Beneath the specialized language and formal rigors of science is a simple, easily forgotten principle: Science is way of exploring the world, and our world is a fantastic place.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in the images that science generates: Spiders that build their own dummies, dinosaurs cloaked in feathers, berries of a colour more intense than any other natural hue. Here are Wired Science's favourite images of the year.
1. Spider Attack in Amber
Image: Oregon State University/Flickr
A spider attacks a wasp: A minute, everyday event, something that's happened billions upon billions of times in these antagonists' evolutionary history, each incident lost to time. But not this meeting, entombed by tree resin 100 million years ago in what's now Myanmar. The resin turned to amber, a time capsule both beautiful and informative.
2. Topographical Moon
Image: NASA [high-resolution version]
It's difficult for the unaided eye to appreciate the striking, varied geography of the moon, which has peaks higher than Mount Everest and craters nearly as deep as the Marianas Trench. This topographical map, published by NASA in February, conveys that geography in glorious fashion.
3. Sandy From Space
Superstorm. Megastorm. Frankenstorm. Some 1,100 miles across, Sandy was the largest Atlantic hurricane ever.
4. Dinosaur Feathers Everywhere
Image: Brian Choo/Nature
Dinosaurs have always been fun to imagine, and doubly so since scientists realized that some had feathers. This detail comes from an artist's rendering of Yutyrannus huali, a 30-foot-long forerunner of Tyrannosaurus rex that, by virtue of its place on the dinosaur family tree, suggests that most of the great reptiles were feather-clad.
5. A Drop of Life
Image: Marek Mis
The microscopic world is a cornucopia of beautiful images; most any finalist in Nikon's Small World contest or the Olympus Bioscapes Digital Imaging Competition deserves inclusion on this year-end image list. But if just one is to be picked, let it be this single-celled algae photographed by Marek Mis, conveying in its light and colour the essences of life itself.
6. Magnificent Riflebird's Mating Dance
Image: Tim Laman
Birds of paradise are an avian family renowned for their marvellous, seemingly fanciful plumage, used by the birds to attract mates. It's not just the feathers that are special, though; birds of paradise often perform elaborate courtship rituals, such as the dance of the magnificent riflebird, captured on film during an expedition by Cornell Lab of Ornithology researchers.
7. George Boorujy's Meadowlark
Image: Babble, 2011, ink on paper. (George Boorujy)
For artist George Boorujy, hyper-realistic hand-inked detail is a form of engagement, a way of holding viewers' attention in an image-saturated world. Animals are often the subjects of his work; like this meadowlark, part of Boorujy's Blood Memory exhibition, they possess an almost hypnotic power.
8. The Ghost Dragon
Image: Xialin Wang et al./Naturwissenschaften
A 120-million-year-old flying reptile discovered in northeast China, the aptly named Guidraco venator - Chinese and Latin for "ghost dragon hunter" - had a 15-foot wingspan and a snaggle-toothed mouth that could have been imagined by Tim Burton.
9. Spider-Building Spiders
Images: Phil Torres
Not only does this collection of debris caught in a web look like a spider. It was made by a spider, too - a newly discovered species from the Peruvian Amazon that constructs its own dopplegangers, a behaviour never before documented.
10. Rutabaga's Decay
Image: Heikki Leis
Fungi can be found in every habitat on Earth, and by some estimates outnumber plants by a factor of five. Yet despite their ubiquity, they go mostly unnoticed, remarked upon mostly when some forgotten piece of food is found covered in fuzz. Estonian artist Heikki Leis captures these moments on camera, revealing the beautiful fungal assemblages present in such mundanities as a decomposing rutabaga (above).
11. Saturn and Tethys
Space is an unceasing source of fantastic imagery, meriting its own Best of 2012 image gallery, and Saturn itself probably deserves its own gallery, too. That said, there's something beautifully serene about this photograph of the ringed planet and Tethys, one of its 62 moons, here visible as a bright fleck in the upper-left corner.
12. Super-Blue Berry
Image: Vignolini et al./PNAS
These Pollia condensata berries are so colourful that they might have been picked minutes ago. In fact, they were gathered in 1974. Like beetles and butterflies, their colour comes not from pigments but from the refractive geometries of their surface coverings, which don't degrade over time. (Some beetle colours even shine true after nearly 50 million years.) Researchers say that P. condensata's blue is the most intense colour in the natural world.
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