A Visual Tour from the Heights of Mt. Etna to Tiny Antarctic Molecules

"Autofluorescence of Tick Nymph on a Mammalian Host," Marna E. Ericson, University of Minnesota - Dermatology First Place Winner in Photography Laser scanning confocal microscopy is used to capture the autofluorescence of a common deer tick as it feasts on a the ear of a golden hamster.

Judges have named 11 winners in the 2004 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge, an annual international competition created to recognize outstanding achievement in use of graphics media to illustrate research processes and results.

The contest is jointly sponsored by the journal Science, which is published by AAAS, and by the National Science Foundation.

Winning entries in this year's competition span research fields from viral medicine to Earth science and span the globe from Germany to Seattle. They are displayed in the 24 September issue of Science and in a slide show in the journal's electronic edition, Science Online. More than 90 entries qualified for judging. An independent panel of distinguished science communicators and graphics experts evaluated the entries on visual impact, innovation and technical accuracy.

Winners in the 2004 challenge are:

Photography

First Place:

"Autofluorescence of Tick Nymph on a Mammalian Host," by Marna E. Ericson, University of Minnesota.

Honorable Mentions:

"Antarctic Diatom Chain," by Dee Breger, Drexel University's Materials Science & Engineering Department. (Breger also won First Place and Runner-Up in the photography category of the 2003 competition)

"Pasture of Instabilities," by Linda M. Strzegowski and Ting Xu, University of Massachusetts' Materials Research Science and Engineering Center.

Illustration

First Place:

"Water Permeation Through Aquaporins," by Emad Tajkhorshid and Klaus Schulten, Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Honorable Mention:

"Spiral IV," by Kenneth Eward, BioGrafx Scientific & Medical Images, Ovid, Mich.

Informational Graphics

First Place:

"Mt. Etna," by David Fierstein, of Felton, Calif.

Non-Interactive Media

First Place:

"Bat Intercepts Flying Insect," by Cynthia F. Moss and Kaushik Ghose, University of Maryland, College Park.

Honorable Mentions:

"The Elbe River Flood 2002," by Nils Sparwasser, Adelheid Craubner, Christian Gredel, Thomas Rupert and Robert Meisner, German Aerospace Center (DLR).

"Spatiotemporal Arboviral Surveillance in Florida during 2003," by Gregory Ross, Jonathan Day and Roxanne Rutledge-Connelly, University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences/Florida Medical Entomology Laboratory.

INTERACTIVE MEDIA

Honorable Mentions:

"Brachial Plexus," by Paul Bigeleisen, Strong Memorial Hospital, Rochester, N.Y.

"RNAi: A Ballet of Molecular Machines, Including "Slicer" and "Dicer," Controls Gene Expression Using Small RNA Molecules," by Doug Huff, Beth Anderson, Simon Fenwick, N. Leigh Anderson and Norman G. Anderson, Arkitek Studios, Seattle, Wa.

For more information on the contest, see the Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge web site.

23 September 2004