Science as Art

COMMUNICATING SCIENCE

Some scientific images are so compelling that they seem to transport the viewer into a world of different scale, providing a you-are-there perspective for concepts ranging from the molecular to the global. Such is the case with the winners of the second annual Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge, cosponsored by Science magazine and NSF.

The prize-winning visuals include a handsomely complex evocation of water molecules squeezing through aquaporins in a cell membrane (bottom). Emad Tajkhorshid and Klaus Schulten--computational biophysicists at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign--generated the illustration by combining thousands of digital atoms with the help of protein-modeling software.

Kenneth Eward, a science artist who founded BioGrafx Scientific & Medical Images in Ovid, Mich., created a flamelike image of a DNA molecule from X-ray crystallographic data (top). The viewer looks down the core of the double helix, which has been simplified by leaving out the bonds that stretch across the core.

Other images include an interactive animated video of RNA interference in action and a colorful shot of surface irregularities on a thin film of polystyrene obtained with an optical microscope. The images can be viewed at http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/vis2004.