All too often, the beauty of scientific knowledge gets trapped in monochrome graphs and jarring acronyms. The touch of talented artists, however, can set it free.

The 2010 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge released its top stunning entries today. They appear in the Feb. 18 issue of Science, which together with the National Science Foundation sponsored the event.

From GPS-tracked trash and nanoscale ripples to colliding quasars and hairy tomato seeds, dig into our favorite science visualizations in this gallery.

The HIV virus, a menacing genetic script that lethally infects more than 33 million people worldwide, looks more like a splotch under the planet’s most powerful microscopes.

By scraping for details of the virus’ structure from more than 100 studies in three different scientific fields, however, four focused artists summed it up into one intricate 3-D structure.

The model is now considered the most-detailed ever created for the contagion, and won the competition’s first-place prize in illustrations.

Image: Ivan Konstantinov, Yury Stefanov, Aleksander Kovalevsky, Yegor Voronin/Visual Science Company [high-resolution version available]