The National Science Foundation and journal Science have revealed the winners in this year’s Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. As always, we’re happy to see the life sciences strongly represented in this contest of the best imagery that “would intrigue, explain and educate”.
One of the first place winners in the Illustration category is an amazing installation (below) by biologist Peter Lloyd Jones and architect Jenny E. Sabin of the University of Pennsylvania’s Sabin + Jones LabStudio. Be sure to check out the high resolution photo of the art piece to get an idea for its maddening complexity.
“Branching Morphogenesis” aims to reveal–through abstraction–the unseen beauty and dynamic relationships that exist between endothelial cells and their surrounding extracellular microenvironment. Movies of networking endothelial cells cultured on a 3-D matrix were analyzed to generate computational tools that simulate this process. Next, large-scale templates from simulations were overlaid with more than 75,000 inter-connected zipties.
One of two winners in the Noninteractive Media category is a video by Harmony Starr, Molly Malone and Brendan Nicholson of University of Utah explaining why identical twins are no longer as identical in later life. Watch and learn (ignore the error message):
Link to all the winning entries: The International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge 2009…
Press release: 2009 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge Winners Announced …
