Science retrospective part 5: celebrating our 25th year with images from the frontiers of discovery.

As the editors looked back at science visualizations that appeared in Computer Graphics World over the past two decades, we were struck not only by the significance of the discoveries these images help make possible, but even more so by the impressive range of scientific disciplines that have embraced graphics technologies as a means of understanding the world around us. As the selections on the following pages clearly show, researchers in fields ranging from agronomy and astronomy to mathematics and medicine have pushed the limits of science visualization to examine phenomena at the smallest scales of inner space to the vast dimensions of outer space. What these images also help us see is that if we follow the curve of development and adoption of this technology, the most amazing discoveries are yet to come. Stay tuned.

* 1982 Japanese computer graphics artist Yoichiro Kawaguchi digitally Recreates a milk-drop "coronet," originally captured in a stroboscopic, stop-action flash photograph by MIT professor of computer science, Harold "Doc" Edgerton.

* February 1982 False-color Landsat imaging helps researchers study the effects of animal herding on a 34,000 sq. km area of Kenya. The images reveal that during a period of restricted grazing from 1973 to 1978, grassland continued to be overtaken by bushy Acacia plants (shown in red).

* July 1982 A computer simulation of tree growth--using color to distinguish live and dead trunks--helps foresters at the University of Massachusetts visualize growth dynamics and determine effective, ecological logging patterns.

* February 1983 By pseudo-coloring spectroscopy data from Centaurus A--a huge radio wave and X-ray source--astronomers at the European Southern Observatory are able to create a model of the galaxy and determine its exact shape.

* May 1983 The computer anatomical reconstruction package, developed at the University of Texas Health Science Center, creates accurate, 3D solid models of biological structures, such as this rat brain, solely from CAT scans or other 2D cross section data. The technique allows medical researchers to study structures that are too delicate to examine directly.

* March 1994 Contour software enables surgeons to "walk through" facial reconstruction operations. The physician highlights areas, layer by layers, where tissue must be added or removed, and the computer builds a 3D model showing the result.