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The Best Science Photographs of 2005
Hogwash McFly writes "This year's Visions Of Science Photographic Awards have honored several amazing snapshots in the realm of science photography. Photographs were each judged in one of ten categories, and winning images range from a sinister cancer cell to the use of eggs to illustrate panspermia. The full list of winners and runners up is featured on the official website, and there are larger versions of the winners over at the Beeb and at National Geographic."
Some of those were pretty nice shots.
The children's stuff was even more impressive - I particularly liked the bursting baloon!
"Murderer? Well, that's a harsh word. I prefer to think of myself as a Mortality Technician."
See also: The Lennart Nilsson Award
that someone just wanted to say "panspermia."
Seemed to be much more art than science. Eggs falling into water to represent panspermia. At least the others had some relation to more hard science. I liked the ion channel the best. Seemed vaguely like a mushroom cloud. Had many elements of art along with hard science.
From now on I'll have to check each pea I eat for pea weevils.
End transmission.
There are a bunch of beautiful visualizations at this site http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/vis2005/show/ssin tro.dtl
I must have overslept, for just yesterday I thought it was October 21 and there were still 10 more weeks left in 2005!
Simpsons 1F17 [Diorama-rama Day]:
... Let's have a look.
Skinner:
[quietly to Miss Hoover] Get the ribbon ready.
[pulls sheet off]
Oh...a little...sterile...no _real_ insight. What do you
think, Miss Hoover?
Hoover: Ehh.
Skinner: Ooh, now we're into the dregs. Here's Ralph Wiggum's entry.
[pulls sheet off]
Pre-packaged "Star Wars" characters, still in their display
box? Are those the limited-edition action figures?
Ralph: What's a diorama?
Skinner: Why it's Luke, and Obi-Wan, and my favorite, Chewie! They're
all here! [to Miss Hoover] What do you think?
Hoover: [bored] I think it's lunch time.
Skinner: We have a winner!
One simple rule for its versus it's
Before this gets /. into hell, can someone post a mirror?
This is pretty old news.
over and over again... "Coloured using Adobe Photoshop". "Science" and "Photoshop" do not go together. Does the public need even more reason to distrust science?
Notice that most of the photos were artificially colored.
The contest seems to be public relations advertising. It is supported by Novartis, a pharmaceutical company that perhaps should not be trusted completely: Kindness, or maximizing shareholder value?
Slashdotted in under 20 comments. And it's a photo gallery, which makes it even worse.
I love trying to take close up photos, like this one http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=52264740&c ontext=set-1132411&size=l or this one http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=52265385&c ontext=set-1132411&size=l (he's actually starting to spin the web on this one) using my Sony DSC F828 (these are 50% the actual size for flickr). It's amazing the detail you can get.
Anyone have their own site with closeups? What camera are you using?
KeepTrackOfIt.com - Find the lowest gas prices in your area graphically
I don't mean to be a hater, but i dugg this story exactly 23 days ago. Slashdot is getting waxed lately on story submissions.
I always find it interesting how the visual arts community attempts to capture the reality of the world based on the known principles of their day. Looking back through history at the artist rendering of our world provides us with a unique perspective on how wrong we were in describing the world in art.
Art is all about expressing ideas or concepts visually-- Certain portions of the world of science, especially quantum mechanics, are just too weird for us to capture in visual display. Perhaps it will take someone like Dali or Escher to provides us with a view of the quantum world.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Tell me about it. During a tour of Hubble control and image processing at Johns Hopkins I was given a sneak preview of the photo that was being prepped for public release as THE symbolic 15th anniversary photo (some spiral galaxy that was admittedly breathtaking.)
The "prep" involved touching it up with Photoshop. Disappointing to say the least.
I figured there would be millions of folks posting "What about this picture"...but maybe I underestimated /. readers!
Best Buy can have you arrested
Science and Photoshop (or whatever other image processing method) goes very well together. The purpose of the pictures is to show something. Drawing an arrow in the picture or colouring an interesting structure is the same thing. Even laymen might have heard of e.g. Gram colouring of bacteria in light microscopy (even if they don't know that all scanning electron micrographs are really in grayscale and a HIV virion isn't Dangerously Red in reality...).
What doesn't go together, IMO, is photographic awards and Photoshop! The "enhancement" wasn't even limited to coloured SE-micrographs, there are even pure photo montages and screendumps!
It's a "purdy picshurs" award.
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
Does the public already distrust science? Is there some sort of science conspiracy?
Used correctly for scientific purposes, Photoshop is little more than giving artificial coloring to the subject. Scientific photographs and images do this _all_the_time_. Ever see an image from an electron microscope? Photographs/images of just about anything cellular? All artificially colored, either through use of dyes or photoshop techniques. The reason for artificial coloring is to aid in visually distinguishing between different parts/whatever. That's not to say sometimes they don't go overboard, just to make it look pretty, but if they're using photoshop to accurately describe/represent what's actually there (or what they hypothesize is actually there to make it easier to peer review), then I'd say that's fine.
What about this first place picture? It sure could of had its own corporate backing. I can see it now.
"It looks like you're trying to take an award winning science photograph. Would you like some help?"
goatse troll.
How Paul Rapson managed to pull off "Worship"? That photo is amazing!
~jennifer.k~
You could have posted a Coral Cache with your post instead of asking someone else to make a mirror.
http://www.visions-of-science.co.uk/f-2005winners. htm
that's just plain nasty I could of gone my whole life not knowing this, and been all the happier for it. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
This is my favorite, the deformation of the water due to a clip's weight.
It made me remember something... when you hold a small thing (like a clip) very near your eye (so it blurs), the images you see in the background bends near the borders of the object... why?
Tell it to Ted Turner.
Bah! The site uses tables where pure CSS could have been implemented. It's crap!
That has to be embarrassing. Please insert foot into mouth.
When someone picks beautiful colors, the photo becomes partly art.
The implication is that people wouldn't be interested in straight science.
What color is IR in your world?
I fully agree. The problem here is that Novartis is presenting the photos more for their beauty than for their scientific information. That insults the thinking that goes into science. The real beauty of science is the thinking, not pretty pictures.
The whole thing is probably designed by a public relations agency to get free publicity for Novartis. Probably there is no one at the P.R. agency who has any interest in or respect for scientific investigation. However, that theory means that Novartis is out of control, or very much willing to mislead, because someone in top management at Novartis should have realized what they were doing was a mistake.
Certainly my opinion of Novartis has worsened.
Gee, I don't know about you, but I didn't have an actual photograph of the solar system when I learned about it in second grade. Somehow, the textbook visually represented that information using something other than areal photography.
h tm
Some of the standards for images are available on the website.
http://www.visions-of-science.co.uk/f-categories.
where'd it go?