Embroidery artist Melody Lord was fascinated by science even before she met neuroscientist Adam Hamlin of the Queensland Brain Institute. One of her embroidered images of the moon is hanging in an engineer's office at NASA.

She sold it to the engineer's daughter, who saw the work on Melody's blog.

When Dr Hamlin showed Melody images taken of mouse brain cells which form part of his research into Alzheimer's disease, she found the images so beautiful that she decided to recreate them in embroidery. Her work was supported by a Culture at Work 2010 Art & Science Residency.

Her creations showing various stages of brain cell life and death will be on display at the Ultimo Science Festival. Her colourful image of a healthy mouse brain took 40 hours to complete and contains at least 2000 French knots in brilliant cotton on black silk.

USF 2010 is supported by the City of Sydney and the Australian Government through the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.