Sometimes the best way to express a scientific idea is through an image that grabs the eye and invites viewers to wonder what they're seeing.
Fourteen images and multimedia presentations, each using innovative approaches to encapsulate a scientific story, have won the 2006 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, sponsored jointly by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science, which is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.
The contest, currently in its fourth year, recognizes outstanding achievement in the use of visual media to promote understanding of research results and scientific phenomena. The judges’ criteria for evaluating the entries included visual impact, innovation and accuracy.
The winning entries communicate information about complex mathematical concepts, the intricacies of the human body, air flight patterns, the latest scientific imaging technologies to analyze Leonardo da Vinci’s art, and more. The 22 September 2006 issue of Science will feature all of these entries, which will also be freely available at www.sciencemag.org/sciext/vis2006/. The entries will also be displayed at the National Science Foundation’s website, http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/scivis/index.jsp
The winning entries are in five categories:
First Place:
Richard Palais, University of California, Irvine
Luc Benard
Still Life: Five Glass Surfaces on a Tabletop
Second Place:
Caryn Babaian, Bucks County Community College, Newtown, Pennsylvania
A Da Vinci Blackboard Lesson
First Place:
Nils Sparwasser, Thorsten Andresen, Stephan Reiniger, and Robert Meisner, German Aerospace Center
Hawaii, the Highest Mountain on Earth
Second Place:
Louis Borgeat, François Blais, and John Taylor of the National Research Council, Canada
Christian Lahanier of the Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France
Mona Lisa Montage
First Place:
Robert Cheng, Paul Brown, and Rebecca Fahrig, Stanford University
Christof Reinhart, Volume Graphics
An Egyptian Child Mummy
Second Place:
David Yager, University of Maryland
Cockroach Portrait
First Place:
Travis Vermilye, Stephen Humphries, and Andrew Christensen, Medical Modeling, Golden, Colorado
Kenneth Slayer, International Craniofacial Institute, Dallas, Texas
Conjoined Twins
Second Place:
Jack Bradbury, Guillaume Iacino, Erica Olsen, and Robert Grotke, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University
A Real-Time Audio and Video Sound Visualization Tool
NONINTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA
First Place (tie):
Aaron Koblin, University of California, Los Angeles
Flight Patterns
Drew Berry, The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Melbourne, Australia; Jeremy Pickett-Heaps, University of Melbourne; and Francois Tetaz
Body Code
Honorable Mentions:
Curtis DuBois, Lummi Island, Washington
The Handwritten "e"
Matt Heying, Changwon Suh, and Krishna Rajan, Iowa State University
Simone Seig, Universität de Saarland
Materials Informatics
Jennifer Brennan, ADNET Systems Inc./NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; Waleed Abdalati,
Horace Mitchell, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; and Walter Meier, National Snow and Ice Data Center
A Short Tour of the Cryosphere
Flavio Fenton and Elizabeth Cherry, Cornell University
Cardiac Bioelectricity and Arrhythmias
Further information about the 2006 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge is available at http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/scivis/index.jsp. Please contact Susan Mason at +1-703-292-7748 (phone) or smason@nsf.gov (email).
Reporters may request copies of the Science feature, which describes the winning entries, from the AAAS Office of Public Programs, at +1-202-326-6440 (phone) +1-202-789-0455 (fax) or scipak@aaas.org (email).
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world's largest general scientific society, and publisher of the journal Science (www.sciencemag.org). AAAS was founded in 1848, and serves 262 affiliated societies and academies of science, reaching 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of 1 million. The nonprofit AAAS (www.eurekalert.org, the premier science-news Web site, a service of AAAS.