Two groups at Cornell have reaped honors from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) 2006 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

The contest, now in its fourth year, recognizes "the outstanding achievement in the use of visual media to promote understanding of research results and scientific phenomena," according to the NSF.

Jack Bradbury, Guillaume Iacino, Erica Olsen and Robert Grotke of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology received second place in the Interactive Multimedia category for their Web site, http://www.animalbehaviorarchive.org. The site, created by Bradbury and his team at the lab, allows users to hear animals -- crickets, seals, whales, fish and birds -- while watching a real-time spectrogram of the sound as it scrolls across the screen. Visitors can choose from thousands of sound and video recordings online.

Also entered in the Interactive Multimedia category, Flavio Fenton and Elizabeth Cherry of the Department of Biomedical Sciences in the College of Veterinary Medicine received honorable mention for their Web presentation, "Cardiac Bioelectricity and Arrhythmias."

Fenton and Cherry have studied mechanisms of heart rhythm disorders for more than 10 years and developed the program to educate people about these disorders. The program, found at http://www.vet.cornell.edu/news/FentonCherry/Media/main.html, includes information on cardiac anatomy, normal cardiac electrophysiology and different kinds of arrhythmias using a combination of words, pictures and computer simulations.

The NSF competition is sponsored jointly with the journal Science. Fourteen images and multimedia presentations, each encapsulating a scientific concept or story, reaped awards ranging from first place to honorable mention. The awardees were announced in the Sept. 22 issue of Science, and the entries can be viewed at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/313/5794/1730.pdf.