Beneath the specialized language and formal rigors of science is a simple, easily forgotten principle: Science is way of exploring the world, and our world is a fantastic place.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in the images that science generates: Spiders that build their own dummies, dinosaurs cloaked in feathers, berries of a color more intense than any other natural hue. Here are Wired Science's favorite images of the year.
Above:Spider Attack in Amber
A spider attacks a wasp: A minute, everyday event, something that's happened billions upon billions of times in these antagonists' evolutionary history, each incident lost to time. But not this meeting, entombed by tree resin 100 million years ago in what's now Myanmar. The resin turned to amber, a time capsule both beautiful and informative.
Image: Oregon State University/Flickr
Topographical Moon
It's difficult for the unaided eye to appreciate the striking, varied geography of the moon, which has peaks higher than Mount Everest and craters nearly as deep as the Marianas Trench. This topographical map, published by NASA in February, conveys that geography in glorious fashion.
Image: NASA [high-resolution version]
Sandy From Space
Superstorm. Megastorm. Frankenstorm. Some 1,100 miles across, Sandy was the largest Atlantic hurricane ever.
Dinosaur Feathers Everywhere
Dinosaurs have always been fun to imagine, and doubly so since scientists realized that some had feathers. This detail comes from an artist's rendering of Yutyrannus huali, a 30-foot-long forerunner of Tyrannosaurus rex that, by virtue of its place on the dinosaur family tree, suggests that most of the great reptiles were feather-clad.
Image: Brian Choo/Nature
A Drop of Life
The microscopic world is a cornucopia of beautiful images; most any finalist in Nikon's Small World contest or the Olympus Bioscapes Digital Imaging Competition deserves inclusion on this year-end image list. But if just one is to be picked, let it be this single-celled algae photographed by Marek Mis, conveying in its light and color the essences of life itself.
Image: Marek Mis
Magnificent Riflebird's Mating Dance
Birds of paradise are an avian family renowned for their marvelous, seemingly fanciful plumage, used by the birds to attract mates. It's not just the feathers that are special, though; birds of paradise often perform elaborate courtship rituals, such as the dance of the magnificent riflebird, captured on film during an expedition by Cornell Lab of Ornithology researchers.
Image: Tim Laman
George Boorujy's Meadowlark
For artist George Boorujy, hyper-realistic hand-inked detail is a form of engagement, a way of holding viewers' attention in an image-saturated world. Animals are often the subjects of his work; like this meadowlark, part of Boorujy's Blood Memory exhibition, they possess an almost hypnotic power.
Image: Babble, 2011, ink on paper. (George Boorujy)
The Ghost Dragon
A 120-million-year-old flying reptile discovered in northeast China, the aptly named Guidraco venator -- Chinese and Latin for "ghost dragon hunter" -- had a 15-foot wingspan and a snaggle-toothed mouth that could have been imagined by Tim Burton.
Image: Xialin Wang et al./Naturwissenschaften
Spider-Building Spiders
Not only does this collection of debris caught in a web look like a spider. It was made by a spider, too -- a newly discovered species from the Peruvian Amazon that constructs its own dopplegangers, a behavior never before documented.
Images: Phil Torres
Rutabaga's Decay
Fungi can be found in every habitat on Earth, and by some estimates outnumber plants by a factor of five. Yet despite their ubiquity, they go mostly unnoticed, remarked upon mostly when some forgotten piece of food is found covered in fuzz. Estonian artist Heikki Leis captures these moments on camera, revealing the beautiful fungal assemblages present in such mundanities as a decomposing rutabaga (above).
Image: Heikki Leis
Saturn and Tethys
Space is an unceasing source of fantastic imagery, meriting its own Best of 2012 image gallery, and Saturn itself probably deserves its own gallery, too. That said, there's something beautifully serene about this photograph of the ringed planet and Tethys, one of its 62 moons, here visible as a bright fleck in the upper-left corner.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute [high-resolution version]
Super-Blue Berry
These Pollia condensata berries are so colorful that they might have been picked minutes ago. In fact, they were gathered in 1974. Like beetles and butterflies, their color comes not from pigments but from the refractive geometries of their surface coverings, which don't degrade over time. (Some beetle colors even shine true after nearly 50 million years.) Researchers say that P. condensata's blue is the most intense color in the natural world.
Image: Vignolini et al./PNAS
