Beautiful, ominous, and surprising, these are the winners of the 2012 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. For 10 years, the competition - sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science - has celebrated the creators of visually striking, informative, and original art. The 2012 winners were announced today. From glowing corals to spiky seeds to neural networks on a chip, these images speak more clearly - and louder - than any report ever could.
1. First Place and People's Choice (Video): Alya Red: A Computational Heart
Credit: Guillermo Marin, Fernando Cucchietti, Mariano Vazquez, Carlos Tripiana; Barcelona Supercomputing Centre
This visceral, 3-d simulation of a beating heart grabbed first place in its category. A team at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre produced the contracting digital organ using a combination of data from magnetic resonance images, observations of cardiac muscle contractions and electrical signals, and input from physicians and bioengineers. Reproducing a single heartbeat takes 100 minutes of computing time, so the team distributed calculations among the facility's 10,000 processors. The result is a beautifully simulated, seemingly tangible, spasming organ.
2. First Place (Illustration): Connectivity of a Cognitive Computer Based on the Macaque Brain
Neural networks could one day form the basis of a brain-inspired computer chip. This visualization represents the simulation of a macaque's neural connections. Designed by cognitive computing researchers at IBM, the diagram depicts more than 4,000 centres of neuronal attachment, each represented as a dot along the ring, connected by more than 320,739 arcs.
3. First Place and People's Choice (Photography): Biomineral Single Crystals
Who knew sea urchin teeth looked like this? Under a scanning electron microscope - and with the help of some false colour - they do, thanks to tooth-hardening bio-mineral crystals. This image of an urchin's tooth (Arbacia punctulata) was produced by a team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
4. First Place (Posters and Graphics): Adaptations of the Owl's Cervical & Cephalic Arteries in Relation to Extreme Neck Rotation
How owls can turn their heads almost completely around without damaging life-sustaining blood vessels has been a mystery. Now, this poster illustrates the answer. After studying the neck vertebrae and blood vessels in 12 owls, researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine found a number of architectural adaptations that help the birds complete this Exorcist-like manoeuvre.
5. Honourable Mention (Video): Revealing Invisible Changes in the World
Credit: Michael Rubinstein, Neal Wadhwa, Frédo Durand, William T. Freeman, Hao-Yu Wu, John Guttag, MIT Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Lab; Eugene Shih, Quanta Research Cambridge
Intelligence Lab; Eugene Shih, Quanta Research Cambridge
If you could see subtle, normally imperceptible changes - the ever-so-slight flushing of a man's face as his heart beats, the tiny protrusions of a pulsing artery - the world would look a lot like the scenes depicted in this video. Using a pixel-magnifying algorithm, a team from MIT and Quanta Research Cambridge demonstrates how amplified video can be used to determine such things as heart rate...from afar. Cue super spidey senses.
6. Honourable Mention and People's Choice (Illustration): Cerebral Infiltration
A monster tumour (red, glossy lump) is rerouting the brain's streets and highways. These pathways - the white matter that connects neuronal cell bodies - are represented in red and blue, with red being near enough the tumour to be a concern during surgery, and blue being a safe distance away. Constructed by a team at Sherbrooke Connectivity Imaging Lab using magnetic resonance imaging, this image was awarded an honourable mention.
7. Honourable Mention (Video): Fertilization
Credit: Thomas Brown, Stephen Boyd, Ron Collins, Mary Beth Clough, Kelvin Li, Erin Frederikson, Eric Small, Walid Aziz, Nobles Green
Obstacles, mazes, and competition: Fertilization depicts the epic and classic struggle of sperm cells to unite with an egg.
8. Honourable Mention (Photography): Self Defense
The image depicts a live clam (left) and whelk (right) tucked into their shells. Unlike the clam, which can quickly slam its shell shut in response to danger, the whelk can only squirm back into the spiral recesses of its calcified fortress. But the whelk ultimately has the upper hand: it can drill into the clam's shell and suck it dry. This image was produced by a team in Hong Kong that CT-scanned live organisms.
9. Honourable Mention (Games and Apps): CyGaMEs Selene II: A Lunar Construction GaME
Build the moon, pummel it with asteroids, and pour a lava ocean over the nascent crescent.This computer game, called Selene II, helps players learn geophysical and space science concepts by presenting lessons visually, following the same paths a scientist might take to solve problems. Behind the scenes, the game analyzes and tracks players' performance, using algorithms that collect information on how and when concepts are learned and absorbed.
10. Honourable Mention (Video): Observing the Coral Symbiome Using Laser Scanning Confocal Microscopy
Credit: Christine Farrar, Zac H. Forsman, Ruth D. Gates, Jo-Ann C. Leong, Robert J. Toonen; Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, University
of Hawaii at Manoa
Living corals form a fluorescent kaleidoscope of awesomeness when imaged with a non-invasive confocal microscope and laser. This video, produced by a team at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, takes viewers on a trip through Alice's Disco-Inspired Undersea Wonderland. Bright red, blue, and green, corals anchor dynamic and essential communities, and are much more active than one might realize. Bonus: Bach and Vivaldi.
11. Honourable Mention (Photography): X-Ray Micro-Radiography and Microscopy of Seeds
Curled, spiny, and squid-like, these X-rayed plant seeds demonstrate the minifying of existing imaging technologies applied to plant biology. The image, produced by a team from the Czech Republic, presents the X-ray images next to a normal microscope capture.
12. Honourable Mention (Games and Apps): Velocity Raptor
Guide a velociraptor at near light-speed through icy mazes in this web-based game, designed to teach players about special relativity. Using dinosaurs. Levels introduce various bits of relativistic weirdness, like time and length dilation, and Doppler-shifting colours. But the caped Velocity Raptor slips-and-slides on - unless you plunge him into a pool or something.
13. People's Choice (Posters and Graphics): The Pharma Transport Town: Understanding the Routes to Sustainable Pharmaceutical Use
Our pharmaceutical-saturated world is illustrated in this poster, designed by a team at the European Centre for Environmental and Human Health. Can you incinerate drugs? What happens if you flush them? In this tangled ecosystem, most pipelines lead to the environment.
14. People's Choice (Games and Apps): Untangled
Compete to build the most beautiful and compact circuit grids in UNTANGLED, a web-based game that challenges players to develop chip architectures that could be manufactured in silicon. While you play, the game studies, records, and learns. Turns out, human players are much better at designing these things than machine-based algorithms, and the game's designers at the University North Texas hope to change that.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please adhere to proper blog etiquette when posting your comments. This blog owner will exercise his absolution discretion in allowing or rejecting any comments that are deemed seditious, defamatory, libelous, racist, vulgar, insulting, and other remarks that exhibit similar characteristics. If you insist on using anonymous comments, please write your name or other IDs at the end of your message.