This illustration of nanotubes helps researchers envisage the unimaginably small.
Aiming to convey science through art, Science Magazine’s annual Visualization Challenge found its winners. This year’s challenge led to some rather spectacular results.
One of the significant challenges that contemporary science faces is that of translating its complex subject matter into information that the general public can understand - without dumbing the message down to a point where the information becomes compromised.
Very often, the world of science can seem opaque and impenetrable to regular people (like us regular Joes here at AIAIAI), which is one of the reasons that the act of visualising the respective processes that scientists are currently involved in seems like a pretty good idea. And when you consider how important to our overall development many of these scientific endeavours are, coupled with the fact that an artist's interpretation can help scientists in understanding their subject matter in new, alternative ways, the good idea becomes great. Here are some of this year’s most noteworthy entries.
Bryan William Jones won the photography challenge by using a method called 'computational molecular phenotyping' to create this image that displays a slice through a mouse's retina
The Cliff of the Two-Dimensional World by by Babak Anasori, Michael Naguib, Yury Gogotsi, and Michel W. Barsoum. The image displays a nanostructured material made from ultrathin layers of titanium-based compounds.
