Multimedia Gallery
"Self Defense"
"Self Defense," by Kai-hung Fung, Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital, Hong Kong.
This is no shell game but a matter of life or death. The clam (left) can snap its bivalve shell shut at the first sign of a threat. The whelk (right) has evolved another strategy: The spiral shell provides a series of barricades to potential invaders. This dramatic example of two different evolutionary strategies for self-defense caught the eye of radiologist Kai-hung Fung.
To create the image, Fung used a CT (computed tomography) scanner to visualize thin slices of the whelk and clam and then rendered their contours in rainbow colors to highlight their complex structures. Creating such images involves balancing "two sides of a coin," he says. "One side is factual information, while the other side is artistic."
This image won honorable mention in the photography category of the 2012 Visualization Challenge, now called the Vizzies, a long-running, annual competition co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Popular Science magazine. [The competition was formerly named the International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge (SciVis) and was previously co-sponsored with AAAS' journal Science.] The competition aims to recognize some of the most beautiful visualizations from the worlds of science and engineering and awards prizes in five categories: photography, video, illustration, posters & graphics and interactives.
To learn more about the competition and view all the winning entries, past and present, see the NSF Special Report The VIZZIES: Visualization Challenge. (Date of Image: June 2012)
Credit: Kai-hung Fung, Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital, Hong Kong
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