Every year Science Magazine and the National Science Foundation team up to run a competition to recognize the most effective and cutting-edge efforts at visualizing scientific data, principles, or ideas. Below is this year's winner, an illustration of the HIV virus (you can read about what you are seeing here) by Ivan Konstantinov, Yury Stefanov, Aleksander Kovalevsky, and Yegor Voronin.
(click to enlarge)
Here are two less scary, warm and fuzzy, winners.....
A tomato seed by Robert Rock Belliveau
Map of links between the genes of the mustard plant Arabidopsis thaliana by Insuk Lee, Michael Ahn, Edward Marcotte, and Seung Yon Rhee.