Toxic barbs on a cucumber’s skin, nanoscopic flakes of metal and a mouse’s technicolor eyeball (above) are just a few of 2011′s top science visualizations. A panel of judges picked the best of more than 200 entries from 33 countries for the 2011 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. “I think because information technology tools and visualization tools have advanced, people have found ever-increasingly clever ways to display difficult scientific concepts,” said competition judge Thomas Wagner, a cryosphere scientist at NASA, in an interview provided by the contest. Contest judges made their picks based on visual impact, originality and clarity. The winners, which include “people’s choice” awards as well as honorable mentions, were published online Feb. 2 in the journal Science. The entries weren’t just limited to photographs. Contest categories also included illustrations, informational graphics, videos and even interactive video games. See the best of these science and engineering visualizations in this gallery. Images and videos courtesy of AAAS/Science Above: Mouse Eyeball Cells Researchers stained ultra-thin slices of a mouse’s eye to create this first-place photography winner. The stain was made of three antibodies that bind to three different molecules present in all cells, but in differing concentrations. Assigning red, blue and green to each antibody allowed the creators to depict more than 70 different cell types in the organ. Image: Bryan William Jones/University of Utah/Moran Eye Center [high-resolution]

Nanoscopic Cliffs In this electron micrograph, which won a “people’s choice” award in photography, ultra-thin layers of a titanium compound make a convincing canyon-like cliff overhang. When dunked in hydrofluoric acid, a compound known as Ti3AlC2 loses its aluminum to form five-atom-thick layers of Ti3C2. The result is a nearly two-dimensional compound that researchers call “MXene.” Image: Babak Anasori/Michael Naguib/Yury Gogotsi/Michel W. Barsoum/Drexel University [high-resolution]

Cucumber Skin Barbs Under 800X magnification, this honorable-mention-winning photograph shows toxin-filled barbs called trichomes on the skin of an immature cucumber. The trichomes bear sharp points 40 times thinner than a sewing needle and help protect the growing fruit from predators. The toxins they release are called cucurbiticins and are the most bitter compounds known. Image: Dr. Robert Rock Bellivea [high-resolution]

Simpler 3-D Cells The crushing complexity of cells can make realistic depictions difficult to understand. To better communicate important information about cells, a team of researchers designed a program — shown in this video — to reorganize cellular contents for students and educators. The entry won first place in the video category as well as a people’s choice award. Video: Graham T. Johnson/The Scripps Research Institute/Andrew Noske/National Center for Microscopy & Imaging Research/Bradley Marsh/Institute for Molecular Bioscience/University of Queensland

What’s a Jellyfish? Jellyfish aren’t the creatures you think they are, but a fabulous array of wildly diverse creatures unfairly grouped under one simplistic name, argues this honorable-mention-winning video. Video: Steven Haddock/Susan Von Thun/MBARI/jellywatch.org

Self-Assembling Energy Storage Alternative energy raises hopes of combating climate change, but making efficient, inexpensive means of storing green energy hasn’t proven easy. This video, which riffs on Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, shows how self-assembling nanostructures might lead to the next generation of fuel tanks. Video: Christopher E. Wilmer/Omar K. Farha/Patrick E. Fuller/Northwestern University

Foldit and Velu the Welder Games Nearly sweeping the interactive games category was a web-based game called Foldit. The program harnessed the brainpower of 200,000 players to outperform computers in figuring out the complex folding pattern of proteins. The people’s-choice-winning interactive game (below), called Velu the Welder was created for the Wii and standard computers to help school drop-outs in India develop a highly marketable trade skill. Images/video: 1) Seth Cooper/David Baker/Zoran Popović/Firas Khatib/Jeff Flatten/Kefan Xu/Dun-Yu Hsiao/Riley Adams/Center for Game Science at University of Washington 2) Muralitharan Vengadasalam/Ganesh Venkat/Vignesh Palanimuthu/Fabian Herrera/Ashok Maharaja/Tata Consultancy Services

Powers of Minus Ten, Meta!Blast and Build-a-Body Games The game Powers of Minus Ten allows players to zoom into a person’s hand, explore the world at different magnifications and learn about the human body (in the screenshot above, a cellular-level magnification shows dividing cells). In Meta!Blast (below), another zoom-in game, players save shrunken lab mates trapped in a plant cell. Along the way, they explore cell structures. Build-a-Body (last image) helps players build a human and learn about a menagerie of diseases. All three games earned honorable mentions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQYyUy8p3KE Images/video: 1) Laura Lynn Gonzalez/Green-Eye Visualization 2) W. Schneller/P.J. Campell/M. Stenerson/D. Bassham/ES Wurtele/Iowa State University 3) Jeremy Friedberg/Nicole Husain/Ian Wood/Genevieve Brydson/Wensi Sheng/Lorraine Trecroce/Kariane St-Denis/David Rowe/Ruby Pajares /Arij Al Chawaf/Shaun Rana/Nancy Reilly/Spongelab Interactive

The Cosmic Web Dark matter outweighs visible matter more than 6 to 1, making it a crucial yet invisible galaxy component. To visualize dark matter’s influence, artists visualized a 240-million-light-year-wide zone of space and depicted the universe’s structure from the Big Bang (left) to the present (right). (The full image is too big to fit in this space, so be sure to view the high-resolution version.) Orange strings of dark matter coalesce along the edges of 10-million-light-year-wide cosmic voids, giving rise to the filamentous web of galaxies seen in space today. The image won first place in informational graphics. Image: Miguel A. Aragon Calvo/Julieta Aguilera/Mark SubbaRao/AAAS/Science [high-resolution]

Ebola Virus and Electron Microscope Deconstruction From the artists who won last year’s first-place prize for an illustration comes a new view of the deadly ebola virus. The image earned an honorable mention in the information graphics category. Below, a detailed chart shows how every piece of an electron microscope works. (Be sure to look at the high-resolution version, which won a people’s choice award.) Images: 1) Ivan Konstantinov/Yury Stefanov/Alexander Kovalevsky/Anastasya Bakulina/Visual Science [high-resolution] 2) Fabian de Kok-Mercado/Victoria Wahl-Jensen/Laura Bollinger/NIAID IRF, Frederick, MD [high-resolution]

Complex Functions and Cell Division Mathematical functions touch all fields of science, but some are notoriously difficult to understand — so researchers turn to visualizations to give themselves a break. The image above uses a technique called “domain coloring” to visualize one complex function. Zero-values appear as black, infinitely large numbers as white and everything in between a different brightness. Each color represents a specific complex number. Below, a 3-D image illustrates a cell undergoing mitosis, or cell division. Blue represents the cellular membrane while chromosomes are shown in yellow. A fluorescent protein used to tag chromosomes, called MiniSOG, is shown flying out of the cell (top left). The complex function image earned an honorable mention in the illustration category while the cell division image won the people’s choice award. Image: 1) Konrad Polthier/Konstantin Poelke/Free University of Berlin [high-resolution], 2) Andrew Noske/Thomas Deerinck/National Center for Microscopy & Imaging Research/University of California/San Diego/Horng Ou, Clodagh O’Shea/Salk Institute [high-resolution]