Virtual Backgrounds

NSF research impacts nearly every field of science and engineering. NSF's influence reaches from the ends of the Earth to the depths of the oceans and to space and beyond. Our Multimedia Gallery has some of the most stunning images from NSF’s research legacy. Explore some of our most beautiful gallery images below to download for your next virtual meeting.

Pattern of annual rings in shrub stems

Credit: Image courtesy of Daniel Ackerman

Download a high-resolution version of this image (JPEG, 1MB)

A male jumping spider (Saitis barbipes).

Credit: Photo/Bernard Dupont/Wikimedia Commons (licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International)

Download a high-resolution version of this image (JPEG, 0.4MB)

A caribou skull glistens white against the tundra of northern Alaska.

Credit: Daniel Ackerman

Download a high-resolution version of this image (JPEG, 0.9MB)

In this illustration, a sheet of paper shows sketches of one of these surfaces, called Kuen's surface, and the expression, called a soliton, which describes it.

"Kuen's Surface: A Meditation on Euclid, Lobachevsky and Quantum Fields," by Dick Palais, University of California, Irvine, and digital artist Luc Benard. In this illustration, a sheet of paper shows sketches of one of these surfaces, called Kuen's surface, and the expression, called a soliton, which describes it.

Credit: ©Luc Benard, University of California, Irvine

Download a high-resolution version of this image (JPEG, 2.1MB)

DNA Shape. The strong lines in this image echo the sinuous shape of a single strand of DNA.

Credit: Jaya G. Yodh Ph.D., teaching assistant professor, medical education facilitator, Carle Illinois College of Medicine; research assistant professor, Department of Physics, NSF Center for the Physics of Living Cells, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Download a high-resolution version of this image (JPEG, 0.7MB)

View this image in our Multimedia Gallery

Butterfly wings dazzle with their array of patterns and colors.

Credit: Frances Allen, Rachel Thayer and Nipam Patel, Biomolecular Nanotechnology Center/qb3, UC Berkeley

Download a high-resolution version of this image (JPEG, 0.6MB)

The Blanco Telescope dome at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, where the Dark Energy Camera used for the recently completed Dark Energy Survey was housed.

Credit: Reidar Hahn, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Download a high-resolution version of this image (JPEG, 0.6MB)