All too often, the beauty of scientific knowledge gets trapped in monochrome graphs and jarring acronyms. The touch of talented artists, however, can set it free. The 2010 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge released its top stunning entries today. They appear in the Feb. 18 issue of Science, which together with the National Science Foundation sponsored the event. From GPS-tracked trash and nanoscale ripples to colliding quasars and hairy tomato seeds, dig into our favorite science visualizations in this gallery. Human Immunodeficiency Virus The HIV virus, a menacing genetic script that lethally infects more than 33 million people worldwide, looks more like a splotch under the planet’s most powerful microscopes. By scraping for details of the virus’ structure from more than 100 studies in three different scientific fields, however, four focused artists summed it up into one intricate 3-D structure. The model is now considered the most-detailed ever created for the contagion, and won the competition’s first-place prize in illustrations. Image: Ivan Konstantinov, Yury Stefanov, Aleksander Kovalevsky, Yegor Voronin/Visual Science Company [high-resolution version available]

Quasar Collision Quasars are supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies that swallow up nearby matter, creating energetic signatures that astronomers can spot across the universe. To see how a double-quasar system formed 4 billion light-years away, astrophysicists created a computer model able to reconstruct the tango of their two merging parent galaxies. Video: Thomas J. Cox/Carnegie Institution for Science

Nanoscale Monolayer Lending artistic vision of the nanoscale world, two researchers bore down on a gold surface with an atomic-force microscope. Sitting on top of the gold was a nanothin layer of self-assembled molecules. The rippling blue result earned them first-place posterity in the photography category. Image: Seth B. Darling/Argonne National Laboratory; Steven J. Sibener/University of Chicago

AraNet Even the simplest of organisms, such as the small flowering plant called Arabidopsis thaliana, use thousands of genes to get through life. The sheer number can easily obfuscate any gene-to-gene interactions. Using AraNet -- the Genome-wide Gene Function Association Network for Arabidopsis thaliana -- artists mapped the links between functioning genes in technicolor. More than 50 million experimental observations went into building the gene network. The strength of each gene-to-gene connection increases from blue to red. Image: Insuk Lee, Michael Ahn, Edward Marcotte, Seung Yon Rhee/Carnegie Institution for Science

Fungus Among Us From the fuzz on leftover food to the base of a multibillion-dollar beer industry, fungi is everywhere. Putting the enormous branch of multicellular life into perspective with a highly detailed guide, artists picked up Science and the NSF’s first-place prize in informational graphics. Image: Kandis Elliot, Mo Fayyaz/University of Wisconsin, Madison

GlyphSea Vector data, like telltale ribbons on a sailboat’s canvas, show where something is moving and how fast. To bring new life to hard-to-visualize vector datasets, such as seismic waves that roll through rock and sediment, researchers built the computer-powered GlyphSea model shown here. Their work earned them an honorable mention in the competition. Video: Amit Chourasia, Emmett Mcquinn, Bernard Minster, Jurgen Schulze/San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD

T4 Bacteriophage Like a miniature robot from a sci-fi thriller, tiny viruses known as bacteriophages inject their genetic goods into unsuspecting Escherichia coli bacteria. In short order, the bacteria’s innards are hijacked and begin pumping out viral clones. This extremely detailed visualization shows one such virus, called an enterobacteria phage T4. It earned an honorable mention in illustrations. Image: Jonathan Heras/Equinox Graphics, Ltd.

Yeast’s Mitotic Spindle When cells clone themselves, a crucial structure called the mitotic spindle forms around chromosomes and guides the duplication and divvying up of DNA. Such spindles are visible under a microscope, but their 3-D likeness remains somewhat of a mystery. By spending two years with scientists from an array of fields -- including physicists, biologists and computer scientists -- artists were able to piece together this proposed model of a mitotic spindle in yeast. The green represents rod-like microtubles, yellow represents DNA, and proteins are shown in red and purple. Image: The Mitotic Spindle Group/University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Tomato Seed Hairs On each tomato seed, tiny hairs called trichomes secrete the goo that encases them. The sticky substance not only protects would-be seedlings from drying out, but also glues them to soil so they don’t blow away. This stunning photo earned an honorable mention in the photography category. Image: Robert Rock Belliveau