The year's finest science images and visualizations have been announced – and now it's your turn to pick a winner.

The entries come from the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science.

Below are not only the winners of the photography, illustration and visualization categories, but the runners-up. The images are so uniformly amazing that you might prefer one of the contenders.

One week from now, we'll close the voting and announce your category winners – and, of course, the über-winner.

*Note: Image descriptions seem to have been written by the creators themselves, but appear – as do the images – courtesy of Science. Also, to avoid prejudicing you, the image above is the 2007 photography winner, produced by Kai-hung Fung and Pamela Youde of Nethersole Eastern Hospital, and entitled "**What Lies Behind Our Nose?" *

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See Also:__

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.