2007 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge:

About a month and a half remain before time runs out (May 31st 2007) for submissions to the 2007 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge jointly hosted by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and journal Science.

From the blurb on their site:

You can do science without graphics. But it’s very difficult to communicate it in the absence of pictures. Indeed, some insights can only be made widely comprehensible as images. How many people would have heard of fractal geometry or the double helix or solar flares or synaptic morphology or the cosmic microwave background, if they had been described solely in words? Judges appointed by the NSF and the journal Science will select winners in each of five categories: photographs, illustrations, informational graphics, interactive media and non-interactive media. The winners will be published in a special section of the Sept. 28, 2007 issue of the journal Science and Science Online and on the NSF Web site.

I really enjoyed their previous years submissions (2006 here and 2005 here)

Image above: 'The Synapse Revealed'

Credit: Graham Johnson, Graham Johnson Medical Media (I very much liked his portfolio)

Description: Deep inside the brain, a neuron prepares to transmit a signal to its target. To capture that expectant, fleeting moment with painstaking detail, science illustrator Graham Johnson based his elegant, highly accurate drawing on ultra-thin micrographs of sequential brain slices. The brain contains billions of neurons, whose network of chemical messages form the basis of all thought, movement and behavior. Johnson’s illustration tells the story of one such signal, a synaptic millisecond that is both eye-catching and accurate in scale and shape.