Science Visualized As Art: 2008 Winning Images (PHOTOS)

The New Scientist has a gallery of gorgeous images that visualize science as artwork. The images are the winners of the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge: "The awards are given to the best photographs, illustrations and interactive media that visualize science and technology."

Scroll down to see some of this year's winners (see the whole gallery here).

"Squid Suckers: The Little Monsters That Feed the Beast, awarded an Honorable Mention in Photography, is a false-colour microscope image of the suction cups on the arm of the Loligo pealei squid. The 400 micrometer suckers have chitin "fangs" and were photographed by Jessica D. Schiffman and Caroline L. Schauer, Drexel University."

"Mad Hatter's Tea, winner of the Informational Graphics award, is taken from a book called Alice's Adventures in a Microscopic Wonderland. Colleen Champ and Dennis Kunkel, at Concise Image Studios, carefully built scenes from Lewis Carroll's story using microscope images of insects and other small animals."

"The Glass Forest, winner of the photography prize, depicts a community of microscopic diatoms - unicellular algae with a peculiar glass-like cell wall - attached to a marine invertebrate (Eudendrium racemosum). Mario De Stefano, 2nd University of Naples, captured the image with a scanning electron microscope."