SCIENCE

The winners and honorable mentions in the eighth annual International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge are featured in the Feb. 18 issue of the journal Science.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) sponsored the awards.

Jeff Nesbit, NSF's director of Legislative and Public Affairs and Colin Norman,Science Magazine's news editor, describe the competition: "An 'ocean' composed of a single layer of molecules; an intricate depiction of an HIV particle as a study in orange and gray; a phantasmagoria of fungi; a video tracing the long-distance travels of items dumped in the trash in Seattle. The four first-place winners in this year's International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge grab your attention and draw you into unseen worlds in very different ways.

"Researchers are generating mind-boggling volumes of data at exponentially increasing rates. The ability to process that information and display it in ways that enhance understanding is an increasingly important aspect of the way scientists communicate with each other and-especially-with students and the general public. That's why, for the past 8 years, Science and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) have co-sponsored annual challenges to promote cutting-edge efforts to visualize scientific data, principles, and ideas."

A committee of staff members from Science and NSF screened the 111 entries from 63 countries it received, including U.S. entries from 24 states. It sent forth finalists to an outside panel of experts in scientific visualization to select the winners.

The winning entries are featured in the links below, in a slideshow, and on theNSF SciVis page. In addition, a segment of the Science Podcast includes interviews with one of the competition's judges.

THE WINNERS (Winners by categories may be accessed via the links below)

ILLUSTRATION

First Place — Human Immunodeficiency Virus 3D

Honorable Mention — AraNet: A Genome-Wide Gene Function Association Network for Arabidopsis thaliana

Honorable Mention — Enterobacteria Phage T4

Honorable Mention — Proposed Structure of Yeast Mitotic Spindle

INFORMATIONAL POSTERS AND GRAPHICS

First Place — Introduction to Fungi

Honorable Mention — Everyone Ever in the World

PHOTOGRAPHY

First Place — Rough Waters

Honorable Mention — TRICHOMES (Hairs) on the Seed of the Common Tomato

Honorable Mention — Centipede Millirobot

NON-INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA

First Place — Trash/Track

Honorable Mention — GPS and Relativity

Honorable Mention — GlyphSea

Honorable Mention — Computer Simulation of a Binary Quasar

Honorable Mention — Visualization of the Whole Brain Catalog

*Judges

Patrice Legro Marian, Koshland Science Museum, Washington, DC

Thomas Lucas, Thomas Lucas Productions, Ossining, NY

Alisa Zapp Machalek, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, Bethesda, MD

Corinne Sandone, the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD

Tom Wagner, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC

The submission of applications for next year's challenge are encouraged; details for which are forthcoming on the NSF website.

Short Caption: Rough Waters took first prize in the Photography category of the 2010 Visualization Challenge.

Long Caption: Rough Waters by Seth B. Darling of Argonne National Laboratory and Steven J. Sigener of the University of Chicago, took first prize in the Photography category of the 2010 Visualization Challenge. "The science was amazing, and the image was — wow," said Alisa Zapp Machalek, panel of judges member.

Credit: NSF

Short Caption: Human Immunodeficiency Virus 3D took Illustration first prize in the 2010 Visualization Challenge.

Long Caption: "Human Immunodeficiency Virus 3D" by Ivan Konstantinov, Yury Stefanov, Aleksander Kovalevsky and Yegor Voronin of the Visual Science Company in Moscow took first place in the Illustration category of the 2010 Visual Challenge. "You have this gaping mouth that almost looks like it's ready to eat you the way AIDS is eating away at society," panel of judges member Tom Wagner reflects.

Credit: NSF