This iteration of the contest, now in its sixth year, drew entries from 20 countries in such categories as photography, illustration, informational graphics and multimedia. Winning entries range from photographs of vibrating strings to a microscope image of the suction cups on the arm of a squid, although for sheer inventiveness you can't beat an illustration that won the Informational Graphics award: Mad Hatter's Tea is taken from a book called Alice's Adventures in a Microscopic Wonderland, made up of scenes from the classic story carefully built from microscope images of insects and other small animals.

The image above, Visualizing the Bible, depicts all 1,189 chapters of the Bible as a bar graph, with the length of each bar proportional to the number of verses in the chapter. Above this, arcs represent 63,779 cross references between chapters, with different colours corresponding to varying distances between connected chapters.

You can browse a Flash gallery of the winners from all six years on the Science Magazine site. For more on visualizing information, work your way through the site of Edward Tufte before checking out Data Flow: Visualising Information in Graphic Design, just off the press from Gestalten.