This isn't an alien world — it's a representation of the winds traveling from East to West (in blue) and West to East (in red) here on Earth. And this is just one of the fantastic images that won the 2013 Science As Art contest at Princeton University. See a few more below.

Any monkey can run an equation through a graphing calculator, call it "Icosahedron 12" and sell a "giclee image" for $300 to a gullible sophomore. But it takes actual smarts (or a serious bronze foundry) to make cool "science art."

Here's a microscopy image of a fibroblast, stained with a few different antibodies. The green is microtubuli, the red is cell-contacts and the blue is DNA. It's just one of Jan Schmoranzer's amazing nano-art images.

This image of "Nano-Explosions" won first prize in this year's "Science As Art" competition. Fanny Beron from the École Polytechnique de Montréal used an electron scanning micrograph to record the explosion that happened when a CoFeB magnetic array was overloaded. The chaotic blasts are a "reminder that nanoscale…