Top Prize Image for Visualizing Science Shows a Logistic Map’s Chaotic Portion

 Each year, the College of Natural Sciences invites faculty, staff and students to send in interesting and intriguing images from their research for the college-wide Visualizing Science competition. This year’s winners were revealed at the 2025 Texas Science Festival. 

Mathematics undergraduate Caleb Chalmer’s submission was awarded top honors, with reviewers noting “a ghostly quality to it that becomes more interesting the longer you look.” Chalmers created his own version of what is known as the logistics map because he was so enamored with the underlying mathematics.

The best scientific imagery can draw a viewer in, inspiring curiosity in new areas of interest in the process. Many past winners of Visualizing Science can be found on display at the Texas Science and Natural History Museum on the UT Austin campus.

The eight outstanding submissions from the Natural Sciences community that won this year were chosen as finalists for their beauty and scientific merit by professional science communicators or by community members on social media.

The winning entries on this page can also be found in our Visualizing Science Showcase, a 3D virtual gallery exhibition featuring winners and finalists from more than a decade of competitions. Select images in the gallery include expanded audio descriptions by their creators. Wander through the virtual gallery using the link at the bottom of this page.

About the Top Prize Image

Two summers ago, mathematics major Caleb Chalmers was part of the UT math department’s Summer Directed Reading Program, which pairs undergraduate math students with graduate student mentors who help them study interesting math topics not usually covered in classes. He learned about dynamical systems, which are systems that fluctuate over time and can be found in diverse areas of study, such as physics, biology, history, medicine and more. 

Specifically, Chalmers examined the dynamics of the logistic map, which is defined by the quadratic difference equation. Finding it to be one of the most beautiful graphs in mathematics, he created his own version of the chaotic portion (r_inf < r < 4) of the logistic map’s orbit diagram. He designed a custom computer script to render this image described by our editors as “ghostly” and “dreamy.”

Additional 2025 Winners

These two iridescent, jewel-like creatures are dung beetles of the species Phanaeus difformis, which are the focus of Katie Harris’ research in the Koltz Lab at UT Austin. By burying their food, dung beetles play a crucial role in maintaining soil health and suppressing parasites in cattle. Harris is studying how the combination of warmer temperatures from climate change and tiny parasitic worms influence burying behavior in dung beetles. Specimens for this study were collected from Double Helix Ranch, a longhorn ranch in Pontotoc, Texas, owned by Biodiversity Center director David Hillis. The beetles shown here are a male and female pair. On the left is an example of a major male, typically larger and with a bigger horn than minor males, and on the right a female.

Undergraduate students Sneha Chandak and Jacob Lin are working to use a cyanobacteria of the species Oscillatoria lutea as the platform for multiple biosensors, each designed to detect a different water pollutant. Each symbiotic biosensor will display a distinct color fluorescence when triggered by a specific pollutant. In order to demonstrate the potential of cyanobacteria to host multiple engineered bacterial strains and display several color markers simultaneously, they engineered two naturally occurring symbiotic bacteria of O. lutea to express the fluorescent proteins sfGFP (green) and mScarlet (light red). This image shows the growth patterns of the two engineered symbionts after four days, confirming that they had successfully colonized the cyanobacterium’s filaments. The photos also highlight the natural red fluorescence of O. lutea, which appears darker red than mScarlet. Facilities in the Health Discovery Building of Dell Medical School were used to capture this image.

Actin and myosin are proteins essential for movement in nature, including cells crawling along a surface, cell division or even the contraction of muscles. These two time-color images capture actomyosin contraction in a freely contracting active gel, a system made up of actin filaments, myosin II molecular motors and fascin crosslinkers, which help stabilize the network. This gel contracts as myosin motors pull on and slide the actin filaments, mimicking processes found in living cells. To visualize this dynamic process in a single image, time is color-coded: darker blue represents earlier moments, while lighter blue marks later stages. This time-color technique reveals the progression of actomyosin contraction at a glance, showing how the gel changes over time. Such experiments help us understand how molecular forces drive larger-scale movement, providing insight into the dynamics of life at the micro-scale.

Molecular crystals of Diketopyrrolopyrrole, an organic chromophore that absorbs visible wavelengths of light, were grown via a physical vapor deposition method by Tanner Volek, a Ph.D. student in the Roberts physical chemistry group. He uses these crystals to study a multiexciton generation process called singlet fission, wherein a molecule in a high energy state can split its energy with a neighboring molecule leaving both molecules in lower energy states. Important to understanding this process is the particular arrangement of neighboring molecules in the solid state. As such, he has grown high quality crystals of these compounds to help study the relationship between their structure and their singlet fission capabilities. This image was taken using a profilometer at the Texas Materials Institute on campus.

A method known as whole mount in situ hybridization chain reaction (isHCR for short), combined with confocal microscopy, helps researchers study whole brains and see gene expression in detail in a diverse variety of organisms. Fluorescently labeled probes bind to target mRNA molecules to show activity in specific neuronal cell types. Ph.D. student Emily Lessig, advised by Hans Hofmann of the Department of Integrative Biology, applies these techniques to reveal the neural mechanisms underlying cooperative or “spiteful” behavior in an African cichlid fish. In this example, isHCR is used to visualize neurons that express two neuronal activity markers (in yellow and in red) and contain the neurotransmitter dopamine (in green); the blue color shows the overall brain structure. This image was scanned by Alessandro Dorigo of the Max Planck Institute using samples prepared by Emily Lessig.

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Ph.D. student Hannah Rempel studies how the diets of coral reef fishes shift across healthier to more degraded reefs. Her work focuses on parrotfishes, surgeonfishes and chubs, which help maintain healthy coral reefs by grazing algae and cyanobacteria that can otherwise overgrow and smother corals. A graduate coral reef ecology course exercise inspired her to begin this piece showing the ‘Coral Triangle’ — the birthplace of reefs. Using a technique called stippling (making tiny dots with pen and ink), this scene slowly began taking shape over two years, inspired by many photos from others in her lab and online that show the immense diversity of these reefs. Through this piece Rempel seeks to share a bit of the wonder and beauty of coral reefs that so captivate her, as well as her dream for what she hopes we can one day do to restore coral reefs like the ones she studies.

This image is a section of spleen tissue from a mouse, magnified in a light microscope at 20x. What makes this image remarkable is that the mice used in the research were humanized, meaning they were treated to generate real human cells in their bodies and brains. Staining the tissue section with an antibody for HLA-DR, a receptor specific to human immune cells, shows distinct brown-stained human cells that the mouse successfully generated and maintained. Mice like this enable the study of HIV in a humanized context within an animal model, providing a more accurate and translatable platform for advancing HIV research. Undergraduate student Vikas Dhulipala captured this image while doing a summer undergraduate research program at the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Department of Pharmacology and Experimental Neuroscience this past summer.

Visualizing Science Showcase