Visual science

Best Scientific Visualization-2013

Dmitry Tselikov, Compulenta

Science Magazine and the US National Science Foundation have just named the winners of the 2013 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

In the "Illustration" category, Greg Dunn and Co. won. Their work is called "Cortex in Metallic Pastels" (Cortex in Metallic Pastels). Axons, dendrites and other appropriate things resemble a birch grove at dusk. The task of accurately depicting a slice of the cerebral cortex was not set, because in that case there would be complete confusion. Instead, Mr. Dunn allowed himself to "thin out" the forest of cells so that the structure of each neuron could be seen.

Neurons are created by spraying paint on canvas, after which some of them are shaded with gold leaf and palladium. In the future, Mr. Dunn would like to create a laboratory where scientists and artists would jointly develop various visualization methods. Now he uses, for example, the technique of lithography, so that each neuron has its own angle of reflection: as the viewer passes by the picture, some neurons appear, others disappear.

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The work of Lorrie Faith Cranor from Carnegie Mallon University (USA) entitled "Security Blanket" deserved a commendable review. This is a colorful "word cloud" consisting of thousands of passwords that are most often found in the database stolen in 2009 from the RockYou gaming site. The size of the symbol combination corresponds to its popularity, and the color corresponds to the theme.

The most common password – "123456" – is found three times more often than its closest pursuer, so it serves as a background. It is also interesting to note that among the passwords on edible subjects, "chocolate" is the most popular, and in the category of living beings – "monkey". In addition, passwords on the topic of love and tenderness come across much more often than obscenities. People think the same way...

Mrs. Cranor sewed herself a dress of the same type and began to produce blankets.

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The audience award went to Lydia-Marya Joubert from Stanford University (USA), who photographed a one-and-a-half-meter hand by the British sculptor Francis Hewlett and superimposed micrographs of Pseudomonas bacteria colonies on the image. The green color indicates those bacteria that turned out to be resistant to antibiotics, and the red color indicates those that were destroyed. The work illustrates the idea that humanity is losing the fight against microorganisms.

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As for the photos, in the first place is a group of employees of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA). The picture is good in itself, but we'll explain it anyway. In the foreground there are two madreporous corals of Pocillopora damicornis, 3 mm between them (they were painted pink). They have cilia, and scientists are interested in how polyps move them in order to attract nutrients. The specialists dissolved colored particles in the water, which made it possible to see the path of the water flow: gold marked what happened in the first hour and a half, blue – afterwards (the cilia, marked purple, changed position). Near the cilia, the lines become intermittent: there the flow is especially fast.

The authors admit that they were inspired by the color scheme chosen by Andy Warhol for his cycle "Flowers".

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The incentive award was awarded to a photograph of a Deutzia scabra leaf, which is covered with hairs topped with asterisks a quarter of a millimeter in diameter. They give the sheet a napiness, and Japanese carpenters sometimes polish their products with these sheets.

Steve Lauri from Northern Ireland achieved amazingly vivid colors using microscopy in polarized light, as well as emphasizing the blue color by filtering light through a crystal of selenite (calcium sulfate). By the way, this is the method of the XIX century.

A microscopist at the University of Ulster notes that this half-forgotten technique is very useful for distinguishing more than twenty types of action, because each of them has its own asterisks density, size and shape.

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The audience also welcomed the visualization of the microstructure of a self-assembled polymer with a length of 2 mm, with the help of which Anna Pyat, a materials scientist from the University of South Florida (USA), collects biomedical "laboratories on a chip".

Processing of various combinations of polymers at different temperatures and humidity leads to the formation of a variety of structures, which determine how the cells that fall on the chip will behave. Howard Kaplan from the same university learned how to turn such photos into three-dimensional images to make it easier to study the topography of polymers. Moreover, greatly enlarged versions (the size of a chocolate bar) are printed on a 3D printer - that's the quality of these photos.

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The creation of the NASA Space Flight Center named the best video. Goddard. Together with the solar wind, we fly to Earth, but we are unlucky: the planet has a magnetic field. Then we transform into heat and influence the circulation of the atmosphere and the oceans. According to the narrator, the Gulf Stream carries so much energy that it would be enough for a hundred civilizations like ours.

This is a fragment of the film "Dynamic Earth: Exploring the planet's Climate Engine" (Dynamic Earth: Exploring Earth's Climate Engine), which is shown in planetariums of different countries. It took a year and a half to create it, real satellite data and readings of six models were used, so it is not only beautiful, but also reliable.

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In the video, which deserves a commendable review, we move to another dimension – the intestine, and we are told about the immune function of its mucous membrane. The viewer gets acquainted with a number of actors: T-lymphocytes, macrophages, neutrophils, etc. Some of these iridescent fighters spray signaling molecules, while others pulse with deadly energy before exploding and destroying bacteria. It is also shown how a disorder in the ranks of immunity fighters leads to intestinal inflammation. Authors: Arkitek Studios (USA) and Co.

Prepared based on the materials of the journal Science: 2013 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge (click on the link: there is much more interesting and instructive in the original article than in the above review – VM).

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru10.02.2014