Most American students are familiar with the fruit battery. Take some zinc (usually a nail), a bit of copper (a coin), insert them into some fruit and connect them with a metal wire. The fruit juice works as a conductor and generates power. So much even that you can use it to switch on a lamp.

Caleb Charland is fascinated by the phenomenon and has been photographing it for years. Not just because he thinks it’s so beautiful. He also wants his photos to act as a wake-up call. ‘What do we when we run out of energy sources?’

Fruit Battery Still shows how many pieces of fruit it takes to switch on a simple table lamp.

Museum De Buitenplaats, Eelde

Take a scanning electron microscope and a stereoscopic microscope. Use them to find the things living in your house that you normally miss because they’re so small.

American photographer Daniel Kariko is professor at the University of East Carolina, but mainly focuses on depicting his vision on the use and loss of land and the ecological questions that arise. All these insects in our homes are the result of people moving in on their habitat, he thinks.

He created these ‘portraits’ by playing with lighting and using various small reflectors. It resulted in a lighting effect reminiscent of the Dutch masters.

Der A-Kerk,Groningen

German scientists created agricultural institute Amani in north eastern Tanzania. The First World War came and went, the English took over, and transformed it into an important malaria research facility.

For the locals, the institute was a complicated presence in their country. Some considered it the height of progress, but many other people though the scientists on the hill were practising black magic.

The institute is still there on that hill top, although it is no longer being used. For two months, Russian photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva photographed the institute as seen through lab assistant John’s eyes. She not only shows his daily routines, but also their essential importance.

Der A-Kerk Groningen

Thorough forensic research is essential to criminal law. The better and advanced the methods, the faster and easier the right perpetrator can be found.

The Netherlands are at the forefront of developing new methods for ‘real CSI’. Photographer Jeroen Hofman shows how forensic scientists learn the techniques used and put them into practice, ranging from blood spatter and DNA analysis to pathological studied.

KINK, Assen

Universities should be playgrounds for scientists, says Ben Feringa. Keeping that in mind, Dutch photographers Jos Jansen shadowed the Groningen Nobel Prize winner in his laboratory to see what that playground looked like.

Jansen is a trained psychologist and is mainly interested in the interaction between people and science.

He depicted the daily experiments that researchers in Feringa’s lab did with molecular motors and switches. This artificially made molecules move under the influence of light pulses and can then be manipulated.

Der A-Kerk, Groningen

Fifty-year-old German photographer Michael Najjar has been working on a series about the discovery of space for years, blending reality and fictitious scenarios. To that end, he visited spaceports and laboratories and met with scientists and astronauts.

Ultimately, he decided to become part of his project by booking a seat on the Virgin Galactic, Spaceship Two, to become the first artist in space.

He is currently enrolled in a training programme at space centres in America, Russia, and Germany. He captures the extremes his body is going through, such as a flight on the MiG-29 fighter jet in the stratosphere, ‘space walks’ in a swimming pool, and a parachute jump from a height of ten kilometres.

Noorderlicht Fotogalerie Groningen

In Owned by No One, Dutch photographer Alysha Clemens tells the story of a dystopian, late-digital era. In this world, members of a subculture are trying to protect their identity while all around them, information is money and privacy has been destroyed. To that end, they live in safe houses, remove their fingerprints and wear special contact lenses to prevent their eyes from being scanned.

Clemens graduated with this project from the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in The Hague. She not only came up with the movement herself, which means she had to write a manifesto, but she also photographed the members ‘from the inside out’. They are fictitious, but are based on reality.

Essentially, the question is: how free are we when we always have to protect our identities?

 De Faun, Groningen

New Zealand photographer Wayne Barrar made his name photographing the glass-like remains of microscopic organisms. These have been collected and archived since the nineteenth century.

They are invisible with the naked eye. But once you view them under the microscope, they show their true face, says Barrar. They are of a geometric diversity and perfection that cannot be found in nature.

The title of the series, The glass archive, refers to the different types of glass. The glass ‘skeleton’ the one-celled weeds use to protect themselves from the outside world, the glass in the microscope lens, but also the glass frame of the printed work.

De Faun, Groningen