National Geographic: Best Science Images of 2008

"The Glass Forest"
Tiny green diatoms create the illusion of a fernlike forest as they attach to their marine-invertebrate hosts. Mario De Stefano of the Second University of Naples, Italy, captured this miniscule "jungle" from the Mediterranean Sea with a scanning electron microscope. The image earned first place in the photography category of the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. The awards are given annually by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science for images that employ modern technology to visualize complex scientific topics. The winners will be announced in tomorrow's issue of Science. --Brian Handwerk

"String Vibrations"

An "overzealous" powering up of a tiny motor caused a cotton string to twist in an unusual pattern, creating the above image. Andrew Davidhazy of New York's Rochester Institute of Technology won an honorable mention in the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge's photography category for his fortuitous mistake. "I happened to overspin the string, and all of a sudden the picture was more exciting," Davidhazy said in a statement. The string whirled some 10 to 20 times during the two seconds of exposure used for the image.

"Squid Suckers: The Little Monsters That Feed the Beast"

Little Shop of Horrors fans may see a resemblance to the bloodthirsty plant from the 1986 movie in the above electron micrograph image. Drexel University doctoral student Jessica Schiffman won an honorable mention in photography in the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge for capturing what's actually an array of suckers found on the tentacles of a long-finned squid. Each sucker--about 400 micrometers wide, or a little smaller than the width of a human hair--is surrounded with "fangs" of chitin, a hard organic material. Squid use their powerful suckers to secure unwitting prey and feed their robust appetites--much like the horror-movie plant that inspired the image's color scheme.

"Polymazing"

A failed "sandwich" of polymers--several molecules strung together--produced an undulating landscape of microscopic hills and valleys. Ye Jin Eun and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, stacked two polymers and immersed them in water as part of an experiment. Though the polymers proved unusable for science, the resulting image earned the team an honorable mention in photography in the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

"Zoom Into the Human Bloodstream"

Deft manipulation of perspective gives viewers a detailed look inside the human circulatory system. The relationship between a tiny oxygen atom and the giant organ of the heart was accomplished with a common painting technique that fits many scales into a single picture, according to Jennifer Frazier of San Francisco's Exploratorium. The unusual view won artist Linda Nye first place in the illustration category of the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

"Visualizing the Bible"

A colorful rainbow brings to light the interconnected nature of one of the world's most familiar books. The Bible's 1,189 chapters are plotted along the horizontal axis at the bottom of the image, with each bar's length determined by the number of verses. The arcs above the graph show the 63,779 cross-references between each chapter. "It almost looks like one monolithic volume," said Carnegie Mellon's Chris Harrison, who--along with Christoph Romhild of North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hamburg, Germany--won an honorable mention for illustrations in the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

"3D Imaging of Mammalian Cells with Ion-Abrasion Scanning Electron Microscopy"

A computer image provides an intimate look at one of humanity's great enemies--the melanoma cell. The cancer cell's pink mitochondria and gold endoplasmic reticulum--a network of vesicles and sacs--swirl around a dark nucleus. The rendering was awarded an honorable mention in the illustration category of the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. Donald Bliss and Sriram Subramaniam of the National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine created the image by "sandblasting" the cell with ions of the element gallium.

"Mad Hatter's Tea" from Alice's Adventures in a Microscopic Wonderland

The old saying "truth is stranger than fiction" gets a boost from this fanciful depiction of the Mad Hatter's tea party from the classic tale Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Illustrator Colleen Champ used micrographs of natural objects created by Dennis Kunkel and arranged them into a picture of three beetles enjoying tea at a table of butterfly wings, surrounded by a field of crystallized vitamin C. Her fantastic take on reality won first place in the informational graphics category in the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

"Genomics Digital Lab: Plant Cells"

A few clicks of the mouse can allow students to explore the parts of a plant cell--such as this mitochondria, the cell's powerhouse--in an educational computer game. The Genomics Digital Lab program, created by Toronto-based Spongelab Interactive, won first place for interactive media in the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. Users can experiment by changing light, water, and soil variables to impact the functions of individual organelles (structures within a cell), then learn how those changes affect the plant as a whole.

"Fighting Infection by Clonal Selection"

Even bacteria that cause strep throat can be beautiful, as seen in the above animation of the body's immune system response. The picture, which won an honorable mention in the noninteractive media category of the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, depicts how immune system cells can ride to the rescue and destroy the harmful bacteria. "We hope that the animation will pique people's interest in how the immune system works ... ," said Etsuko Uno of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, who won the prize with colleague Drew Berry.

Courtesy: National Geographic