists use to create graphical abstracts and scientific illustrations.

Adobe Illustrator

Affinity

PowerPoint

Google

There are also tools such as BioRender that allow you to create graphical abstracts with images that you can copy/paste into designs. However, this tool has limited customization options and is very expensive if you want to download your work as high resolution images that are used for publications and presentations. Read this article to learn more about the costs, pros, and cons of popular scientific design tools .

Use Graphical Abstracts to Promote Research

There are many different options to share your research with the public and your peers. Having a well-designed graphical abstract makes it easy to format the designs to share via presentations, scientific websites, and social media. This is a great way to increase interest in and awareness of scientific research.

In order to share your graphical abstract via social media, you may need to adjust your designs so that the image can be best formatted for different platforms. Each social media platform has their own preferred dimensions for the images you share. For example, if you want to share your graphical abstract on both Instagram and LinkedIn, you will want to adjust one version to fit a square image for Instagram and you probably won't need many adjustments to share a landscape image on LinkedIn. Below are examples of graphical abstract image formatting for social media posts on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

Graphical Abstract Design Summary

All of the examples and tools described in this article can help you design impressive graphical abstracts and share them with a wider audience. Use the simple process below to start your own design.

Step 1. Choose a design plan that looks good to you, best represents your data, and matches your intended scientific journal's formatting requirements.

Step 2. Create a draft of your design by drawing on paper or use digital design tools such as Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, or PowerPoint to arrange your illustrations, text, and graphs. Learn more about graphical abstract design options by clicking on the resources below:
Download free graphical abstract templates and view other science images
Sign up for free courses on graphical abstract and scientific illustration

Step 3. Adjust the design formatting and colors until the main story of your research is clear.
Read articles to learn more about data visualization design best practices and data storytelling

Step 4. Share with scientists and the public via presentations, scientific websites, and social media.

Create professional science figures with illustration services or use the online courses and templates to quickly learn how to make your own designs.

Science Drawings: Research Tools, Animals & Cell Types

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 18:46:22 GMT

A comprehensive review of science drawings and how to include them in your research publications and posters.

Scientific images are becoming increasingly essential science communication tools. Whether you need images for a public or scientific audience, your project will benefit from using high quality animal model and research illustrations to describe your work. This article shows a variety of free and affordable science images that you can use to create your own impressive designs for scientific papers.

Drawings for Research Methods and Biological Diagrams

Creating research illustrations can be difficult for scientists who do not have drawing skills. Below are examples of customizable images for methods sections and biological diagrams that you can use to easily create your own designs for graphical abstracts, manuscript figures, and presentations.

Laboratory Tools and Equipment Drawings

Scientists are often tasked with creating graphic designs that explains what research methods were used in their experiments. The illustrations shown below are the most commonly used laboratory tools and method diagrams such as pipettes, Eppendorf tubes, petri dishes, well dishes, experiment schematics, microscopes, plasmid maps, genomic and proteomic molecular assays, behavioral assays and much more!

The lab illustrations shown below are fully customizable in vector editing software such as Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, Inkscape and partially editable in PowerPoint.

NOTE: All of these template drawings are included in with Simplified Science Pro for only $59/year

Biological Diagram Science Drawings

Biological diagram illustrations are also commonly used to describe research results and methods. Scientists who work in the field of molecular or cellular biology may find it useful to download a series of cellular background templates with lipid bilayers paired with signaling molecules, cell types, organelle, DNA, and RNA designs.

The scientific illustration examples shown below are fully customizable in vector editing software such as Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, Inkscape and partially editable in PowerPoint. They are designed to help scientists quickly illustrate nearly any biological mechanism with professional-looking graphics.

NOTE: All of these template drawings are included in with Simplified Science Pro for only $59/year

There are also tools such as BioRender that allow you to create graphical abstracts with science drawings that you can copy/paste into designs. However, this tool has limited customization options and is very expensive if you want to download your work as high resolution images that are used for publications and presentations. Read this article to learn more about the costs, pros, and cons of popular scientific design tools.

Scientific Drawings of Animals

Animal illustrations are essential for scientists who need to describe complex results that used animals or patients their experiments. Commonly used animal models include mice, zebrafish, fruit flys, nematodes and chickens. Below are scientific drawings of animals that are optimized for use in scientific figures, presentations, and posters. All downloads come in three file types: Adobe Illustrator, SVG, and PowerPoint.

Rat and Mouse Illustrations

Rodent drawings are designed for use in scientific publications and presentations. Downloads include brain illustrations as well as rabbit and guinea pig animal model drawings. These images are easy to use in any design software and can be customized to best represent your research.

Zebrafish Illustrations

Zebrafish drawings that include illustrations of developmental embryo stages and adults. These images can be edited in vector software to add color and adjust every aspect of their design to show normal versus abnormal development.

Fruit Fly Illustrations

Fruit fly ( Drosophila ) drawings that include illustrations of the brain, adults from various view points, and embryo development stages.

Human Brain Illustrations

Human brain drawings that include illustrations of sagittal and coronal views as well as illustrations of the brains within the head outlines. The outlines are especially useful if you want to represent different aspects of brain biology.

C. Elegans Nematode Illustrations

Nematode drawings of Caenorhabditis elegans that include illustrations of hermaphrodites (XX), males (XO), nervous system image, developmental cycles, and cross sections from anterior, middle, and posterior areas of the body.

Chicken Embryo Illustrations

Chicken embryo development stage illustrations that include drawings of Hamburger Hamilton developmental stages, cross sections, and examples of in ovo electroporation. Downloads also include a hatched chick and adult chicken drawing.

How Can I Edit the Science Drawings?

There are many different ways to use and customize downloaded art for scientific publications. You can choose from a variety of design tools, but if you prefer using PowerPoint or Adobe Illustrator, I recommend signing up for the free online scientific design courses to learn how to edit scientific drawings. The course videos provide step-by-step tutorials for creating graphical abstracts and apply the same design techniques that you need to use when creating your own scientific figures, illustrations, and poster s.

Create professional science figures with illustration services or use the online courses and templates to quickly learn how to make your own designs.

How to Make Good Figures for Scientific Papers

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 17:18:45 GMT

Creating good figures for scientific publications requires using design best practices to make each figure clearly show the main point of your data story.

This article reviews important design principles that will help you create effective figures. However, if you want step-by-step tutorials on how to create the scientific illustrations and Excel graphs using Adobe Illustrator and PowerPoint, read these articles instead:

Four Rules to Create High-Quality Figures

The best data visualizations for scientific papers use a combination of good design principles and storytelling that allows the audience to quickly understand the results of a scientific study. Below are four rules that will help you make effective research figures and save you time with the final journal formatting. There are also practical tips on how to find the purpose of your figure and how to apply design best practices to graphs, images, and tables.

Rule 1: Clearly show the main purpose to your audience

For every graph or figure you create, the first step is to answer the question: what is the purpose of my data? Clearly defining the main purpose of your scientific design is essential so that you can create and format the data in ways that are easy to understand.

The most common purposes for scientific publications are to explain a process or method, compare or contrast, show a change, or to establish a relationship. Each of these purposes should then lead you to select graph types. For example, if the goal of your figure is to explain a method, you will likely want to choose process-focused graph types such as flow charts, diagrams, infographics, illustrations, gantt charts, timelines, parallel sets, or Sankey diagrams. Below are examples of the most common graph types that you can use for different data purposes. Read more articles to learn how to choose the right data visualizations and data storytelling .

Rule 2: Use composition to simplify the information

After you define the purpose of your graph or figure, the next step is to make sure you follow composition best practices that make the information clear. Composition best practices include following the journal rules and formatting from left to right, top to bottom, or in a circle. You should also review your designs to remove or adjust distracting data, lines, shadows, and repeated elements. Applying good composition means spending time reviewing your layout and simplifying the story using these techniques.

Data Composition Best Practices:

Design flow should be left to right, top to bottom, or in a circle
Make sure most important data is the focus of the design
Remove or adjust excess data and text
Make text easy to read
Reduce contrast of bold lines
Remove repeated elements
Remove shadows

The example below shows how to design a figure that applies the composition best practices by taking an initial layout of a figure on the left and then use formatting to fill the space, simplify information, and reorder the data to more clearly show the main purpose of the research.

Follow Science Journal Formatting Requirements:

In order to organize the graphs, charts, and figures, you will also need to know the requirements of the scientific journal. You will need to know the limits of the figure sizes, the maximum number of figures, as well as color, fonts, resolution, and file type requirements. You can find different journal requirements by going to the Journal’s homepage and then finding the link to the author’s guidelines from there. If you Google the journal’s formatting requirements, make sure you find the most up-to-date page.

For example, the academic journal Science allows a maximum of 6 figures and requires that they have a width of 55 mm (single column) or 230 mm (double column). In contrast, the journal Nature only allows 3-4 figures or tables with maximum widths of 89 mm (single column) and 183 mm (double column). If you planned to submit your scientific publication to Nature, you would need to carefully plan which graphs and tables will best tell your scientific story within only four figures.

Rule 3: Use colors or grayscale to highlight the purpose

Color is one of the most powerful data storytelling tools. When used properly, color enhances understanding of your graphs and when used poorly, it can be very distracting.

Scientific Color Design Tips:

The example below shows a graph on the left that has a lot of information about graduation rates for bachelor’s degrees in 2019. The text is small and the color design makes it difficult to understand the main results of the data. One way to improve this figure is to use colors to highlight the main story of the data, which is that private for-profit institutions have a much higher drop-out rate than all other institutions. The figure on the right improves this design using the bold pink color and clearer text to highlight the main point of the dataset.

Rule 4: Refine and repeat until the story is clear

The goal of good figure design is to have your audience clearly understand the main point of your research. That is why the final rule is to spend time refining the figure using the purpose, composition, and color tools so that the final design is clear.

It is normal to make 2-3 versions of a figure before you settle on the final design that works best. I recommend using the three clarity checkpoints below to improve your refinement process.

Design Clarity Checkpoints:

Checkpoint 1. Does the figure show the overall story or main point when you hide the text? If not, improve the data visualization designs to more clearly show the main purpose.
Checkpoint 2. Can you remove or adjust unnecessary elements that attract your attention? Remove repetitive elements, bounding boxes, background colors, extra lines, extra colors, repeated text, shadows/shading, either remove or adjust excess data, and consider moving information to supplementary figures.
Checkpoint 3. Does the color palette enhance or distract from the story? Limit the use of color and pick a color palette that improves audience understanding of the main purpose of the figure. If the color doesn’t serve an obvious purpose, change to grayscale.

Scientific Figure Design Summary

For every scientific publication, follow the four rules of good scientific figure design to help you create effective graphics that engage and impress your audience:

Clearly show the main purpose to your audience
Use composition to simplify the information
Use colors or grayscale to highlight the main points of the figure
Refine and repeat the process until the story is clear

Create professional science figures with illustration services or use the online courses and templates to quickly learn how to make your own designs.

Scientific Data Visualization Tools and Techniques

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 17:22:31 GMT

Data visualizations are a powerful storytelling tool that make information accessible and actionable.

Data visualization is the art and science of communicating complex information in simple ways. This article provides tools to help you choose the right graphs and improve your scientific visualizations. You can also practice these techniques by following along with the free online courses linked below.

What is Scientific Data Visualization?

Scientific data visualization uses graphs, charts, and images to communicate scientific research. There are many different ways to represent data and it is important to choose the right graph and chart types that make the data easier to understand. Poor data visualization choices can lead to designs that confuse your audience or make them ignore the results of your research. Below are data visualization tools to help you determine your purpose with example charts and graphics.

Data Visualization Tools

Tool #1: Data Visualization Checklist

One of my favorite data visualization tools is the Data Purpose Checklist. This is a checklist that provides a helpful framework for deciding the main purpose of your data, which can help you choose the best graph style and make design decisions that matches that purpose.

The checklist has five main purpose categories: explain a process, compare or contrast, show a change, establish a relationship, or other. With any dataset, you should ask yourself the question: what is the main purpose of my data story? And then select one of these categories. Any data visualization you make should then be focused on clearly showing the selected purpose.

Tool #2: Data Visualization Examples and Graph Types

Another useful tool is to look at a variety of different data visualization examples and see which types of charts or visualizations are best for your dataset. This is particularly helpful if you have already used the Data Purpose Checklist tool to determine the main point that you want to get across to your audience. Below are recommended chart types that match different data purposes.

Chart Types that Explain a Process or Method

If the purpose of your data visualization is to explain a process, then you will likely want to choose a graph such as a flow chart, diagram, infographic, Gantt chart, illustration, timeline, parallel sets, or Sankey diagram. These are great visual representations of processes and can quickly help your audience understand your research methods or scientific model.

Chart Types that Compare, Contrast, or Show a Change

If the goal of your data is to compare, contrast, or show a change, then you will likely choose from the following graph types: bar chart, box chart, line chart, bubble chart, stacked graph (area or bar), box & whisker plot, pie chart, histogram, radial column chart, pyramid, span chart, or pictogram chart. These are all data visualization options that will help you highlight contrasts or comparisons in your datasets.

Chart Types that Establish a Relationship

If your data focuses on establishing a relationship, then you should choose from the following graph types: network diagram, heatmap, map, radar chart, mosaic chart, venn diagram, chord diagram, or arc diagram. These graphs highlight the relationship between datasets and can help you highlight the main point in their connection.

Other Purposes

If the purpose of your data visualization does not fall into one of the categories above, then you may have the challenge of using a non-standard graphing method to illustrate your results. I recommend visiting this data visualization catalog website to review more graphing options that may match your unique needs: https://datavizcatalogue.com/search.html .

Tool #3: Select Your Target Audience

Another tool to create a good data visualization is to do research on your target audience and then choose the design based that will match your audience needs. Three common audiences for data visualizations are scientific, business, and public. Each of these audiences will prioritize different details in a data visualization and below are some tips and graph ideas for each audience.

Scientific Audience

This audience may include grant reviewers, laboratory members, and academic committees. These groups will often require detailed information in your graphs with clear designs that help communicate the research results. If your visualization is targeting the scientific audience, you may need to choose graph types that allow for details such as statistical significance, number of subjects, and comparisons to controls.

Common Scientific Data Visualizations:

Bar Graphs
Line Graphs
Box and Whisker Plots
Scatter Plots with Bars
Heat Maps
Scientific Illustrations

Business Audience

The business audience may include tech, biotech, and pharmaceutical companies. This audience uses data to inform their business decisions and you should choose eye-catching graphs that quickly show the most important conclusions of the dataset. This can include additional graphic designs that show the main point of the data such as arrows or numbers that stand out from the image.

Common Business Data Visualizations:

Bar Graphs
Line Graphs
Pie Charts
Tables
Graphs with additional graphic designs (such as arrows, large numbers, etc.)

Public Audience

A public audience responds best to simple information presented in an engaging way, so you will likely want to choose graphs that limit detail and focus on the big picture of the data story. This can include using illustrations, maps, and infographics that show the results without having to read the details or text.

Common Public Data Visualizations:

Infographics
Pie Charts
Bar Graphs
Maps
Diagrams
Videos
Illustrations

Tool #4: Data Storytelling Framework

Using a data storytelling framework is another great tool that can be used to create effective data visualizations. Stories contain four main elements: characters, setting, conflict, and resolution. Below is an example of how these elements can be used to tell a story about a biotech product. Read the article linked below to learn more about a data storytelling framework that can help you create better data visualizations:

Data Storytelling Techniques: How to Tell a Great Data Story in 4 Steps

Data Storytelling Example: Let’s set the scene: a company has a new product that improves biologics purification with a one-step process. The characters in this case are the product and the purification elements, the setting is the purification process, the conflict is the performance of the product compared to competitors, and the resolution is the better performance of the company product. Together, these can be used to help design a graphic that highlights the biotech product hero’s journey (see example).

Data Visualization Tools Summary

Regardless of which method you use, each of the four tools listed below provide helpful frameworks for you to transform complex data into clear and compelling graphics.

Create a Data Purpose Checklist - Define the main purpose of the data to keep your overall communication goal clear.
Review Data Visualization Examples - Look at example graphs to help you highlight the purpose of the data.
Identify Target Audience - Create visualizations that appeal to a specific audience.
Use Data Storytelling Techniques - Create a design that tells a compelling story.

Reference

Ukraine refugee arrivals open source data used for my map visualization is from the UNHCR database on March 3-5, 2022: https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine

Create professional science figures with illustration services or use the online courses and templates to quickly learn how to make your own designs.

Best Color Palettes for Scientific Figures and Data Visualizations

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 18:15:30 GMT

Choosing the right colors for your data visualizations improves audience comprehension and makes your work accessible to people with color blindness. Color is also an important element of designing scientific graphs and data visualizations because it is a powerful storytelling tool.

Below is a comprehensive guide that will help you create your own effective scientific color palettes and provides resources to help you apply the selected colors in different data visualization platforms.

What is a Color Palette and Why Should I Care?

A color palette is a set of colors that you use within a visual. For scientific purposes, using a carefully selected color palette can be a powerful tool that helps you tell your scientific story. For example, the use of blue and red on a heat map makes the audience think hot (increase) and cold (decrease), the use of green and brown on a map can tell a story of rainfall impacting farmland fertility, and having one color stand out from the others on a graph can highlight the main point of your research results.

It is also important to use an accessible color palette that doesn’t confuse people with Color Vision Deficiencies (CVD), also known as color blindness. Approximately 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women experience different forms of CVD, so it is a common occurrence that requires understanding which color combinations are hard for people to distinguish.

How to Find the Best Scientific Color Combinations

Choosing opposing colors on the color wheel are some of the best color combinations. These colors can help people understand your data story and are also the most accessible for people with color blindness and other color perception difficulties. However, it is important to note that you should not feel limited by only using these options.

Use Color Saturation and Lightness to Create Contrast

You can use any combination of colors as long as they are highly contrasting, even if they are different shades of the same color. The three main color characteristics are hue, saturation, and lightness. You can adjust any three of these characteristics to create an effective scientific color palette using any colors that best represents your dataset.

In order to test which colors are best for your scientific project and keep them uniform across platforms, you need to know that every color is defined by different kinds of codes. The main color code that you need to know for scientific publications and presentations are “HEX” codes, which are a six-digit codes that you can use to identify the exact colors that you want to keep consistent across design tools such as Adobe Illustrator, Excel, PowerPoint, Prism, Google Slides, websites platforms, etc. You may also need to know the RGB, HSL, or CMYK color codes for different graphing and data visualization tools.

To find different color codes, I recommend that you use the tools below:

Toptal Color Platte Tool - Use this color tool to create, visualize, and download custom, monochrome, analogic, complementary, triad, and quad HEX code color palettes: https://www.toptal.com/designers/colourcode .
Google Color Picker - Online tool where you can use a color slider to find the HEX, RGB, CMYK, and HSL color codes: https://g.co/kgs/qDGrn3rn3 .
Image Color Picker - Online tool where you can upload an image or provide a website URL and get the RGB Color, HEX Color and HSL Color codes from the image: https://imagecolorpicker.com/en .
Your Graphing System - Use color formatting tools in your graphing software such as Excel, Prism, R, MATLAB, etc. These tools may not show the color codes, but most will allow you to use an eye dropper tool to select your desired colors from a color palette image.

Use the Viz Palette Tool to Test for Color Accessibility

After you choose a potential color palette for your scientific graphs, posters, or presentations, I recommend that you check whether your colors are accessible to people with all types of color blindness using a fantastic tool called "Viz Palette" by Elijah Meeks & Susie Lu: https://projects.susielu.com/viz-palette .

The Viz Palette tool allows you to enter the HEX, RGB, or HSL color codes in the Edit panel and then test how people with different types of CVD will see the colors. The example below shows how the tool allows you to see what a set of colors looks like to a person with red/green color blindness and also shows the gray scale view. If your chosen color palette is not fully accessible, you can make adjustments to some of the color's hue, saturation, and lightness until it meets the tools requirements for the fewest color conflicts.

One incorrect thing I have heard designers say is to “never use red and green together.” They say this because red and green have the most color conflicts for people with color blindness. However, if it is important to your data story, you can use red and green colors together as long as you apply different saturation and lightness to increase the contrast. (See example where high contrasting red and green colors can be used together without a conflict).

Accessible Color Palettes for Charts and Graphs

The best color palettes for data visualizations are accessible to a wide audience and have clear data storytelling . The examples below provide color combinations and hex codes for a variety of bar charts, line graphs, and pie charts that work well for scientific publications. These examples include hex codes and provide options for sequential, qualitative and divergent color palettes.

Two Color Combinations for Bar Graphs

Three Color Combinations for Bar Graphs

Four Color Combinations for Charts

Six Color Combinations for Charts

Eight Color Combinations for Charts

Color Guides for Data Visualization Platforms

Data visualization platforms have different options for applying color and using the color codes. Below are resources to help you apply the best colors for graphing platforms such as Adobe Illustrator, Excel, R, Tableau, MATLAB, and Map Generators.

Color Palettes in Adobe Illustrator

Color Palette Tools in Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint

Color Palettes in R

https://www.stat.ubc.ca/~jenny/STAT545A/block15_colorMappingBase.html

Colors Palettes in Tableau

To learn how to apply color to data visualizations in Tableau, visit the Tableau Help Center pages: https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/viewparts_marks_markproperties_color.htm

Color Palettes in MATLAB

M ATLab uses RGB values and a color picker code (c = uisetcolor) to define colors.
Below are two resources that can help you select the right MATLab color palettes for your graphs and visualizations:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/uisetcolor.html

http://math.loyola.edu/~loberbro/matlab/html/colorsInMatlab.html

Colors Palettes for Maps and Cartography

The best tool for testing color palettes for maps and cartography data is the Color Brewer by Cynthia Brewer, Mark Harrower and The Pennsylvania State University: https://colorbrewer2.org/#type=sequential&scheme=BuGn&n=3

Color Palettes for Scientific Poster Backgrounds

Use this resource article to learn more about good research poster design: https://www.simplifiedsciencepublishing.com/resources/free-research-poster-templates-and-tutorials

Tool to Translate a Color into Any Format

How to Use Color to Tell your Scientific Story

The goal of selecting colors for your data visualization is to help your audience quickly understand the main point of the information. One effective method to improve color design for data visualizations is to only apply color to the elements that you want to attract your audience's attention.

For example, the graphs below both use the same data, but the graph on the right changes the order, improves formatting, and selectively uses color to draw your eye to the most important information. After you create any data visualization, you should ask yourself whether the colors highlight the main point of your scientific story, and if not, consider revising your color design.

Read these articles to learn more scientific story design tips and tricks:

Grayscale is a Good Default Option

Although color can be used as an effective tool to tell your data story, it is also important to note that grayscale colors are still a great way to represent your data. The key to using grayscale in scientific research is to make sure that there is approximately a 15-30% difference in saturation between the colors used (e.g. shades of gray). Most default color guides are already set up to help you select gray colors that are not too similar.

Science Color Palette Summary

All of the tools described in this article can help you find and apply the right colors for your data visualizations and scientific figures. Now that you have all of the resources you need, you can use the simple process below to create your own scientific color palette:

How to Choose the Best Scientific Color Palette:

Step 1. Choose a color palette that looks good to you and best represents your data. Use the information in this article to help you make good initial choices.

Step 2. Test the colors in the Viz Palette tool to see how they will affect a color blind audience.

Step 3. Adjust color, hue and saturation in the Viz Palette until there are no color conflicts.

Step 4. Apply the final colors to your data visualization platform, scientific papers, posters, and graphs that highlights the main point of your data.

References:

Statistic of number of people with CVD from https://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindness/

Create professional science figures with illustration services or use the online courses and templates to quickly learn how to make your own designs.

How to Use Simplified Science Publishing Content

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 12:59:52 GMT

After downloading content from the Simplified Science Publishing template library , you are allowed to use the downloads for personal, educational, publication, and commercial use without attribution. Learn more about usage rules below.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Can I use downloaded content to create work for a client?

You are allowed to use Simplified Science Publishing Content for your own client's work as long as you are using the templates to create a secondary element that is a part of a unique image (see example below). You are not allowed to sell clients an exact copy/paste of the main elements.

You will need to modify and combine the original images so that they become a secondary element product for your client by adjusting the sizes, vector points, and color of the templates and also add your own graphics or drawings. This usually happens naturally when you are creating custom graphics that tell your client's unique scientific story. Learn more about secondary and main elements below.

When using Simplified Science Publishing Content, please note that you can edit it and give your client the printed product or the PNG/PDF file that contains the secondary elements, but never an editable file which includes our resources.

2. What is the difference between a secondary and main element?

When using Simplified Science Publishing Content for any use that generates profit, you must edit the original content in a way that changes it from a main element to a secondary element and you are not allowed to share the original editable files. If you are using the templates for your own scientific figures that are published in academic journals, posters or presentations, you are allowed to use the original files as main elements in your design.

Main Element (Example 1)

Content is used as main element when the resource is used in a product (physical or digital) as it has been downloaded from the Simplified Science Publishing sites, without any changes being applied to the design.

Main Element (Example 2)

If you add other elements created by yourself or by a third party, like small details or adding/changing the text and color, but the design from Simplified Science Publishing is still the element with more weight in the final composition, meaning that it attracts the attention before the other parts on the design, this will still be understood as main element.

Secondary Element

Simplified Science Publishing content is used as a secondary element when other elements, not from Simplified Science Publishing, are added to the final composition and become more important than the resource from Simplified Science Publishing.
Acceptable uses of secondary elements for commercial profit, such as freelance designs for a client.

3. What does it mean to use Simplified Science Publishing Content "without attribution"?

Without attribution means that you are allowed to use the content for personal, academic, educational, and commercial uses without referencing Simplified Science Publishing as the source of the images. This is different from BioRender where most licenses require that you acknowledge use of BioRender in publications.

How to Become a Scientific Illustrator in 5 Steps

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 15:16:50 GMT

Becoming a scientific illustrator requires skills in graphic arts, communication design, and scientific research.

Scientific illustrators use a combination of artistic and analytical skills to transform complex concepts into engaging graphics. An important starting point for your scientific illustration career is to identify which of the essential skill sets are lacking and then work to improve them until you have enough experience to build an impressive portfolio.

Below are 5 steps that will help you determine what additional training and assets you may need to become a scientific illustrator. There are also practical tips on how to expand your connections in the science industry and options for seeking employment.

STEP 1. Identify your strengths and weaknesses in three skill categories: graphic design, communication, and scientific research

A scientific illustration career requires you to be skilled in understanding scientific concepts, creating engaging and accurate designs on digital platforms, and clearly communicating the main point of complex information. This combination of expertise means that you will need experience in a variety of overlapping disciplines and be able to identify which skill sets you need to improve to be eligible for jobs.

One way to identify your scientific illustration strengths and weaknesses is to list the skills you have and the areas you will need to strengthen for each expertise category. Below is a Scientific Illustrator Skill Chart to help with this exercise and I suggest that you print it and fill it out to assess your skills. By filling out the chart, you will see how your current strengths and weaknesses match up with the expected experience for a successful scientific illustration career. If you mark any of the skill categories with a score less than 3, you should strongly consider seeking additional training to improve your ability to compete in the scientific illustrator job market.

STEP 2. Increase skills in your areas of weakness

After you fill out the scientific illustrator expertise chart or create your own strength assessment, the next step is to increase the skills in your areas of weakness. For example, if you are a scientific researcher who has a Masters or Ph.D., you may need to increase your experience using graphic design software such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and learn more about effective communication design. If you are an artist or graphic designer, you may need to take additional science coursework or participate in seminars designed to train artists to support scientific research. If you are a beginner in all three skills categories, you can consider pursuing a degree from a comprehensive scientific illustrator program.

The recommendations below provide resources on how to strengthen your experience in the three different scientific illustration skill categories: graphic design, communication and scientific analysis.

How to improve graphic design skills

If you need to improve graphic design skills, you can increase your experience by taking on online training courses to learn how to use Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and 3D design software. There are many affordable options such as free YouTube videos and training certificate courses via LinkedIn Learning. I am not recommending courses that focus on pen and paper graphic arts skills because even though it is helpful to have these skills, the majority of scientific illustration jobs require you to use your artistic abilities in digital formats. Digital and vector graphic art skills are necessary. Paper media skills are good and translate well into digital art skills, but they are only necessary in some niche positions for medical, geographical and museum illustrator careers.

Below is a comprehensive list of graphic design training options to improve your ability to create impressive digital illustrations. I don’t recommend investing in an expensive comprehensive scientific illustrator training program to improve design skills unless you also have little experience in scientific research or other scientific disciplines.

Graphic Design Training Recommendations:

LinkedIn Learning has affordable certificate courses for Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Cinema 4D, and many others.

Simplified Science Publishing offers online training courses and research illustration templates that help participants create impressive scientific figures and presentations using Adobe Illustrator.

NYU Health Sciences Library has a great list of recommended Illustrator tutorial links: https://hslguides.med.nyu.edu/illustrato r.

Attend classes at the nearest school that offers Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop courses.

How to improve communication design skills

Communication design is the art of expressing information in a way that grabs attention and provides clear understanding. If you need to improve communication design skills, you can read about best practices from a variety of sources and you can also attend courses or workshops. Below is a list of the recommended resources and classes to improve your presentation and communication design expertise:

Communication Design Training Recommendations:

Read trusted resources that teach best practices in presentation and communication design such as:
Slide:ology. The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte. O’Reilly.
Presentation Zen. Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery by Garr Reynolds. Berkeley, New Riders.
Visualize This:The Flowing Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics by Nathan Yau. Indianapolis, Wiley.

Participate in communication courses and workshops:
Simplified Science Online Courses
Coursera Effective Communication Courses
www.asbmb.org/career-resources/communication-course
www.aldacenter.org/workshops

How to improve scientific research skills

In order to be a successful scientific illustrator, you will need to understand scientific concepts and be familiar with the field of scientific research. Most projects require that you understand the scientific topic in order to accurately illustrate cell types, biological pathways, physics diagrams, and engineering concepts. You can create good scientific illustrations without having laboratory or field experience, however it may take you longer and cause frustration for your scientific clients if they have to explain every aspect of their research in order to get an accurate final figure design. Below is a list of some recommended science training resources and there are many other creative ways to expand your scientific research and knowledge skills.

Scientific Training Recommendations :

Earn a master’s or doctorate degree in science. Most opportunities are open to individuals who at least have a Master’s in scientific field.
Take online or college-level science classes:
alison.com/courses/science
www.khanacademy.org/science
Find community college courses near you.
Network with scientists in your area and ask if they would be willing to let you shadow their work in a laboratory.
Find a scientific internship:
www.internships.com/science
stemundergrads.science.gov/
www.aaas.org/careers/internship-opportunities

Comprehensive scientific illustrator training

If you need to strengthen all three skill categories, you can consider applying to a comprehensive scientific illustration degree or certificate program. The upside to this decision is that you will be a desirable candidate for positions in the field and build connections in the industry. The downside to this decision is the cost. According to Glass Door, scientific illustrators have a salary range of $42,000 to $74,000 in a fairly competitive job market. Comprehensive scientific illustrator programs cost upward of $30,000 per year.

Top Academic Scientific, Medical and Biomedical Illustration Programs:

Johns Hopkins University - Master's (MS) in Medical and Biological Illustration (MBI)
Augusta University - Master's (MS) in Illustration
Rochester Institute of Technology - Master's (MFA) in Medical Illustration
University of Illinois at Chicago - Master's (MFA) in Biomedical Visualization (BVIS) Program
Arcadia University - Bachelor's (BA) in Scientific Illustration
Buena Vista University - Bachelor's (BFA) in Scientific Illustration
Cleveland Institute of Art - Bachelor's (BFA) in Biomedical Art (Medical Illustration)

Certificate Programs:

STEP 3. Build your portfolio

The third step is to build your portfolio. You need to showcase your scientific illustrations to earn a client’s or employer’s trust. The best way to do this is to create a website that highlights your scientific illustration portfolio and provides a description of your freelance services. Even if you don’t have clients yet, you can create illustrations using standard scientific journal styles as part of your graphic design training and practice.

Scientific Illustration Portfolio Tips:

Create scientific illustration examples that match styles for different journals such as Nature, Science, and others.

Create a company website to showcase your illustrations. I recommend using Duda, Squarespace, Wix, or WordPress for your website design.

If you have completed work for clients, ask them for permission to use their illustrations for your portfolio and include their institution logos on your website.

STEP 4. Build your connections

The fourth step to becoming a scientific illustrator is to build your connections through networking. This is especially important if you want to do freelance work in addition to looking for a full-time position. By meeting people through networking events, scientific conferences and other meet-ups, you will increase your chances of connecting with potential clients and employees seeking someone with your skills. You can also learn a lot about the scientific companies and research institutions in your area. Below is a list of tips to help build your connections with the scientific professionals where you live and expand your illustration clientele.

Scientific Illustrator Networking Tips:

Create a list of companies, institutions, illustrators, and scientists that you are interested in working with and reach out to them with inquiries on meeting up for coffee or a virtual meet-up
Attend public events associated with local academic research universities and hospitals
Attend local biotechnology and science networking groups
Always bring business cards with your name and website address to events, but resist the urge to hand people your business card unless they ask for it
If you are new to networking, review additional tips from these resources before attending events:
www.kangan.edu.au/students/blog/successful-networking-tips
www.entrepreneur.com/article/223468

STEP 5. Become a contractor and apply!

After you have increased your scientific illustration expertise and created an impressive portfolio for your website, the final step is to become an independent contractor and apply for available positions. Becoming a scientific illustrator is an exciting and fulfilling career for people who enjoy translating complex information into engaging designs. Below are resources that can help you take the final step to starting your own scientific illustrator business and finding employment.

How to Become an Independent Contractor:

https://www.thebalancesmb.com/why-should-i-create-an-independent-contracting-business-397571

Scientific Illustrator Job Websites:

Create professional science figures with illustration services or use the online courses and templates to quickly learn how to make your own designs.

How to get Adobe Illustrator for Students and Scientists

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 01:14:47 GMT

Adobe Illustrator is widely considered the best tool for creating professional scientific figures and diagrams for research presentations and academic publications.

There are three main ways that you can get Adobe Illustrator on your computer:

Your institution or laboratory can share their Schools & Universities license with you.
You can purchase an individual student license for $19.99/month and a non-student license for $20.99/month .
You can start a 7-day free trial .

Below are detailed suggestions on the three main ways to get the latest version of Adobe Illustrator if you are a scientist or student seeking to learn how to use the tool. (Instructions, costs, and links are from March 2021).

How to Get Adobe Illustrator Through Institution or Lab

Many academic institutions support their students and researchers with the tools they need to succeed in creating quality scientific publications. This includes purchasing software licenses for Adobe Illustrator which is widely considered an essential tool for creating quality figures for high tiered journals and presentations.

If you are unsure whether your institution or lab already has an Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Creative Cloud license, then the first step is to ask. Contact the head of your academic program, your Principal Investigator, and your institution's library to see if they already own a sharable license. Your institution may also have a computer laboratory where you can go to use the software for free.

If you have determined that your institution or laboratory doesn't have an Adobe Illustrator license, then the next step is to request that they acquire one. Illustrator is considered the best tool to create high quality figures and academic programs often consider it essential training for scientists and students who are working to establish successful careers in academic research. Below is a link to the institutional Illustrator pricing and plan options that you can include in your request.

How to Purchase an Individual Adobe Illustrator License

If you plan to use Adobe Illustrator for both research and personal use frequently, then you can also consider purchasing an individual or student Adobe Illustrator License. Below are some common options for purchasing an Adobe Illustrator license:

Monthly plan: If you want to save costs and you only plan to use Illustrator for a few months out of the year, you can choose a monthly plan and only turn on the subscription and payments for the months that you know you will use it heavily.

Annual Plan: If you know you plan to use the software more than 8 months out of the year, then you should choose to purchase an annual plan.

Student Plan (Monthly or Annual): If you are a student, then you can get the entire Adobe Creative suite of applications for a cheaper monthly and annual cost.

How to Get a 7-day Free Trial

If you are unsure whether you want to purchase Adobe Illustrator, then you can sign up for a 7-day free trial using the link below. Consider planning ahead to schedule a lot of dedicated Illustrator training time for the week you turn on the subscription. Below are some recommended trainings and tools that you can review or complete while you have the trial turned on:

Adobe Illustrator FAQ

What is the difference between Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Illustrator subscription?
The full Creative Cloud subscription gives you access to all of the Adobe tools such as Photoshop, Lightroom, Premier Pro and many others. If you don't plan to do video, animation and photo editing work, then you will only need to subscribe to the single app for Adobe Illustrator for quality figure creation.

How do I know if my computer can run Adobe Illustrator?
Click this link to show the minimum computer system requirements for running Adobe Illustrator

What if you don’t have access to Adobe Illustrator through an institutional license or cannot afford it?
Consider using the free alternative called Inkscape . (Note: Simplified Science Publishing does not offer Inkskape training).

Can I use Adobe Illustrator to become a scientific illustrator?
Yes, and here is a great resource to learn how to become a scientific illustrator.

Create professional science figures with illustration services or use the online courses and templates to quickly learn how to make your own designs.

How Do Arteries and Veins Work? Blood Vessel Structure and Function

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 01:14:21 GMT

Blood vessels are muscular and flexible tubes that create your blood transport system and is made of arteries, capillaries, and veins.

Cardiovascular System Review

In Greek, the word “kardia” means heart and in Latin, the word “vas” means vessel. This Greek and Latin combination creates a straight-forward translation for the cardiovascular system: the heart and blood vessels. These organs create your blood transportation system and tirelessly move five to six liters of blood on a full tour of your body nearly every minute.

This article will focus on the structure and function of blood vessels and you can view this article to read more about heart anatomy.

Artery Structure and Function

Within the walls of every modern building is an organized system of pipes that supply pressurized water to the sinks, toilets, and showers. Comparatively, your internal plumbing is chaos. Every square inch of your body contains a dense tangle of blood vessel pipes. The pipes that supply newly oxygenated blood to all of your tissues are called arteries. Arteries support the life of every cell in your body and problems with your arterial plumbing, such as clogs or cracks, can dramatically impact your health.

The defining characteristic of arteries is that they carry blood away from the heart. Therefore, arteries are your pressure pipes that handle large changes in blood pressure with each heartbeat. During the pump (systole), the heart’s ventricles send blood shooting into the arteries, which briefly increases pressure. During the refill (diastole), the heart muscles are relaxed and pressure in the arteries is decreased. This cycle of pressure changes stretches and relaxes the artery walls, thereby creating your pulse and blood pressure. When you press your fingers against your wrist or neck, the pulse that you feel pressing against your hand is due to the repeated surging and slowing of blood within your arteries.

Almost every artery carries newly oxygenated blood to resupply the body’s tissues, but there are two exceptions: the pulmonary arteries, which carry deoxygenated blood from the heart to the lungs and umbilical arteries, which carry deoxygenated blood from a pregnant woman’s fetus to the placenta.

Artery walls are made of three main layers of cells that are called tunics. The word tunic means a close-fitting coat, so you can think of the blood vessel layers as your cardiovascular system’s clothing layers that change in thickness depending on their location and environment.

Every artery and arteriole has three tunics: intima, media and adventitia. Tunica intima is the inner-most layer and it is made of a single layer of endothelial cells. This layer is similar among all arteries and functions as the base layer for each blood vessel outfit. The tunica media is the middle layer and it is made of smooth muscle and elastic tissue. The thickness of this layer changes dramatically depending on an artery’s location. Arteries that are near the heart receive strong bursts of blood with each heartbeat and they have a thick smooth muscle layer and a strong elastic layer that provide strength and flexibility to handle the high blood pressure. The arterial pipes that carry blood throughout the body branch to become narrow tubes called arterioles.

In contrast, arteries and arterioles that are far away from the heart are not exposed to high blood pressure and have a thin middle muscle and elastic layer. Finally, the tunica adventitia is the outer coat and it is made of tough connective tissue. This layer is slightly thicker in major arteries near the heart and very thin in arterioles.

Capillaries Structure and Function

In order to survive, every living cell in your body needs to be located near a network of thin blood vessel tubes that are called a capillary beds. These so-called beds are more like tiny tissue hammocks that cradle the cells throughout your body. How tiny? The width of a capillary is less than the width of the thinnest human hair. Look at the hair on your arm—your organs are enmeshed in capillary beds whose threads are thinner than those hairs.

In many ways, capillaries connect your internal tissue to the outside world. Arteries and veins are the major highways that carry blood throughout the body, but your capillaries allow water, nutrients, hormones and waste to transfer between the bloodstream and your body’s cells. Therefore, capillaries are your transfer tubes and their function is essential for every organ. Without capillaries, the air you breathe, the water you drink and the food that you eat would have no way of reaching the cells that depend on them to function.

Vein Structure and Function

Once blood has squeezed through the capillaries, it flows into the drain pipes of the circulatory system which are called the veins and venules. Modern water drainage systems receive liquid from sinks, showers, toilets and soil, send it through filters to remove toxins and waste, and then send it back into the main water supply. Veins function similar to a drainage system because they take blood that has been filtered through the body’s tissues, send it through additional organ filtration systems to remove toxins and waste and then send the blood back to the heart to begin the journey again.

Create professional science figures with illustration services or use the online courses and templates to quickly learn how to make your own designs.

How Does the Diaphragm Work? Diaphragm Structure and Function

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Sat, 12 Aug 2023 03:03:17 GMT

The diaphragm is a muscle that forms an umbrella dome shape at the base of your ribcage and helps you breathe.

Every breath begins with an umbrella shaped muscle that flexes underneath your ribcage. This dome-shaped muscle that stretches across your torso is called the diaphragm (die-uh-fram) and when your diaphragm is relaxed, it resembles an oblong umbrella top that is squeezed underneath your ribs and creates the base of your chest cavity.

How Does the Diaphragm Work?

The movement of the diaphragm muscle provides the primary force for every inhale and exhale that you take. When the diaphragm is relaxed, it forms a dome that presses into your chest cavity and pushes against the lungs to help push air out. When your diaphragm contracts, the dome flattens out as if it were a flexible umbrella-top that was pulled downward by the handle. As your diaphragm flattens, it creates more space and reduces pressure in the chest cavity and this pressure change forces air into your lungs. When your diaphragm muscle relaxes, it re-forms the dome shape, which reduces space in the chest cavity and allows air to flow out of the lungs.

To solidify the concept of diaphragm function, place your hand below your ribcage and pay attention to the movement underneath your hand as you take deep, belly breaths. With every inhalation, your diaphragm flattens, (pulling down on the metaphorical umbrella handle), which expands your ribcage and reduces pressure in your chest to pull air into your lungs. Now when you exhale, imagine the umbrella top pushing upward and forming the dome shape underneath your ribs. Can you feel that each exhale is guided by the diaphragm pushing back up into your chest?

If the umbrella muscle actually had a handle, you could imagine that a little goblin in your belly could control your breathing by pulling and pushing on the umbrella’s stem, forcing the air in and out of your lungs. Thankfully, we have brainstem neurons and phrenic nerves instead of mischievous goblins, which control the movement of the diaphragm with cyclical precision.

Intercostal Muscles

When you breathe, you may also feel that your upper body expands. Although the diaphragm is the main force behind respiration, the muscles that fill the gaps between your ribs are also important. These thin ribcage muscles are called intercostal muscles. Let’s take a moment to meet your intercostals. Place a finger between a pair of your ribs and take a few big breaths. You should be able to feel these muscles lengthen with each inhale, (allowing your ribs to expand) and shorten with each exhale, (decreasing the volume of your chest cavity). The ability of your intercostals to expand and collapse your ribcage allows you to take bigger breaths. This function is especially important when you are active and in need of more oxygen. During exercise and other strenuous activities, the human body requires more energy and therefore more oxygen. (Remember, no oxygen = no energy).

The intercostal muscles provide structure and flexibility to your upper body and when you breathe, they allow your ribcage to expand and contract. If your entire ribcage were made of rigid bone, your lungs wouldn’t be able to expand as much. Athletes and people running away from zombies depend on both the diaphragm and the intercostal muscles to allow for deep breaths that provide hard-working cells with oxygen.

Diaphragm Injury and Disease

Diaphragm injuries are most often caused by traumatic physical events such as traffic accidents. Considering that the umbrella muscle is essential for breathing, injuries to the diaphragm results in life-threatening scenarios that require serious medical care. Doctors can use a variety of tests, such as chest X-rays, computerized tomography (CT) scans and surgical procedures, to determine whether a diaphragm is in need of surgical repair.

However, there is also a much more prevalent, non-vital issue that affects the diaphragm and intercostal muscles: hiccups. Those sneaky bastards come out of nowhere. The surprising moment when air is sucked into your lungs and a little “hic” sound is released from your throat can feel as though your respiratory system was hijacked. A hiccup is caused when the diaphragm and intercostal muscles contract without your control. It’s as if a little chest cavity goblin does exist and tugs down on the umbrella muscle handle.

The common hiccup is often caused by a rapid expansion of the stomach that can occur with overeating, eating too fast, eating spicy food, drinking carbonated drinks and even changes in temperature. Everyone has their favorite cure. People hold their breath, eat sugar and use surprise scare tactics with varied success. Unfortunately, a scientifically proven non-invasive hiccup treatment remains a mystery.

Diaphragm Anatomy Summary

D iaphragm: The diaphragm is the umbrella muscle that forms a dome shape at the base of your ribcage. When the diaphragm contracts, it flattens and creates more space and less pressure in the chest cavity. This reduced pressure causes air to flow into the lungs. When the diaphragm relaxes, air flows out of the lungs as the umbrella muscle re-forms the dome.

Intercostal Muscles: Muscles that fill the gaps between your ribs provide structure and flexibility to your upper body and when you breathe, they allow your ribcage to expand and contract.

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Research Poster Templates for PowerPoint and Adobe Illustrator

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Sat, 12 Aug 2023 03:01:31 GMT

Free Downloads for Research Poster Templates

Create a Simplified Science Publishing resource account to download two free scientific poster templates, one for Adobe Illustrator and one for PowerPoint. If you need help using either of these templates, consider using the resources below:

Adobe Illustrator Research Poster Template (48 x 36 inches)

If you have Adobe Illustrator on your computer and would like to start creating a well-designed research poster from a template, please create an account to download the free template.

The backgrounds use locked layers, but you can unlock them to customize the poster for any size, color, and design changes.

PowerPoint Research Poster Template (54 x 40 inches)

This simple and effective PowerPoint template will help you quickly create a scientific poster for a conference or presentation. Please create an account to download the free template.

It is formatted to conveniently match a standard research style that can be copied from your current publication or can also be used as your draft for a future scientific publication.

Create professional science figures with illustration services or use the online courses and templates to quickly learn how to make your own designs.

From Scientist to Illustrator: Alternative Science Career Path

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Sat, 12 Aug 2023 03:00:18 GMT

Karen Thiebes is a scientific illustrator and founder of Simplified Science Publishing. She earned a PhD in Neuroscience and used design training to transition into an alternative science career as a graphic designer and marketing analyst.

Alternative Science Career Path

My interest in science started with a strong desire to understand how living things work. This interest led me to become a scientist who worked to discover more about how our nervous system develops from single cells to complicated nerve networks . Although I loved discovering new molecular details as a researcher, I did not love spending entire years transferring tiny amounts of liquid from one tube to another. When these two truths collided during the second year of my Neuroscience graduate training, I began to think creatively about how I would pursue an alternative science career.

I started by asking myself questions about what I enjoy most about science and where I saw myself in five years. The honest answer was that even though I felt excited by the creativity and dedication required to design effective experiments, I was more interested in designing engaging scientific figures and presentations.

After I realized that my long-term goal was not to stay in academic research, I began to focus on increasing my graphic design, project management, and scientific communication skills. My goal was to plan a loose path toward a scientific communication and design career and I hoped that building skills would expand my opportunities..

Building Scientific Illustration and Design Skills

I started to make a slow transition from scientist to illustrator by building my digital design skills and credentials. This included taking a night class at Portland Art Institute and taking online Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Maya courses from LinkedIn Learning. In taking these courses, I was able to apply the skills to my own research figures, websites, and other artistic projects to create a design portfolio.

Developing new expertise takes time. My initial digital illustrations and animations were rough around the edges and it took over three years of practice before I was able to create professional-level designs. For example, one of my first attempts at creating a scientific illustration for the public was for the ASCB Comic Strip competition (shown below). I created the illustration in Photoshop and even though it was crudely drawn, it helped me learn more about how to use digital illustration design tools while I was still completing my PhD.

The main piece of advice I have for anyone who is embarking on a new career path is to be persistent and patient. New skills do not develop overnight and you should be proud of the small progress you make toward your goals each week.

Building Connections

It was also essential for me to burst the academic bubble and build connections with people in the wider biotech communities and other professional industries. As a researcher, it is easy to avoid networking and only connect with the people you know at research conferences. I strongly recommend attending a variety of professional events and networking outside of research conferences because this was one of the most important activities that helped me understand what kind of career opportunities exist outside of academia.

My favorite question to ask when I first started attending networking events was "what brings you to this event?" I wasn't trying to sell my services as an illustrator because I wasn't ready yet. I was simply enjoying hearing what people do for a living and would introduce myself as a researcher who was learning about more careers beyond the laboratory. You also never know who you will meet. While attending a science communication conference, I once met Jorge from PhD comics and he drew me an illustration on the back of his business card during a presentation.

As people shared their stories, I began to realize how many different jobs are available to someone with good project management, communication, and scientific critical thinking skills. These conversations made me excited to continue increasing my design experience and encouraged me to explore alternative career paths.

Alternative Science Career Path Leap

The scariest step of my career was graduating with a PhD in Neuroscience without a job. My first break came six months after I graduated when I was asked to help a former colleague at my graduate school create figures that would meet the criteria for the journal Science Translational Medicine. The success of this first project led me to create the company Simplified Science Publishing so that I could be paid formally. From that point on, I was officially open for business as a freelance illustrator.

My career path has evolved in unexpected and joyful ways since my first scientific publication design project. I still work part-time as a scientific illustrator for Simplified Science Publishing, but working in website design also led me to pursue a full-time career as a search engine optimization (SEO) analyst and strategist. This has resulted in an extremely rewarding alternative science career that combines my analytical, scientific, and creative interests.

Are you Interested in Pursuing an Alternative Science Career?

One of the common questions my friends and colleagues in academic research have asked me is "how can I learn more about pursing an alternative science career?" Aside from learning more about career options from networking events, I strongly suggest that you outline your own strengths and interests. If your talents and interests align with a more creative and art-focused career then you should consider learning more about becoming a scientific illustrator and watch the course on scientific communication careers. If your talents and interests point you toward being an excellent project manager and analyst, then I suggest you learn more about options in administrative, communications, and marketing careers.

Researchers often believe that scientific training doesn't easily translate into other career paths. I strongly disagree. The critical thinking, presentation, and project management skills that one develops by working in a research lab are highly applicable to many different types of careers. If you are interested in pursuing an alternative science careers, don't hesitate to brainstorm how your strengths and interests can apply to jobs outside of academia.The scariest step of my career was graduating with a PhD in Neuroscience without a job. My first break came six months after I graduated when I was asked to help a former colleague at my graduate school create figures that would meet the criteria fo r the journal Science Translational Medicine. The success of this first project led me to create the company Simplified Science Publishing so that I could be paid formally. From that point on, I was officially open for business as a freelance illustrator.

Create professional science figures with illustration services or use the online courses and templates to quickly learn how to make your own designs.

What is Blood Made Of? Blood Composition and Functions

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 23:39:23 GMT

Blood is a combination of plasma, red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets.

Blood is an important part of your health and behavior. Blood cells and plasma affect your mood, your ability to fight infections, and your basic desires for food and sex. This is an educational science resource for anyone who wants to know more about what blood is made of and about the important blood functions that support your life.

Composition of blood and cell type percentages

Blood is made of 45% cells and 55% plasma. The cellular portion of blood is almost entirely made of red blood cells, but also contains a small amount of white blood cells and platelets. These three cellular components provide your body with oxygen transport, disease defense, and blood clotting.

Blood plasma is mostly made of water and contains many molecules that are dissolved in the liquid such as proteins, hormones, nutrients, and ions. These tiny pieces of your plasma determine many aspects of your emotions, behavior, and health. If you’ve never felt particularly grateful for the tiny bits flowing through your blood, you can put these at the top of your human anatomy appreciation list.

Red Blood Cells (RBCs)

Red blood cells (RBCs) make up nearly half of your blood volume (40-45%). They are shaped like round jelly donuts with an indent in the center that is stuffed with hemoglobin (Hb) proteins. The structure of a hemoglobin protein looks like four baseball mitts stitched together. Each mitt has an iron molecule in its center and these pockets create loose binding sites for dissolved gases such as oxygen and carbon dioxide. These heme-iron protein mitts are the reason why you are able to carry enough oxygen to live and they also give human blood its red color.

Every breath you take gives your body the oxygen you need to survive and allows for the removal of carbon dioxide, which is toxic at high concentrations. Blood is required to transport oxygen and carbon dioxide throughout your body and even though both of these gases can dissolve directly in the blood plasma, your cells require much more oxygen than can be carried in the plasma alone. This is why RBCs are necessary for your life—they provide efficient oxygen transport to support your body’s approximately 37.2 trillion cells.

In order to reach your cells from the blood, your heart pumps blood into the lungs where approximately one billion oxygen molecules can bind to the hemoglobin mitts in a single RBC. These oxygen-loaded RBCs then flow back into your heart where they are pumped out through the rest of your body’s blood tubes. Next, oxygen leaves RBCs near tissue where the oxygen level is low and enters the surrounding cells. Carbon dioxide can now bind to the emptied hemoglobin mitts and hitch a ride back to the lungs for release.

However, only 20-30% of the carbon dioxide that your cells produce is transported to the lungs via RBCs because most carbon dioxide is converted into bicarbonate instead. Bicarbonate does not bind to the hemoglobin and dissolves directly in blood plasma where it functions as an important acid-base buffer in your bloodstream.

Note: Red blood cells are not real cells because they do not have a nucleus or organelles. They are cell-like discs that are full of hemoglobin.

Anemia and Red Blood Cell Counts

If you experience excessive tiredness, weakness and difficulty breathing, a doctor may order blood tests to check your red blood cell levels as well as your oxygen, carbon dioxide, and bicarbonate levels. If your red blood cell count and oxygen levels are low, the doctor may conclude that you have anemia. Anemia is a condition in which you don’t have enough healthy RBCs to transport oxygen to your tissues and it is caused by blood loss, iron deficiency, vitamin deficiency, or impaired red blood cell production. Anemia also affects a whopping quarter of the global population. Make sure to support your RBCs with a well-balanced diet.

White Blood Cells (RBCs)

White blood cells are a tiny portion of your total blood volume (~0.5-1%) however, they are a crucial part of your body’s defense system. They are the immune system’s cellular defense ninjas that recognize and destroy invaders such as harmful fungi, bacteria, parasites, and also virus or disease infected cells. There are six main types of white blood cells and each type specializes in different areas of defense—some prefer to attack bacteria and others are highly skilled parasite assassins. When blood test results show an elevated white blood cell count, it often indicates that the body has an infection and is increasing the number of ninjas in the blood to fight. For a brief summary of the different white blood cell types, visit this UMRC resource .

Platelets

What is blood plasma?

Plasma is Mostly Made of Water

Blood plasma makes up 55% of blood and it is the largest amount of liquid in your body. Blood plasma is approximately 92% water and the remaining 8% contains a powerful mix of molecules that control many basic behaviors and emotions. When you feel hungry, anxious, sleepy, or sick, the microscopic bits that dissolve in your blood plasma are primarily responsible for these feelings. This is because blood plasma contains hormones, antibodies and clotting proteins, as well as nutrients such as fats, vitamins, electrolytes, and other digested food particles. Each of these components could have a full article dedicated to their function and importance, but the focus of this article is on the organs that interact with blood, so the information provided is brief.

Plasma is 7% Protein

Around 7% of the stuff that is dissolved in the watery plasma are proteins that can be divided into three categories: albumin, globulins and fibrinogen. These proteins may not seem worth remembering due to their clunky names, but there are plenty of reasons to be grateful for these globs:

Albumin is the most abundant type of plasma protein and it is a molecular taxi that can transport hormones, fatty acids, and drugs to different destinations throughout the body. For example, without albumin, the anti-inflammatory drug ibuprofen would not be efficiently transported to your tissues to relieve pain and reduce inflammation.

The globulin protein category also contains transport taxis, but it is best known for antibody proteins that are important for your immune system. Antibodies function as demolition stickers for bad bacteria and other pathogens that invade the bloodstream. Salmonella is a bacteria that is often found in undercooked meat and it can cause an infection that results in vomiting, fever and inflammation. When Salmonella moves into the blood from the intestines, at least three different types of antibodies can stick to the Salmonella surface. These antibody surface markers are destruction signals that are recognized by your white blood cell defense ninjas. When white blood cells come into contact with bacteria that have been labeled with antibodies, they respond by swarming, engulfing and dismantling the bacteria. Take a moment of gratitude to appreciate your fierce antibodies and white blood cells that protect your body.

Last but not least, fibrinogens are large clotting proteins that make up a tiny percentage of the plasma. Fibrinogen proteins work with activated platelets to form scabs in injured tissue. Without fibrinogens, even scrapes and scratches would potentially result in life-threatening amounts of blood loss.

Beyond each of their individual functions, all of these proteins are essential to maintain appropriate amounts of water within blood vessels. Due to their large size, most proteins cannot escape the blood vessel walls and therefore, they provide an incentive for water to enter the bloodstream. This incentive is due to osmosis and osmotic pressure, which determines the passive movement of water and other fluids in permeable systems.

Osmosis is Essential to Keep Water in Your Bloodstream

One way to think about osmosis is to focus on how it influences the movement of water into and out of blood vessels. Think of water as an extroverted socialite—it flows toward the party with the most molecular guests. The bloodstream is a highly concentrated party due to the proteins and cells that are too big to exit the blood vessel walls. Therefore, water will flow into the blood vessels from surrounding tissues and tubes that are less concentrated, such as the kidneys and intestines. This osmosis party rule applies to the movement of water across all mammalian cell membranes and it is an essential process that supports the lives of all creatures and plants on this planet. Who knew that dihydrogen monoxide (H2O) had such a bustling social life?

Plasma is Made of 1% Tiny Molecules

The remaining 1% of blood plasma contains some of the most powerful effectors of your biology and well-being. These tiny components can be separated into three main groups: hormones, nutrients, and ions:

Hormones are behavior bits that influence many feelings, such as love and fear, and they also regulate the basic desires for water, food, sleep, and sex. Different hormones are released into the bloodstream from many locations throughout the body and regulate your mood and behavior by causing biological cascades in different organ systems such as your digestive and nervous systems.

Nutrients are primarily molecules that are broken down from food such as carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins, minerals, and fats that are broken down in your digestive track and are transferred into the bloodstream from your intestines and liver. But nutrients can also come from recycling your body’s old and defunct cellular machinery.

Ions (also called electrolytes) are charged atoms that allow your body to send electrical impulses and they also maintain proper water and acid/base concentrations that keep your organs healthy and happy.

Human blood anatomy summary

Blood composition: 45% cells and 55% plasma

Cells:

Red Blood Cells: Iron mitts that transport oxygen to your body’s cells. *Technically not a cell because it doesn't have a nucleus
White Blood Cells: Defense ninjas that detect and destroy pathogens such as bacteria, parasites, and disease-infected cells.
Platelets: Clot transformers that help plug blood vessel leaks.

Plasma:

Water: Party animals that flow toward the highest populated molecular social scene.
Plasma Proteins: Albumin (transport taxis), globulins (transport taxis and antibody demolition stickers), and fibrinogen (clot factors).
Plasma Particles: Hormones (behavior bits), nutrients (food bits), and ions (charged bits)

The next time that you donate blood, give a blood sample, or stop its flow from an injury, take a moment to reflect on the amazing microscopic material that is packed into every drop.

References:

Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, 18th Edition. Longo DL, Fauci AS, Kasper DL, Hauser SL, Jameson J, Loscalzo J. eds.
Anatomy, Physiology, and Disease: An Interactive Journey for Health Professions , 2nd Edition. Bruce J. Colbert, University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown.
http://www.redcrossblood.org/learn-about-blood/blood-components/plasma

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Heart Electrical System Anatomy and Sequence of Electrical Conduction

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 04:56:26 GMT

The heart electrical system is controlled by the spread of electrical signals between specialized cells in the heart muscle. They follow a consistent pattern that can be measured using tools such as the electrocardiogram (ECG).

What is heart electrical conduction?

The heart electrical conduction anatomy is made up of a network of signaling pathways that control your heartbeat. Each time your heart pumps blood throughout your body, electrical signals travel through different areas of your heart that make your heart chambers expand or contract. This electromechanical pumping mechanism is carefully timed to allow for consistent blood flow and blood pressure.

Note: If you are not familiar with basic heart anatomy, I suggest you read the heart structure and function article first.

Sequence of electrical conduction through the heart

The heart sequence of electrical conduction starts in the upper-right wall of the right atrium where specialized cells form a cluster called the sinoatrial (SA) node. The SA node is known as the heart’s pacemaker and it creates the starting signal for each heartbeat. When the SA node triggers an electrical pulse, it sends electrical messengers racing toward left atrium and toward the second important cell cluster, called the atrioventricular (AV) node. The AV node is located in the lower-left side of the right atrium and the electrical activity between the SA and AV segment of the race causes the muscles of both the left and right atria to contract, which helps push blood from the atria into the ventricles.

After a brief rest to allow the ventricles to fill with blood, the electrical baton is handed from the AV node to a narrow group of Purkinje cells called the bundle of His. From here, the electrical racers split off in two directions: half head down the track toward the right ventricle and the other half race toward the left ventricle. The final hand-off occurs at the base of the ventricles, where the electrical impulse is sent through thin Purkinje fibers on both sides of the heart. The final sprint through the Purkinje fibers causes the muscular walls of the ventricles to contract, which pumps blood from the right ventricle into the lungs and from the left ventricle out into the body. At this point, the heartbeat is complete and the electrocardio relay race starts up again from the SA node.

You can think of the heart’s electrical conduction system as an electric relay race, where the electrical baton is passed between groups of cells that make different regions of the heart contract at different times.

Each heartbeat is created by muscle contractions that squeeze the chamber walls in a precise pattern. These muscle contractions provide the force that pumps blood throughout your body, similar to a foot pump that forces air into your favorite floating device. But instead of pumping air into toys for a pool party, your heart functions as a dual blood pump to support your life party. The “dual” part of the blood pump arises because the right and left sides of your heart function as separate pumps that send blood to two different destinations: the lungs and the body. The right chambers of your heart receive deoxygenated blood from your body’s veins and pump it into your lungs and the left chambers of your heart pump the recently oxygenated blood into the rest of your body.

Heart arrhythmias and treatments

A heart arrhythmia occurs when a heart is beating too fast, too slow, or when there is a problem with a heart’s pattern of refill and pump. A person can be born with an irregular heartbeat, but arrhythmias can also occur when damaged or aging heart tissue prevents electrical signals from making smooth and properly paced laps around the electrocardio racetrack. The fact that the heart has a self-contained electrical system has allowed for the development of useful medical treatments, such as the defibrillator and the artificial pacemaker. Both of these devises can help a patient whose heartbeat has an irregular rate or rhythm.

Most arrhythmias are not life-threatening. However, if an irregular heartbeat impairs the pumping of blood into the lungs and the rest of the body, it can have immediate and deadly consequences. The cells in the human body require a constant supply of oxygen and if the heart’s chambers are not contracting at the right times or if they are not contracting strongly enough, it can result in a dangerous decrease blood flow and oxygen delivery. Without proper oxygen delivery, a person can pass-out and die within minutes. Therefore, it is essential that you pay attention to your blood pump and seek immediate medical care if you sense an abnormality in your heartbeat’s rate or rhythm.

How does a pacemaker work?

If a person has a heart arrhythmia that disrupts blood flow, a doctor may suggest a surgery to implant a defibrillator or a pacemaker to monitor and control the heart’s electrical impulses. These devices are implanted under the skin in the upper chest and have wires that are guided through a vein and into the heart. The tips of the wires are both sensing and stimulating electrodes. They detect irregular heart contractions and then send electrical pulses to override and correct the abnormality with each heartbeat.

The first defibrillators and pacemakers that were used for clinical research in the 1950s were large external devices that needed to be wheeled around on carts and plugged into an electrical outlet. Today’s implantable heart devices are automated, battery powered and roughly the size of a packet of gum. Thank you, research and technology.

Electrocardiograms (ECG or EKG)

In addition to controlling a person’s heartbeat with external electricity, medical professionals who are concerned with a heart’s function can also stick electrodes to a person’s chest and limbs to measure the details of a person’s heartbeat. Electrodes that are placed in specific locations on the skin can detect the heart’s electrical pattern and generate a graph called an electrocardiogram (EKG or ECG). You may be familiar with this graph if you watch medical television dramas because an ECG often indicates the death of a fictional patient when the graph “flatlines” to show that the patient’s heart has lost all electrical activity. But the ECG is more than just a tool to determine whether the heart is electrically dead and a close look at the squiggles can reveal important information about a heart’s function.

An ECG depicts the sequence of electrical conduction. There are three main ECG peaks that are named the P wave, the QRS wave, and the T wave. To remember these details, you can think of the PQRST peaks as the Pork Roast Waves, where the Pork (PQ) represents the heart’s refill and the Roast (RST) loosely represents the pump. To be more precise, the 'P' wave is caused by the electrical activity between the SA and AV nodes and it results in an atria contraction that pushes blood into the ventricles. The 'QRS' complex shows the electrical activity from the AV node all the way to the Purkinje fibers in the ventricles, where the segment between the 'R' and the 'S' represents the muscle contraction of both ventricles. Finally, the 'T' wave shows that the electrical activity in the ventricles as they return to baseline. By analyzing the shape, height and timing of the PQRST waves, a doctor can use the ECG to diagnose many specific problems in a patient’s heart.

Human electrical conduction study guide

Heart Sequence of Electrical Conduction: Electrical signals move from the sinoatrial (SA) node to atrioventricular (AV) node in the atria, then move to a narrow group of Purkinje cells called the bundle of His and finally move to the Purkinje fibers in the left and right ventricles.

Heart Arrhythmias: Heartbeat with an irregular rate or rhythm.

Pacemaker: Device that detects irregular heart contractions and then send electrical pulses to override and correct the abnormality with each heartbeat.

Electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG): Tool that detects the heart’s electrical sequence of electrical conduction.

The heart is a powerful organ that tirelessly moves five to six liters of blood on a full tour of your body nearly every minute. Because of this essential function, it is one of the most important organs for human health. Consider donating to help fund lifesaving research and advocate for better heart health for at-risk populations.

References:

Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, 18th Edition. Longo DL, Fauci AS, Kasper DL, Hauser SL, Jameson J, Loscalzo J. eds.
Anatomy, Physiology, and Disease: An Interactive Journey for Health Professions , 2nd Edition. Bruce J. Colbert, University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown.
https://www.thehealthy.com/bodies/human-body-every-minute/

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How Does the Heart Work? Review Heart Structure and Function

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Thu, 11 May 2023 17:43:16 GMT

The human heart is a muscular organ that squeezes and relaxes to pump blood through its four chambers, four valves, and blood vessel tubes.

What does the heart do for your body?

The heart is your body's blood pump. It is a muscular organ that is roughly the size of your fist and it is easy to locate thanks to its constant thumping inside your chest. Take a moment to place your hand over your heart. As you feel it pulse against your palm, your heart is pumping 5-6 liters of blood through all of your internal tissues. It is remarkable that this small muscle provides the force that is necessary to bring nutrients and remove waste for nearly every cell in your body. Read on to learn more about human heart anatomy and how it supports your life.

How does the heart work?

The heart is made of specialized cardiac muscle tissue that surrounds four chambers. Essentially, the heart is a muscle with four holes in the middle and these chamber holes are attached to blood vessel tubes that allow for blood entry and exit. There are also four valves that separate the heart’s chambers and tubes and these valves ensure that blood only flows in one direction. The heart's basic function is to use these four muscular chambers to pump blood throughout all of your body.

Heart blood flow order

One way to understand the heart’s blood flow pattern is from the point of view of a red blood cell flowing through the tubes, valves, and chambers. Imagine that you’ve shrunk down to and hopped onto a red blood cell to take a tour of the heart.

The heart blood flow journey begins in the heart’s upper-right chamber, called the right atrium (1) - See Heart Blood Flow Diagram illustration. You and your blood raft flow into the right atrium from either the superior or inferior vena cava, which are the largest veins in your body.

After reaching the right atrium, you have less than half a second before the change in pressure via the atrium contraction sends you down into the large lower-right heart chamber, called the right ventricle (2). To get from the right atrium to the right ventricle, you will have slipped through your first heart valve. Heart valves are flexible cartilage flaps that function as a perfectly timed doors and they only allow blood to move in one direction through the heart’s chambers and tubes.

After you slide through the first set of valve flaps, they slam shut behind you to prevent blood from flowing back into the atrium and the muscular ventricle walls contract. This contraction increases pressure in the right ventricle chamber and sends you shooting upward through another set of valve doors in a tube called the pulmonary artery (3).

The pulmonary artery sends you gushing toward the lungs, where it splits into many smaller tubes. You are eventually squeezed through the tiniest tubes in the lung’s alveoli one RBC at a time. Within these narrow tubes in the lungs, the RBC rafts load up with oxygen, carbon dioxide leaves the blood vessels and then you and your oxygenated buddies flow back to the heart via the pulmonary veins. One of the pulmonary vein dumps into the upper left chamber of the heart, called the left atrium (4).

Soon after you reach the left atrium, a familiar process begins again as a change in pressure or an atrium contraction sends you down through another valve and into the final chamber, the left ventricle (5). From here, you will embark on an adventure through the body because the next ventricular contraction will send you bursting upward through the final valve in the aorta (6).

The aorta is a large tube that branches into many other smaller tubes to distribute you, (and the newly oxygenated blood), throughout the body. If you decide to continue with the tour, you and your iron raft may flow down to a toe before circling your way back to the heart’s right atrium in roughly 30 seconds.

Heart contraction cycle

Cardiac cycle events are segmented into two main parts of the heartbeat: diastole (refill) and systole (pump). The diastole happens when the top chambers called atria contract together to help refill the ventricles and the systole happens with the large lower chambers called ventricles contract together to pump blood into the lungs or body. Every heartbeat that you feel is due to the repeated cycle of this refill and pump.

This repeated contraction pattern also produces two sounds that are called “lup-dub”. The “lup” sound is generated by the closing of the two valves that are between the atria and the ventricles, (which signals the end of the heart’s refill) and the “dub” is the sound made by the closing of the two valves within the pulmonary artery and the aorta, (which signals the end of the heart’s pump). These two sounds have been used extensively throughout medical history to determine whether a patient’s heart is working properly and a well-trained doctor can distinguish subtle differences in the sounds to diagnose problems such as heart murmurs and valve defects.

Human heart anatomy study guide

Heart: The heart is made of specialized cardiac muscle tissue that surrounds four chambers and pumps blood into your lungs and body.

Blood Flow: Blood low in oxygen moves from the body into the right atrium, to the right ventricle and then pumped into the lungs. Blood high in oxygen moves from the lungs into the left atrium, to the left ventricle and is then pumped out into the body.

Reaches = Right atrium
Leaves = Left atrium

There are two main parts of a heartbeat:

Refill (diastole) - Blood flows from the atria to the ventricles.
Pump (systole) - Blood is pumped from the ventricles into the lungs and the body.

Learn more about heart anatomy by reading this heart electrical system and ECGs article .

References:

Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, 18th Edition. Longo DL, Fauci AS, Kasper DL, Hauser SL, Jameson J, Loscalzo J. eds.
Anatomy, Physiology, and Disease: An Interactive Journey for Health Professions , 2nd Edition. Bruce J. Colbert, University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown.
https://www.thehealthy.com/bodies/human-body-every-minute/

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What is the Epiglottis? Epiglottis Structure and Function

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Mon, 08 May 2023 18:20:56 GMT

The epiglottis is a piece of cartilage that covers the entryway to your trachea and lungs. The purpose of the epiglottis is to stay closed when saliva and food are moving to your stomach.

What is the epiglottis?

If you’ve ever taken a sip from a drink and accidentally laughed at the same time, you probably experienced an uncontrollable coughing fit that caused tears to stream down your cheeks. This unpleasant event is due to the poorly timed opening of your epiglottis (eh-pih-glah-tis). The epiglottis is the primary protector of the airways, your lung guardian and breathing gate. Essentially, your epiglottis is your breathing bouncer.

The epiglottis is a leaf-shaped piece of cartilage that covers the entryway to your larynx and trachea. If your breathing bouncer opens at the same time that saliva and food particles are sliding past, some of the stuff can slip into your airway, which causes coughing and irritation. In a worse-case scenario, an inappropriate opening of your epiglottis can also allow a large piece of food to become lodged in your windpipe, which causes you to choke. Thankfully, the epiglottis is remarkably good at its job and rarely allows intruders into your air tubes.

If you feel motivated to support the health of human lungs that are protected by your epiglottis, consider making a donation to the American Lung Association:

References:

Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, 18th Edition. Longo DL, Fauci AS, Kasper DL, Hauser SL, Jameson J, Loscalzo J. eds.
Anatomy, Physiology, and Disease: An Interactive Journey for Health Professions , 2nd Edition. Bruce J. Colbert, University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown.

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How Do Lungs Work? Lung Structure and Function

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Mon, 08 May 2023 18:07:49 GMT

The lungs are a spongy network of air tubes and blood vessels and the three main lung structures that allow for gas exchange are bronchi, bronchioles, and alveoli.

Evolution of lungs

When creatures first wriggled out of the sea and onto dry land, they were gifted with a crucial adaptation: primitive lungs. These lungs were not the efficient air bags that we have today. They were a loose collection of blood vessels that were originally created to absorb tiny bits of oxygen from water running across them.

When early amphibious creatures began to spend more time on land, the crude network of blood vessels and tubes eventually evolved into a tightly woven mesh that more closely resembled the lung structures that allow humans to absorb oxygen from the air instead of water.

Lung structure review

The lungs are a spongy network of air tubes and blood vessels and the three main lung structures that allow for gas exchange are bronchi, bronchioles and alveoli. The primary bronchi are similar to two penne noodle tubes that split off from the central airway and they shuttle air into the left and right lungs. These bronchi tubes then split off into increasingly thinner spaghetti-width tubes, which are called your bronchioles. Lastly, the bronchioles guide air into millions of microscopic sacs called alveoli, which are your gas exchange meatballs.

How do lungs work?

When you take a breath, air moves past the main tube (called the trachea) and branches into the two smaller bronchi tubes. The brochi shuttle air into the right and left lung lobes and from there, the air is sent into the network of tiny bronchiole tubes that resemble slender noodles. As you inhale, your chest and tiny tubes have expanded to compensate for the increased pressure and the air is forced to move into tiny sacks called alveoli. The alveoli are the microscopic meatballs in this somewhat silly pasta analogy and take on the most important role for your entire respiratory system: the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide.

One key feature of the alveoli is that they are packed with tiny air tubes and also enmeshed in a dense tangle of thin blood vessels. The thinnest blood vessels surround each alveoli air sac cluster and as the blood rushes past the alveoli air tubes, it release the excess carbon dioxide and absorbs oxygen molecules before being pumped back into your heart to be distributed to the rest of your body.

References:

Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, 18th Edition. Longo DL, Fauci AS, Kasper DL, Hauser SL, Jameson J, Loscalzo J. eds.
Anatomy, Physiology, and Disease: An Interactive Journey for Health Professions , 2nd Edition. Bruce J. Colbert, University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown.

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What is Aerobic Respiration and Why is it Important?

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Sun, 07 May 2023 16:37:12 GMT

Aerobic respiration is important because our cells use this process to convert oxygen and food into the energy that we depend on for life.

Gas exchange may not seem like a thrilling concept, but the ability to exchange gas is the reason why you and nearly every creature on this planet are alive. In particular, our evolutionary ancestors spent at least a billion years perfecting the exchange of two gases: oxygen and carbon dioxide. Almost every cell in your body needs a constant supply of oxygen and also needs to remove carbon dioxide to survive.

Oxygen is essential because our cells use aerobic respiration to convert oxygen and food bits into the energy that we depend on for life. There are many biochemical reactions that create aerobic respiration, but for simplicity’s sake, this article will focus on a central concept: no oxygen = no energy. Organic fuel and other molecules are also required for energy, but oxygen is the only piece of this molecular puzzle that is restocked from outside your body every 4-5 seconds.

What is Aerobic Respiration?

Aerobic respiration is a series of biochemical reactions that convert oxygen and organic fuel into carbon dioxide, water and high-energy molecules. The process starts when organic fuel undergoes digestion in the stomach, intestines, and liver, which are then broken down and transferred into the blood. Oxygen is transferred to the bloodstream via gas exchange in the lungs.

Next, both oxygen and organic fuel move from blood into the body’s cells, where they are used in a series of chemical reactions. These cellular biochemical reactions produce carbon dioxide, water, and energy. Carbon dioxide is transferred back into the blood, water remains inside the cells or moves into other body fluids and high energy molecules usually remain inside the cell it was formed to support the cell’s activity. The full aerobic respiration chemical equation is illustrated below.

Why is Aerobic Respiration Important?

Aerobic respiration is important because it is the primary way that your cells produce energy. Your cells can also use anaerobic respiration to generate energy without oxygen, but the cellular reactions are less efficient, generate a harmful byproduct called lactic acid and cannot sustain the long-term energy needs of a human cell.

Without aerobic respiration, your cells, (and therefore you), cannot survive more than 10-20 minutes. You can live around three days without water and a week or two without food, but just a few minutes without your cells being able to transform oxygen into energy and the cells in your brain begin to die. This makes aerobic respiration one of the most vital processes that supports your life.

Aerobic Respiration Equation and Summary

Aerobic Respiration: Cells in the human body use aerobic respiration to generate energy, where oxygen and organic fuel are converted into carbon dioxide, water and high-energy molecules.

Aerobic Respiration Equation: C 6 H 12 O 6 + 6 O 2 → 6 CO 2 + 6 H 2 O + heat + 38 ATP

For a more detailed review of aerobic respiration, visit: https://biologydictionary.net/aerobic-respiration/

References:

Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, 18th Edition. Longo DL, Fauci AS, Kasper DL, Hauser SL, Jameson J, Loscalzo J. eds.
Anatomy, Physiology, and Disease: An Interactive Journey for Health Professions , 2nd Edition. Bruce J. Colbert, University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown.

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What are Pleura? Lung Pleura Structure and Function

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Sat, 06 May 2023 16:02:56 GMT

The pleura are slippery membranes that protect your lungs and allow you to breathe smoothly.

Lung pleura structure and function

Your chest cavity contains three thin membranes that cover your lungs that resemble slippery plastic sacks. One pleura membrane covers the inside of your ribcage and lays on top of the diaphragm and the other two pleura encase the right and left lungs.

Each thin slippery sack is composed of cells that secrete a watery fluid that allow your lung tissue to safely expand and contract inside your body. The main functions of the pleura are to reduce friction and to increase surface tension, both of which are essential for breathing.

Surface tension describes the tendency of liquids to attract each other. This is the same force that allows some bugs to walk on water, (the water sticks together underneath their tiny legs) and it is the reason why water forms a droplet instead of spreading out on a surface. The cutest way to describe surface tension is that many liquids, particularly water molecules, prefer “group hugs”. Surface tension is possible thanks to the electrostatic force called cohesion.

What is cohesion?

Cohesion is the attractive force that causes surface tension “group hugs”. Water molecules are cohesive because each water molecule contains one oxygen (blue) and and two hydrogen (white) atoms, which create partial positive and negative charges. This means that when water molecules are near each other, moving toward each other is inevitable because the opposite charges attract.

What role does surface tension play in breathing?

The substance that coats the pleura is mostly made of water, which means that the slippery sacks form a cohesive attraction between your lungs and the walls of your chest cavity. This attraction makes your pleura-covered lung tissue stick to the sides of chest cavity when it expands, which creates more space for the air to swoop inside your lungs. More air in your lungs means a more efficient breath. Without the slippery sacks, your lungs would still expand, but they would fill with less air and would likely be more vulnerable to wear and tear as they move inside your chest cavity.

You should also thank your pleura for separating your right and left lungs. When a person experiences an injury that punctures one of the lung lobes, the injured lung can collapse due to a loss of air pressure. However, if the damage is not too severe, the healthy neighboring lung can continue to function thanks to being separated in its own pressure cavity by the pleura. One working lung is better than none!

Read Related Content:

References:

Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, 18th Edition. Longo DL, Fauci AS, Kasper DL, Hauser SL, Jameson J, Loscalzo J. eds.
Anatomy, Physiology, and Disease: An Interactive Journey for Health Professions , 2nd Edition. Bruce J. Colbert, University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown.

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What is a Heart Attack? Heart Attack Causes & Prevention Tips

karen.thiebes@gmail.com (Karen Thiebes) — Fri, 05 May 2023 11:55:38 GMT

A heart attack is an injury to heart tissue that results in low oxygen levels. The most common cause of a heart attack is a blood vessel blockage related to heart disease.

One in four people die of heart disease each year in the USA. This is a shocking statistic that may increase your heart rate when you think about the high probability that you or someone you know will have a life-threatening experience with their heart.

One of the most common deadly events is a heart attack. A heart attack occurs when a lack of oxygen results in the death of heart tissue. (When you think of heart attack, think of oxygen lack). Like all of your internal tissues, heart muscles need oxygen from the bloodstream and when oxygenated blood is prevented from reaching a section of the heart, the muscle cells begin to die. The death of cardiac muscle can prevent the heart from pumping properly and leads to symptoms such as shortness of breath and discomfort in a person’s chest and upper body.

What causes a heart attack?

Most heart attacks are caused by blockage of a blood vessel that supplies oxygenated blood to the heart’s muscle tissue. These blood vessel blocks can be caused by plaques that plug one of the heart’s oxygen-supply blood vessels, called coronary arteries. But heart attacks can also occur if a muscle spasm narrows a blood vessel and reduces blood flow.

Depending on the person and the severity of the blood flow blockage, a heart attack can have mild to severe symptoms. To improve the odds of surviving a heart attack, it is essential that a person act fast and dial 911 at the first sign of symptoms. Heart attack symptoms can include chest or upper body discomfort and pains, shortness of breath, dizziness, and nausea.

Without immediate treatment to remove the blood vessel plaque or to relax the spasm, the lack of oxygen results in damage to cardiac muscle tissue and can cause a person to die within a half hour of the first symptoms. If a person survives a heart attack, the injured artery or muscle tissue may develop a permanent scar that negatively affects the blood pump’s function for the remainder of the person’s life. Nearly one million people in the United States have a heart attack each year and many people die because they do not get help fast enough.

How can you prevent heart attacks and improve outcomes?

The prospect of heart-disease can be overwhelming but there are many things that you can do to help prevent heart attacks. The best thing that you can do for better heart health is to move! It doesn’t need to be strenuous exercise—take a walk with a friend and stand up and stretch for a few minutes numerous times throughout each day. You should also reduce the amount of high-fat foods in your diet to prevent an accumulation of fatty deposit plaques in your blood vessels.

And even if you are healthy, you should be aware of common heart attack symptoms and how they can present differently in men and women . If you are feeling any chest pain or difficulty breathing, don't hesitate to call for medical care at the first sign of symptoms.

Altogether, the heart is at the center of your body’s health and well-being and it is one of the easiest organs to appreciate. Take good care of your heart with exercise and a healthy diet and pay attentions to any changes in your heart beat pattern. Please also consider donating to help fund lifesaving research and advocate for better heart health for at-risk populations.

References:

Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, 18th Edition. Longo DL, Fauci AS, Kasper DL, Hauser SL, Jameson J, Loscalzo J. eds.
Anatomy, Physiology, and Disease: An Interactive Journey for Health Professions , 2nd Edition. Bruce J. Colbert, University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown.
https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health-topics/heart-attack