"Regulation of the Cell Cycle and DNA Damage-Induced Checkpoint Activation"

"Regulation of the Cell Cycle and DNA Damage-Induced Checkpoint Activation," by Erin Olson and her team at R&D Systems, Inc., Minneapolis, Minn.

Inside a cell's nucleus, some proteins act like quality control auditors, ensuring that it's safe for the cell to copy its DNA and divide. This informational graphic from Erin Olson and her team at R&D Systems, Inc. in Minneapolis, Minn., sketches how these proteins seek out DNA damage during checkpoints as the cell moves between the four stages of its cycle. In the purple circles, they juxtapose the actions of the checkpoint proteins with the normal events inside the cell's nucleus. Some of these checkpoint proteins detect DNA damage, while others sit on the broken site and recruit new proteins to send out the call for DNA repair enzymes to fix the problem. Olson hopes the poster will serve as a quick reference for researchers and biology students.

This image won Honorable Mention in the Informational Graphics category of the 2009 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge (SciVis) competition, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science. The competition is held each year to celebrate the grand tradition of science visualization and to encourage its continued growth. The spirit of the competition is to communicate science, engineering and technology for education and journalistic purposes. To learn more about the competition and view all the winning entries, see the NSF SciVis Special Report (Date of Image: January-April 2009)

Credit: Erin Olson, Daphne Orlando and Tim Manning; R&D Systems, Inc.

"Mucus Meadows"

"Mucus Meadows," by Jerome Carpenter and Sheel Shah, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

This rolling green pasture is a scene common to all of us; it's the landscaping found inside the lungs. The thickets of grass are cilia emerging from the cell membrane. The cilia seen here are in various stages of growth, from the newly sprouted stalks in the top left and bottom right to the more mature cilia on the left side of the image. The landscape is also dotted with clumps of secreted mucus and a ubiquitous field of microvilli. While some of the cell boundaries are easily spotted by fissures, the others can be traced out with careful examination. This particular image is of a ciliated cell culture that has been washed to remove most of its surface mucus. The culture was preserved with formaldehyde and imaged with an environmental scanning electron microscope.

This image was entered for judging in the Photography category of the 2009 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge (SciVis) competition, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Journal Science. The competition is held each year to celebrate the grand tradition of science visualization and to encourage its continued growth. The spirit of the competition is to communicate science, engineering and technology for education and journalistic purposes. To learn more about the competition and view all the winning entries, see the NSF SciVis Special Report (Date of Image: August 2009)

Credit: Jerome Carpenter and Sheel Shah, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"Follow the Money: Human Mobility and Effective Communities" (Images 1-3)

Image 1: "Follow the Money: Human Mobility and Effective Communities," by Christian Thiemann and Daniel Grady, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.

Ever wonder where your dollar bills travel after you plop them down for a cup of coffee? The website "Where's George?" allows you to do just that: Record your bill's serial number and then track its journeys as other people spend it across the country. But it's more than just a game, because every time a dollar is spent in a new place, it means someone moved it there. Thiemann and Grady have been using the website's data to study how people move within the United States.

They produced this video to explain their project and animate the results. Tiny bills stretch out from county to county on a map of the contiguous U.S. Some places, such as Los Angeles, Calif., have many bills passing through it from across the nation, while others, such as Anderson County in Tennessee--Grady's home--have just a few that mainly cycle locally.

This image was tied for First Place in the Non-Interactive Media (Screen Shots) category of the 2009 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge (SciVis) competition, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science. The competition is held each year to celebrate the grand tradition of science visualization and to encourage its continued growth. The spirit of the competition is to communicate science, engineering and technology for education and journalistic purposes.

Image 2: This screen shot is from the video "Follow the Money: Human Mobility and Effective Communities," by Christian Thiemann and Daniel Grady of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.  The screen shot was entered in the Non-Interactive Media (Screen Shots) category of the 2009 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge (SciVis) competition, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science. 

The SciVis competition is held each year to celebrate the grand tradition of science visualization and to encourage its continued growth. The spirit of the competition is to communicate science, engineering and technology for education and journalistic purposes.

 (Date of Images: September 2009)

Credit: Christian Thiemann and Daniel Grady, Northwestern University