A picture is worth how many words?
Effective illustration
Courtesy Da Vinci
When attempting to communicate the world of science, visualization often works better than words. Illustrations are a quick and effective means for communicating science, engineering and technology to an often scientifically challenged population.
Competition makes us better
The National Science Foundation and the journal, Science, created the International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge to encourage the continued growth toward this journalistic goal.
Judges appointed by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science will select winners in each of five categories: photographs, illustrations, informational graphics, interactive media and non-interactive media. NSF.gov
Want to see the winners?
This link will take you to the 2004-2009 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge winners. I am also embedding a You Tube video of past competitions below.
.
Tags : Every space probe ever launched, all on one map of the Solar System.
This animation shows you how viruses trick healthy cells to join the dark side.
What you see in the video actually happens much, much faster in real life — in a fraction of a fraction of a second. So this is a very slow motion version of cellular activity. NPR.org
Best Science Visualization Videos of 2009
This clip is a compilation of videos showing the evolution of a project called “Breaking Waves,” funded by the Department of Defense. It uses numerical flow analysis to tackle the challenge. (see more of the best visualization videos at Wired.com)
Evolutionary trees like the one Charles Darwin scribbled to illustrate his epiphany are still used today to help biologists understand and communicate the diversity of life. Like Darwin and his contemporaries, today’s evolutionary biologists are part of an ongoing effort to figure out how Earth's many species are related. As new tools help biologists to analyze evolutionary relationships, the tree of life changes and grows ever more complex.
How will biologists today and in the future to organize all of this information? No one knows for sure - but a number of computer scientists and software designers are taking a crack at it! In collaboration with biologists designers are creating programs that will allow researchers to share and search through enormous amounts of taxonomical information. Some programs, like UC Davis's paloverde, take cues from familiar web tools like WIkipedia and Google Earth, allowing users to search the tree of life from various perspectives and distances.
Beyond making research more accessible to scientists and the public, software tools like this will help scientists around the world work together in new ways - developing new medicines to treat constantly evolving diseases, new products and processes that take into account changing ecosystems, and to understand biodiversity on a local and global scale.
The potential of these tools is as big as the imagination of the designers and engineers behind them - what kind of tool would you create to help organize the tree of life?
Check-out this website! You can see a 3D cube model of a brain MRI.
Geoscience in the middle
Courtesy eigenFACTOR Eigenfactor is a search engine for scientific journals. They have an interesting interactive way to browse through the various branches of science based on citations in these journals.
Static map
Courtesy eigenFACTORThey've taken some of the richest connections between the different disciplines and produced a static map that shows these connections weighted by citation. It shows some interesting flows of information between, Medicine, Cell Biology, Ecology, and Crop Science for example. Now I just need to figure out what "Control Theory" is.
3-D visualizations help prepare for next flood.
The New York Times has a nice feature on Felice Frankel and how she is pioneering in the use of imagery to convey scientific research. She brings an aesthetic eye to scientific imagery and isn't shy about using photoshop to ethically enhance our view into the microscopic world.
Today's featured picture from Wikipedia is an animation demonstrating what relationship pi has to a circle's diameter and perimeter.
Subscribe
I want to learn about
Science Buzz is supported by the National Science Foundation.Copyright © Science Museum of Minnesota, 2004-2010, except where noted.
Add a new comment