Slideshow: Art of Science 2013

Mingzhai Sun and Joshua Shaevitz / Princeton

Click through the top images from Princeton University's Art of Science Competition, which features images of artistic merit created during the course of scientific research.

Launch slideshow

Worms are a source of wonder in this year's crop of aesthetically pleasing scientific images, served up by Princeton University's Art of Science Competition.

"C. instagram," one of the contest's top photos, features a wriggling network of C. elegans worms on an agar plate covered with E. coli bacteria. Ewwww, right? But when Princeton molecular biology student Meredith Wright looked at the scene through a microscope, she had a different reaction: Cooool!

"I found the pattern on this plate particularly lovely, and was able to capture it with my cell phone by holding the lens of my phone's camera up to the microscope eyepiece," she wrote. "I've since shared the photo on social networking sites and have had friends who've never been interested in biology ask me more about my work because of this photo."

Researchers don't do what they do to create beautiful pictures, but beauty often arises amid the search for scientific truth. That's what the Art of Science program is going for: Images produced in the course of scientific research that have aesthetic merit as well.

This year's theme was "Connections." Andrew Zwicker, director of science education at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, said that some of history's most exciting scientific discoveries have come from making connections between different disciplines.

"For example, with physics and biology, everyday there is a new finding showing that the two are connected in the most fascinating and profound way," he said in this year's contest announcement. "In a similar vein, connecting the aesthetics of laboratory images to their scientific importance has transformed how we look at our data and results. With the 2013 Art of Science competition, we are celebrating all manner of connections."

Meredith Wright / Princeton Art of Science Competition

"C. instagram" shows masses of C. elegans worms on an agar plate. The picture was taken with a smartphone camera through a microscope, and shared via Instagram.

The connections between beauty and truth are reflected in this year's three top-rated images. First prize goes to Martin Jucker's visualization of Earth's wind patterns in shades of red and blue. Michael Kosk's photomicrograph of crushed birch wood took second place. And third prize went to a many-branching visualization of online connections for the websites set up by the plasma physics lab and by the Lewis Center for the arts.

"These two embroidery-like figures visually give us an idea of the similarities and differences of a website devoted to science and one devoted to the arts," said the prize-winning webmasters, Paul Csogi and Chris Cane.

The three prize-winners will share $500, divided into shares of $250, $154.51 and $95.49 in accordance with the aesthetically pleasing golden ratio. Another 40 images are included in Princeton's Art of Science 2013 exhibit, which opened on Friday in the atrium of Princeton's Friend Center. The works were chosen from 170 images submitted from 24 different departments across campus.

Click through our slideshow featuring some of the pictures in the exhibit, and then be sure to visit the Art of Science website and the Art of Science Facebook page for much, much more. And don't forget to share. That's precisely what Meredith Wright hopes you'll do with "C. instagram."

"This image represents the simple pleasure of finding something beautiful when you don't expect to," she wrote, "and it shows how easy it is to connect science with new audiences by simply clicking 'share.'"

More artistic science to share:

• Solid science turns into crowd-pleasing art
• Creepy critters and cool close-ups
• How beauty was found in a slimeball

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many pages of scientific prose is a science comic worth? Or, for that matter, how many words in a blog post?

Science comics took the spotlight last week during one of the scores of sessions at Science Online 2013 in Raleigh, N.C. — and one of the takeaways was that illustrators and cartoonists are serious about the science they're depicting. Heck, many of them are trained scientists as well as gifted artists. Take MinutePhysics' Henry Reich, for example: He earned degrees in physics and math, but found himself drawn to film and video. Now he encapsulates complex concepts in physics (such as the quest for the Higgs boson) in YouTube videos that last just a bit more than a minute.

His latest MinutePhysics offering wraps up more than two dozen science websites and video channels worth checking out, including way-cool science comics such as xkcd and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. You'll want to scan the whole list, but you won't want to stop there. It's a good thing the weekend is coming up, because here are another eight science comics to while away the hours with:

Bird and Moon: Rosemary Mosco is a "nature lover with a passion for science communication" — and a flair for cute, colorful graphics that are thoughtful as well. Have you always wondered how to tell a dolphin from a porpoise? Check out the "Animal Cheat Sheet."  

Beatrice the Biologist: Katie McKissick is on a mission to "make science fun and interesting for the casual reader," and she's not afraid of stirring up a little controversy as well. Don't miss the story behind the "Facebook Genital Scandal of 2012."

Jay Hosler: Biology professor Jay Hosler highlights science comic strips of all stripes in his blog, "Drawing Flies," and creates his own highly respected comics and graphic novels. 

Luci's Let Down: Writer Marjee Chmiel and illustrator Sandra Lanz team up on an online comic book that's more about metaphysics than strictly physics.

PHD Comics: Jorge Cham draws the kinds of comics that graduate students might post on their office bulletin boards — when their faculty adviser isn't looking. Check out this Cosmic Log Q&A with Cham, as well as his fantastic guide to the Higgs boson.

Sci-ence.org: Maki Naro aims to "communicate science topics in a way that hopefully anybody can understand, and ideally elicit some chuckles." I had to chuckle over a certain zombie who guest-starred in a strip about last year's "Supermoon."

Walkabout Em: Emily Coren has degrees in ecology and evolutionary biology as well as science illustration. Her illustrations don't joke around — instead, they present creatures and concepts with a pleasing style.

2D Goggles: Melina Sydney Padua presents "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage," a quirky webcomic interspersed with observations about the history of the Difference Engine and other geeky subjects.

Science-fiction author David Brin has his own list of favorite science webcomics. And if you're looking for science-centric graphic novels you can actually hold in your hand, keep an eye out for "Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards," "Darwin," "Feynman," "Logicomix," "Neurocomic," "Radioactive," "Science Tales" and "Trinity."

More about science comics:

• Bam! How comics teach science
• Comics go beyond the Higgs boson
• Geek gift prize highlights xkcd

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Published 10:19 p.m. ET Feb. 7, 2013. Last updated 12:36 p.m. ET Feb. 8, 2013.

The controversial effort to find out whether a long-lost Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece lies beneath a fresco in Florence has been suspended without resolving a mystery that some have compared to a "Da Vinci Code" riddle.

The mystery surrounds a painting known as "The Battle of Anghiari," or "Fight for the Standard," which was commissioned by city officials for a meeting hall in the Palazzo Vecchio to commemorate a Florentine military victory in 1440. Contemporary accounts indicate that Leonardo began the wall painting in 1505 — but left it unfinished, due to problems he encountered with the experimental technique he was using to apply the paint.

Decades later, the city hall was enlarged and restructured, and in 1563 the Italian artist Giorgio Vasari painted a mural on one of the new walls. In the course of all that remodeling, Leonardo's painting disappeared. Today, it's known only from Leonardo's preparatory sketches and from copies inspired by the original.

Fast-forward to 1975: Maurizio Seracini, an Italian-born engineering professor and expert in art analysis at the University of California at San Diego, was back in his native Florence, studying Vasari's fresco. He noticed that a soldier in the fresco was waving a flag that read "Cerca Trova" (Seek and Ye Shall Find). Did this hint at the location of the lost Leonardo painting?

Over the years that followed, Seracini marshaled the expertise, technology and financial support needed to create a virtual reconstruction of the hall's layout before the remodeling took place. It looked as if there was a gap between the part of the wall where the "Cerca Trova" legend was painted and the older wall beneath. Armed with that information — plus funding from the National Geographic Society and backing from Florence's mayor, Matteo Renzi — Seracini won permission from Italian officials to drill six tiny holes into Vasari's wall and push camera-equipped endoscopic probes into the gap behind it.

The initial results were promising: Seracini said the team found "traces of pigments that appear to be those known to have been used exclusively by Leonardo." This March, National Geographic aired a documentary about the investigation, titled "Finding the Lost da Vinci." Heartened by the findings, Seracini asked for permission to conduct more sophisticated tests. The story was shaping up as a real-life "Da Vinci Code" thriller in the art world. (In fact, Seracini is mentioned in the Dan Brown novel as an art diagnostician who unveils "the unsettling truth" about a different work by Leonardo.)

Italian officials, however, were becoming increasingly unsettled about tampering with the 450-year-old Vasari mural. Some experts questioned whether there was really enough justification to go forward. "Vasari would never have covered a work by an artist he admired so much in the hope that one day someone would search and find it," Discovery News quoted Tomaso Montanari, an art historian at the University Federico II in Naples, as saying. "You would expect such a hypothesis from Dan Brown, certainly not from art historians."

In the end, cultural officials ruled that the scientists could drill one more hole for endoscopic tests, but couldn't do any further drilling after that. That meant the more sophisticated (and more intrusive) tests could not be conducted. Last month, Italian news outlets reported that the National Geographic Society was suspending the project "until further notice." 

Now Discovery News says that Florentine museum officials have given the go-ahead to fill in the six existing holes and take down the scaffolding that was used during the project. "This is how it ends," the Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported, "with strokes of stucco and paint, the search for Leonardo's mythical work."

More Leonardo da Vinci mysteries:

• Dig for Mona Lisa turns up a skeleton
• The anatomy that Leonardo couldn't copy
• Did Leonardo copy his famous 'Vitruvian Man'?
• Leonardo da Vinci ... fashion designer?
• Art experts hold mock 'Da Vinci trial

For more about the unsolved "Da Vinci Code" case, check out Rossella Lorenzi's report for Discovery News.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Koby Barhad / RCA

Koby Barhad's concept for an installation called "All That I Am" suggests creating genetically engineered mice that reflect some of the traits associated with Elvis Presley. It's important to note, however, that no mice have yet been Elvisized.

A British artist’s plan to create a mouse with Elvis Presley’s DNA has set websites buzzing over the past week, but right now it’s nothing more than an art-school concept. And it's not clear whether the concept will ever go any further, due to ethical and legal concerns about blending human and animal DNA.

"The purpose of the work was to raise those almost frightening issues," artist Koby Barhad told me. Mission accomplished, Koby.

Actually, celebrity DNA is quite the commodity. A few years ago, a venture called MyDNAFragrance marketed several perfumes that supposedly reflected the DNA coding of Elvis as well as Michael Jackson and other dead celebs. (Sorry, those celebrity-themed fragrances, including "Blue Suede," are no longer available.) The DNA for that project came from University Archives' collection of historical hair. The Elvis hair that Barhad used came from another source: an eBay vendor who was selling strands for $22. (He says he also bought strands of hair attributed to Princess Diana and President John F. Kennedy.)

Barhad, a 35-year-old MFA student at London's Royal College of Art, said he didn't actually submit the Elvis strands for DNA sequencing. Instead, he conducted a practice run with the aid of a couple of researchers from Imperial College. The scientists analyzed DNA extracted from their own strands of hair, as well as from cheek swabs, to confirm that it would be possible to get some sort of genetic reading from the hair alone.

Barhad was particularly interested in seeing whether the DNA tests could identify a variant of the human ACTN3 gene that has been associated with athletic performance. "We proved that those particular scientists didn't have that gene," he told me. Theoretically, then, the DNA tests might be able to identify the genetic signatures of particular traits in Presley's DNA — although realistically, there's some question about how much the DNA might have degraded over the decades.

The next step in the concept would be to breed mice that reflected that genetic signature. Theoretically, you could insert a string of code from the Elvis genome into the desired mouse gene, through a procedure similar to that used to create lab animals with specific mutations. Barhad said another option would be to identify a genetic twist in the mouse genome that parallels the twist in the Elvis genome. For example, if Presley had a particular mutation of the ACTN3 gene, mice could be bred with a similar mutation.

Koby Barhad / RCA

Koby Barhad's concept envisions a stacked series of mouse cages that reflect different aspects of Elvis Presley's life.

The final step in Barhad's art project, titled "All That I Am," would put the Elvis-themed mice in a variety of postmodernistic cages that reflect phases of the rock star's life: One cage might have a funhouse mirror to enlarge the mouse's image, just as Presley's ego was enlarged by fame's mirror. Another would put the mouse on a treadmill, calling to mind how "Elvis worked himself to death" in his final years.

It's worth emphasizing that the Elvis mice do not exist, despite what some websites initially reported.

"I guess the project created a space to imagine a scenario we are all afraid of and want to experience at the same time," Farhad said in an email, "and that was the reason all the news [sites] published it as if I produced this specific mouse, instead of just suggesting it. The funny, or actually scary, thing is that a place in the U.S. ... already contacted me to buy the specific mice. So I think it kind of proves that it is much more real than I even imagined it would be. I'm still writing emails to everyone saying I didn't actually go as far as producing the clones."

In today's follow-up Skype voice call, Barhad said he had no intention of creating an Elvis mouse. "The thing I'm thinking of doing is having my own mouse" that would reflect his own genetic code, he said.

However, Barhad said he'd have to do some more research before going forward with that part of the art.

"Humanized" versions of genes, such as the FOXP2 gene that's associated with speech, have been inserted in mice for research purposes for years. But it's one thing to do that sort of thing under the stringent guidelines that govern genetic studies, and quite another to do it for an art exhibit — even if it's an exhibit designed to call attention to the controversy over transgenic DNA.

"I'm actually going over the law on that," Barhad told me.

Would it be wise for him do it? Or would Elvis observe that when it comes to splicing celebrity DNA, "only fools rush in"?

More about Elvis ... and DNA:

• Auction house all shook up over Elvis hair
• Arthur C. Clarke's DNA odyssey
• Looking for alien DNA
• Cows make humanized milk — but is it safe?

Tip o' the Log to Wired UK's Ian Steadman.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Do science and art mix? They certainly do in a couple of computer-generated visualizations that show how Earth's oceans flow and how our universe grew up.

The "Perpetual Ocean" animation was created by NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio, and tracks ocean surface currents around the world from June 2005 through December 2007. It was created using a high-resolution computer model that translates whatever satellite and ground-based readings are available into a global, full-ocean depiction of ocean and sea-ice circulation. The model is called ECCO2, which stands for Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II. ECCO2 is used for quantifying the role of the oceans in the global carbon cycle and for other scientific applications as well. Plus, it's just a darn cool video.

The funny thing is that the video was done almost a year ago. "This visualization was created as a last-minute entry for the SIGGRAPH 2011 computer animation festival; however, it was not accepted," the studio said in its database description. Despite that initial dose of rejection, "Perpetual Ocean" has gone on to become viral in the past week, probably because it has just been uploaded to NASA Goddard's popular Flickr site.

This year's deadline for SIGGRAPH 2012 submissions is April 9 — and I'm betting that, this time, NASA isn't waiting until the last minute.

Stanford University, meanwhile, has just put out a video that highlights visualizations created at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory's Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, or KIPAC.

Researchers at the Visualization Lab use supercomputers to produce computer simulations showing the birth of the first stars, the spread of the cosmic web, the blast of a supernova and other astrophysical wonders.

"Creating these animations is a real joy these days, because computers and software are so much more powerful today," Stanford physics professor Tom Abel, the head of KIPAC's computational physics department, said in a Stanford news release. "Not long ago, it took us weeks to produce a single animation. Now we can do one in an afternoon."

Take a look at KIPAC's image and photo gallery, and whenever you can, go full-screen with the video.

More science you can watch:

• Watch the moon evolve in 3 minutes
• Scientific visions that take the prize
• Microscopic marvels star in movies
• Cosmic Log video gallery

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Mars' reddish dust covers the Opportunity rover's solar panels in this downward-looking view, assembled from images taken by the NASA probe's panoramic camera from Dec. 21 to 24, 2011. The mosaic was put together in such a way as to omit the mast on which the camera is mounted.

One of the trickiest things that NASA's Opportunity rover does on Mars is take a look at itself — but for the six-wheeled rover, it's been a vital part of its eight-year-plus mission on the Red Planet.

This picture illustrates why the occasional once-over is so important: Because Opportunity relies on solar power, mission controllers back on Earth need to know how much dust is accumulating on the rover's solar panels. It's been a while since the dust has been swept off by Martian winds, and so there's quite a bit of dust covering the power-generating cells right now.

The dust hasn't been so much of a concern during the previous southern winters that Opportunity has spent in Meridiani Planum on the Red Planet. But as winter approaches this time, NASA has decided to position the rover on a north-facing slope so that it can soak up as much of the sun's weak rays as possible. That's a strategy that the rover team employed in the past with Opportunity's twin, the Spirit rover, which now lies moribund in Gusev Crater on the other side of the planet.

Opportunity is conducting research in place as it sits on the north-facing slope of a ridge known as Greeley Haven, on the rim of the 14-mile-wide Endeavour Crater. The rover's going to be there for a while: Mars' southern winter solstice takes place on March 30, and the planet's seasons last roughly twice as long as Earth's. So we'll be seeing a lot of the rover's surroundings at Greeley Haven — including the current focus of its scientific studies, a rock called Amboy.

For comparison's sake, here's a picture of Opportunity's relatively clean solar panels from September 2007:

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell

This mosaic shows Opportunity's solar panels in September 2007 as seen by the rover's panoramic camera. The downward-looking view has been assembled to omit the mast on which the camera is mounted.

And here's a real treat from space artist Don Davis: A painstakingly assembled mosaic of imagery from Opportunity, looking east-southeast over Endeavour Crater to the far side just before sunset. You can see Opportunity's dust-covered solar panels and color-calibration sundial in the foreground. In the distance, you can see the long shadows cast on the crater floor — including the slight bump of a shadow that could well have been cast by Opportunity itself. It's a picture to marvel over, and astronomer/educator Stuart Atkinson does his fair share of marveling on the "Road to Endeavour" website. Emily Lakdawalla provides further details about Davis' rendition on the Planetary Society Blog.

Copyright Don Davis / NASA / JPL / Cornell

Don Davis created this mosaic from imagery sent back from Mars by NASA's Opportunity rover as the sun was setting on Jan. 27. The rover is looking out from a ridge toward the far rim of Endeavour Crater. The shadow of the ridge, and Opportunity itself, can be made out on the crater floor, toward the right edge of the image.

A little section of this picture served as this week's "Where in the Cosmos" picture puzzle on the Cosmic Log Facebook page earlier today. It didn't take long for Josh Jones to figure out what the picture showed, and to reward his mastery of a Martian mystery, I'm sending him a pair of 3-D glasses. Join the Cosmic Log Facebook community and stay tuned for the next "Where in the Cosmos" puzzle.

Speaking of Mars, my space-watching colleagues and I touched upon Red Planet research and other cosmic topics during the Weekly Space Hangout on Thursday. To wind up the week, here's the webcast, courtesy of Universe Today's Fraser Cain:

More about Mars:

• Rocks hint at strong quakes on Mars
• Mars orbiter spies on past probes
• NASA aims to shift money from Mars to space tech

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Slideshow: Stunning scientific sights

Click through prize-winning photos and illustrations from the 2011 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

Launch slideshow

Visualizing science has come a long way from the days of overhead projectors and boxes of microscope slides — and to see just how far we've come, all you need to do is take a look at this year's top entries in the International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

This is the ninth year for the competition, which is sponsored by the journal Science and the National Science Foundation. The 212 entries, received from 33 countries, focused on subjects ranging from transmission electron microscopy to the cosmic web that stretches across the universe.

Expert judges selected their top entries in five categories: photography, illustrations, informational posters and graphics, interactive games, and videos. But the general public got in on the judging as well, casting 3,200 online votes to select "People's Choice" award winners.

"The talent of these award winners is remarkable," Monica Bradford, Science's executive editor, said in a news release. "These winners communicate science in a manner that not only captures your attention but in many instances strives to look at different ways to solve scientific problems through their varied art forms."

Check out our slideshow, featuring the winners in the photography, illustration, poster/graphic and interactive game categories.

A mere slideshow doesn't give you the full flavor of the interactive games, however, so you'll really have to give them a try separately. The top-rated game is Foldit, a protein-folding puzzle game that has led to published research. We've written quite a bit about Foldit already: Check out our reports about the AIDS-like virus puzzle that was solved by Foldit players, and the molecular "recipes" that gamers came up with.

Three more games merited honorable mention: Meta!Blast 3D, an educational game about cellular biology; Build-a-Body, which lets players put together virtual organ system; and Powers of Minus Ten, which lets players zoom into the structure of virtual cells. Velu the Welder, a game from India that actually trains players to do welding, won the People's Choice award.

Before you get too involved in the game-playing, take a look at these winning videos:

Here's the list of winning entries in the other four categories of the 2011 challenge:

Photography: First place goes to Bryan William Jones, University of Utah, Moran Eye Center, for "Metabolomic Eye."

Honorable mention: Robert Rock Belliveau for "Microscopic Image of Trichomes on the Skin of an Immature Cucumber."

People's Choice: Babak Anasori, Michael Naguib, Yury Gogotsi, and Michel W. Barsoum of Drexel University for "The Cliff of the Two-Dimensional World."

Illustration: Three honorable mentions were cited. Emiko Paul and Quade Paul (Echo Medical Media) as well as Ron Gamble (UAB Insight) for "Tumor Death-Cell Receptors on Breast Cancer Cell." Joel Brehm of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Office of Research & Economic Development for "Variable-Diameter Carbon Nanotubes." Konstantin Poelke and Konrad Polthier of Free University Berlin for "Exploring Complex Functions using Domain Coloring." People's Choice: Andrew Noske and Thomas Deerinck (National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research, University of California, San Diego) as well as Horng Ou and Clodagh O'Shea (Salk Institute) for "Separation of a Cell."

Informational posters and graphics: First place goes to Miguel Angel Aragon-Calvo (Johns Hopkins University), Julieta Aguilera and Mark SubbaRao (Adler Planetarium) for "The Cosmic Web."

Honorable mention: Ivan Konstantinov, Yury Stefanov, Alexander Kovalevsky and Anastasya Bakulina of Visual Science for "The Ebola Virus."

People's Choice: Fabian de Kok-Mercado, Victoria Wahl-Jensen and Laura Bollinger of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases IRF for "Transmission Electron Microscopy: Structure, Function & 3D Reconstruction."

Interactive games: First place: Seth Cooper, David Baker, Zoran Popović, Firas Khatib, Jeff Flatten, Kefan Xu, Dun-Yu Hsiao, and Riley Adams of the Center for Game Science at the University of Washington for "Foldit."

Three honorable mentions were cited: W. Schneller, P.J. Campbell, M. Stenerson, D. Bassham, and E.S. Wurtele of Iowa State University for "Meta!Blast 3D Interactive Application for Cell and Metabolic Biology. Level 1: The Cell." Jeremy Friedberg, Nicole Husain, Ian Wood, Genevieve Brydson, Wensi Sheng, Lorraine Trecroce, Kariane St-Denis, David Rowe, Ruby Pajares, Arij Al Chawaf, Shaun Rana and Nancy Reilly of Spongelab Interactive for "Build-a-Body." Laura Lynn Gonzalez of Green-Eye Visualization for "Powers of Minus Ten."

People's Choice: Muralitharan Vengadasalam, Ganesh Venkat, Vignesh Palanimuthu, Fabian Herrera, and Ashok Maharaja of Tata Consultancy Services for "Velu the Welder."

More scientific visions to enjoy:

• Visions of science go viral: 2010's winners
• The top sights of science: 2009's winners
• Science that you can see: 2008's winners 
• Science's best sights: 2007's winners
• More visions of science: 2006's winners
• Visualization challenge: 2005's winners
• A scientific visual feast: 2004's winners
• Visualization challenge: 2003's winners
  

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Scott Garner

Artist Scott Garner's Still Life project uses technology similar to that found in today's smartphones to bring a traditional painting to life.

Life isn't still. Paintings don't have to be either. And now, thanks to Seattle-based artist Scott Garner, still life art is catching up with the times.

He's created an interactive gallery piece called Still Life that comes to life when tilted: the vase tips over, fruit rolls off plates and across the table, the fruit stand tumbles.

"It is about the role of technology in our lives and finding ways to switch our perspective on it a little bit," Garner told me Tuesday.

The installation consists of a traditional still life scene — a set table with fruit, plates, and an ornamental vase — presented on a flat screen TV that Garner wrapped in a traditional wooden frame.

"In any digital project, I try to find some source for more traditional craft," he noted.

This framed TV is hung on a rotating mount so that it swivels from side to side. A motion sensor is hooked to the back of the TV. As the screen moves, the tilt data is fed into a computer.

The computer, in turn, runs a video game engine from Unity 3D that Garner programmed so that it moves all the objects in the digital scene as they would in real life.

He created Still Life while an intern at superfad, a brand driven design and production company. Garner is now packing his bags to travel around before starting graduate school in digital art next year.

Where he's going is undecided, but wherever he ends up, he'll likely cast technology in new ways.

"We have amazing technology like smartphones with touch screens and accelerometers and voice recognition and all of these things, but basically you are still using it like a bunch of analog buttons," he said.

"One of the things I'm really interested in is finding ways around that, in addition to just general creative exploration."

— Via Discovery News

More on high-tech art:

• Art museums pin hopes on high tech
• Molecular movies go Hollywood
• The physics behind the movie magic
• Bio-artists bridge gap between arts, sciences

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

This year's "Dance Your Ph.D." winners include a "love story" about titanium alloy and bone tissue as well as performances inspired by fruit-fly sex, pigeon courtship and X-ray chromatography.

If you think these dances sound too dorky, they're not. They're funny. Beautiful. Even sexy.

That's not to say "Microstructure-Property Relationships in Ti2448 Components Produced by Selective Laser Melting" is anything like a spangly samba on "Dancing With the Stars." The science dance is far cleverer.

Joel Miller, a biomedical engineer at the University of Western Australia in Perth, got together with some high-stepping friends and shot 2,200 still images that were converted into a stop-action animation. "We didn't have a video camera," he told ScienceNOW's John Bohannon, the organizer of the "Dance Your Ph.D." contest.

The resulting 4-minute video tells the story of Titanium Man (played by Miller) and Bone Woman (Sara Fontaine), and how a blend of titanium's alpha and beta crystalline forms makes a perfect match for bone tissue. The laser-heated alloy could bring about a happy ending for the love story: better, longer-lasting hip and knee replacements.

Bohannon created the Ph.D. dance contest in 2008, under the sponsorship of the journal Science, to give doctoral students a chance to transform their research into dance routines. This year, a record 55 dance videos were entered.

Miller's biomedical love story earned him not only the top spot in the physics category, but also the grand prize of $1,000 and a free trip to TEDx Brussels, a gathering of scientists, artists and business leaders in Belgium.

Three other videos won $500 prizes:

Cedric Kai Wei Tan, a biologist at the University of Oxford, won the biology category with his depiction of the fruit fly's mating dance. It turns out that females prefer to mate with brothers who are recognized by scent.

"Females preferentially mate with males that are related to the first mates because there might be immunological and survival costs associated with mating with males that are unrelated to their first mate," Tan says.

The Ph.D. dance traces the complex sequence of sniffing, licking and chasing that goes into the fruit fly's mating ritual. Let's see them try that on "Dancing With the Stars":

FoSheng Hsu, a structural biologist at Cornell University, was tops in the chemistry category for his solo interpretation of the time-consuming process for extracting proteins from E. coli bacteria and determining their structure through X-ray crystallography.

To get the gist, you have to read the description of each step of the process as you watch the video.

During the different stages of the dance, Hsu portrays the E. coli, the affinity beads used during purification, the scientist doing the crystallization, the screen for X-ray diffraction images and even the three-dimensional structure of the protein being studied.

The tricky procedure "is crucial for not just understanding the cellular function but also provides a fundamental step to drug design," Hsu says. To tell the truth, I don't know which is trickier ... X-ray crystallography or X-ray choreography:

Emma Ware, a behavioral biologist at Queen's University in Canada, won the social science prize for a dance mimicking the interactions of pigeons during courtship. Ware tinkered with the pigeons' perceptions by showing the males time-delayed video of the females' movements. If the delays were more than a few seconds, the males were thrown off their rhythm and the courtship dance was disrupted.

There's yet another twist: The delays didn't have much effect on male-male or female-female interactions. "There is something 'special' about courtship dynamics," Ware reported in her dance video.

Bohannon said Ware's ability to replicate the pigeon experiment with a human dance partner was an "impressive choreographic feat." See if you agree:

More dancing with the scientists: 

• 2010 winners: Chemistry you can dance to
• Dancing gators reveal sonic secrets
• Dolphins join in on tail-walking fad
• How the 'Dancing' vote was hacked

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to a circle on Google+. And for something completely different, check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Archaeologists say the shapes of finger marks suggest that children as young as 2 years old made drawings on the walls of a Paleolithic cave dwelling, with an occasional boost from the grown-ups.

The tale of the "prehistoric preschool" was laid out by Cambridge University archaeologist Jessica Cooney last weekend at a conference on the archaeology of childhood. Cooney has been studying hundreds of markings made on the walls of France's Rouffignac cave complex. Many of the markings are thought to date back 13,000 years, to a hunter-gatherer culture known as the Magdalenian. The same culture is thought to have created the better-known cave drawings at Lascaux.

Like Lascaux, the 5-mile (8-kilometer) Rouffignac cave network has plenty of drawings, depicting mammoths, rhinoceroses, horses and even a cave bear. But Cooney focuses on a different kind of art: impressions left behind in clay or "moonmilk" — a soft, white, crystalline precipitate that forms inside limestone caves. The ancient artists created the impressions by pressing or dragging their fingers through the soft material on the cave walls. Those markings are what Cooney and her research colleague, Walden University's Leslie Van Gelder, used to estimate how old the artists were. 

The analysis built upon years of research that Van Gelder conducted along with her late husband, archaeologist-theologian Kevin Sharpe. They measured the hands of thousands of modern-day people and came up with a correlation between the span of a person's three middle fingers and the person's age. For example, if the tips of the three fingers cover less than 1.3 inches (34 millimeters) in width, the fingers definitely belong to a child less than 7 years old, Cooney explained.

That modern-day analysis was then applied to the cave impressions, known as finger flutings.

"By 2006, Sharpe and Van Gelder had developed a way of determining the age and gender of children’s hand impressions, through the flutings," Cooney explained in Cambridge's news release. "As a methodology, it’s amazingly accurate.  By measuring the flutings at Rouffignac with callipers and matching them up against the modern data set, we can tell the age of the child who made them to up to 7 years old — and that is being conservative.  Similarly, if we have a clear finger profile, the shape of the top edges of the fingers, we can tell to 80 percent accuracy whether the individual was female or male. This works with both children and adults. Using methodology we can also identify marks made by the same child."

Cooney and Van Gelder spent a week making detailed measurements in the Rouffignac caves.

The researchers suspect that eight to 10 people, including four kids aged 7 or younger, were behind the ancient finger flutings. Children left marks in every chamber. One of them was apparently just 2 or 3 years old and may have been helped by a grown-up. "The most prolific of the children who made flutings was aged around 5 — and we are almost certain the child in question was a girl," Cooney said. 

Cooney said that child's markings appear on cave ceilings more than 6 feet (2 meters) high, which would suggest that she was held up or put on someone's shoulders to make the marks. One chamber was so marked up by children that it may have served as a "playpen of sorts," she said.

Finger flutings have been found not only in France and Spain, but in Australia and New Zealand as well. Were they mere doodles, or was there a deeper significance to the markings?

"We don’t know why people made them," Cooney said in the news release. "We can make guesses, like they were for initiation rituals, for training of some kind, or simply something to do on a rainy day.  In addition to the simple meandering lines, there are flutings of animals and shapes that appear to be very crude outlines of faces, almost cartoonlike in appearance. There are also hutlike shapes called tectiforms, markings thought to have a symbolic meaning which are only found in a very specific area of France. When in 2006 Sharpe and Van Gelder showed that that some of the tectiforms were the work of children, it was the first known instance of prehistoric children engaging in symbolic figure-making."

Personally, I lean toward the idea that the markings were the Paleolithic equivalent of kindergarten fingerpainting, but what do you think? Feel free to speculate in the comment section below.

More about prehistoric cave art:

• Altamira cave art in peril again, scientists say
• 'Cave' documentary is awesome and immediate
• Fungus threatens famed Lascaux cave drawings
• Gallery: Ancient rock art from around the world

For a guided tour of the Rouffignac cave complex's kiddie art, check out Rossella Lorenzi's report for Discovery News.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

Nathalie Miebach

This wall piece, "The Perfect Storm," reflects weather data from the twin storms of 1990 that sank a fishing vessel off the coast of Massachusetts - and inspired a book and movie that were also titled "The Perfect Storm." Click through a slideshow featuring Miebach's musical scores and sculptures.

Nathalie Miebach decides what storms sound like.

This Boston artist spends her studio time turning reams of weather data — wind speeds, barometric readings and rainfall totals — into music and sculptures. 

Miebach's work has tracked temperate storms, documented the daily weather of beaches. In one particularly poignant project, she created a musical piece that documented changes in weather during the week following her father-in-law's death. For her work, Miebach was selected as a 2011 TEDGlobal Fellow. 

Origins
It began when Miebach signed up for astronomy night classes at Harvard, while taking basket weaving lessons from a local artist during the day. "I was going to the lecture with my bucket and sprayer," Miebach said, "[I was] learning about astronomy ... about the deepest of space, and the deepest of time, but all I really got was a two-dimensional understanding of it all." 

But then something clicked: Miebach found herself thinking, "I could really use the basket to find a tactile way of understanding astronomy." 

Miebach's final project wove her daytime and nighttime pursuits neatly together. She made a basket which described an astronomical chart — the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, which astronomers use to classify stars.

Miebach was hooked. "When you take data and put it into 3-D, things get revealed that don’t get seen in a normal graph," said the artist, who spent six years after her Harvard course working on art inspired by data from the stars.

And then one day, she got a call from two weather scientists at Tufts University. They'd gotten wind of her work, and asked her to spend a summer collecting weather data on a lonely patch of Massachusetts coast on Cape Cod.

The Cape Cod experience rerouted her attention to weather data, which she then started using as the raw material for her artistic work. To create the pieces she makes now, she uses a combination of data she collects by herself, from wind vanes and temperature gauges, as well as data available off the Internet: temperature and wind speed, measured over the course of days, weeks, or months.

Where the music happens
The musical bits coming out of Miebach's projects really started out as a happy accident, when she realized that what she understood as a graph of data could be re-interpreted by musicians. 

Miebach wasn't an expert herself. "I don’t know anything about music – I don’t play music and I can’t read music," she acknowledged. But she found musicians such as Janet Schiff, a Milwaukee cellist, who were willing to help her convert numbers on graph paper to music that musicians could understand. "That was my challenge," Schiff told me.

"My No. 1 rule is that I don't touch the data," she said. The numbers get laid out on a graph. The graph is then embellished with things that Miebach saw, like the cloud cover, or the moon cycles. "A D on a piano keyboard might be a 5-mile-an-hour wind," Miebach said.

During a series of exchanges with the musicians, the notations are reworked, polished, and refined so that they make musical sense. The music ends up sounding a little like this, or this. Both of these are recordings of Miebach's "Hurricane Noel," which was made from weather data that tracked a storm's path along North America's east coast, all the way from Haiti to Nova Scotia. (The audio files are large, so give them a while to open.)

Miebach encourages the musicians who play her work — such as Janet Schiff and her colleagues in the Nineteen Thirteen Trio, or the Axis Ensemble — to personalize the work, as long as they keep the data intact. That's why the two recordings sound different.

Nathalie Miebach

The musical score for "Hurricane Noel" incorporates weather data from a storm that swept through North America's east coast over the course of three and a half days in 2007. Click through a slideshow featuring Miebach's musical scores and sculptures.

Artistry and awkwardness
It isn't until the score is perfected and packed away that Miebach begins sculpting. She picks one or two elements of the swirling data before her, and begins building, looping in layer after layer, creating wall mounts as well as woven sculptures.

The final products, arresting visuals with loud weaves and bright colors, at first glance look like something out of a kid's store, Miebach admits, but that's what draws people in.

"Only when they have their nose in the sculpture, that’s when they realize that this is all numbers. That behind all this playful presentation is a system of logic that puts it all together," she said. 

At that moment, there's an "awkward tension" that develops between the viewer and her piece, Miebach said, as they realize that what they're looking at could fit snugly in an art gallery, in a science museum and in a craft show. This awkward art appreciation is just what Miebach is looking for.

More about turning science into art: 

• Music of the genes
• Music of the spheres … and the stars
• The geometry of music
• Music made for monkeys

Click through a selection of Miebach's sculptures and musical scores.

Nidhi Subbaraman is the science and tech news intern at msnbc.com. Follow Nidhi on Twitter, and connect with the Cosmic Log on Facebook. 

Norman Rockwell

A Norman Rockwell oil painting shows astronauts John Young and Gus Grissom as they're suited for the first flight of the Gemini program in March 1965. NASA lent Rockwell a Gemini spacesuit in order to make this painting as accurate as possible. Click through highlights from the "NASA | ART" exhibition.

Space visions from well-known painters, photographers, sculptors and astronauts — dating back to the beginnings of NASA's spaceflights in the 1960s — go on display this weekend at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum after a three-year national tour. The exhibition of more than 70 works from the NASA Art Program, titled "NASA | ART: 50 Years of Exploration," comes as the latest chapter of spaceflight history, the 30-year space shuttle program, is nearing its end.

The NASA Art Program was set up in 1962 to show space exploration from a perspective that launch cameras couldn't capture. "The artists were given pretty much free rein to do anything they wanted to do," Tom Crouch, senior curator of aeronautics at the Smithsonian, told The Washington Post. And what artists! The lineup included Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, James Wyeth, Alexander Calder, Annie Leibovitz and William Wegman.

For this exhibition, the curators added works by Norman Rockwell, the classic Americana illustrator; and Alan Bean, the Apollo 12 moonwalker who's an accomplished artist as well. DCist's Heather Goss says the exhibition is "pretty damn spectacular." She calls particular attention to Paul Calle's pen-and-ink sketches of the Apollo 11 astronauts as they were suiting up for their historic 1969 moon landing.

What masterpieces can we expect from future flights? The Post reports that no artists were commissioned to document the shuttle Endeavour's launch on May 16 due to budget cuts, but it says a "world-famous photographer, who declines to be named right now," will be on hand when Atlantis lifts off on July 8 to close out the space shuttle program.

Check out the exhibition, which is on display on the second floor of the National Air and Space Museum on Washington's National Mall through Oct. 9. And if you can't get to the exhibit, you can sample some of the highlights in our "NASA | ART" slideshow.

More about space art:

• Moonwalker's art goes on display at Smithsonian
• Spacey artists win crafty prizes from Etsy and NASA
• Hubble Space Telescope goes pop
• Artists of the final frontier

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.