Scientific data can be as pleasing to the eye as a stunningly wrought sculpture or a delicate engraving — and once again the Princeton University Art of Science competition has produced some dazzlers.

The competition solicits images produced by Princeton staff and students during the course of scientific inquiry that have aesthetic merit. This year over 250 images were submitted. Here, we showcase some of our favorites.

In this image, the process of laser deposition is captured. In laser deposition, researchers vaporize a polyethylene oxide with focused lasers, allowing the resulting gas to deposit on a silicon wafer. This thin film then grows outward from a single nucleus.

Because the polymer is diffusing randomly onto the silicon, it grows out in surprising flare-like patterns, replicating the sun in a spot roughly the diameter of a single human hair.

Ramariopsis kunzei looks more like a beautiful white coral living under the sea than a mushroom living on the floor of a tropical forest. This beautiful fungal fruit is edible but, more importantly, plays an essential role in a forest’s nitrogen cycle.

Fungi like this break down organic compounds into nitrogen. Unfortunately, in the Panama tropical forest where this picture was taken, these fungi and other microorganisms in the soil cannot break down enough organic material to provide the forest with all of the nitrogen it needs to recover from clear-cutting that occurred 12 years ago.

Yasmin Afsar, an electrical engineering graduate student, created this portrait titled "Portrait of the artist in the air shower." She writes:

I spend many hours in the cleanroom, usually attired as seen in the photo. A cleanroom is used for research that requires a low level of environmental pollutants. Skin, hair, and clothing emit millions of tiny particles that can foul our micro- and nanoscale electronic devices, and every precaution is taken to prevent this. Here, the artist enters the clean room in full costume through a 20 second air shower.

This image, of the sub-components of fruit flies' ovaries, won the "People's Choice" award for 2014.

Each ovary of the female fruit fly consists of multiple ovarioles, tubes through which the developing egg passes.

In this picture, cross-sections of ten ovarioles from different fruit flies are arranged with stem cells and early stage egg chambers at the center, and the more mature chambers at the periphery. The nucleus of each cell is stained yellow/orange. The cell membranes are stained blue.

The beetles photographed here aren't actually playing in the snow — they are being dusted with flour. These tiny beetles are common pests in stores of food grains, and flour is their food.

This study wasn't, however, about the beetles themselves, but rather the tiny parasites that live in and on their bodies. Researchers studying the beetles investigated how their metabolic rates and energy expenditure change in response to being infected with parasites.

As the solution droplet evaporated, the protein crystallized and left a delicate pattern similar to that seen in snowflakes, called “dendritic crystallization.”

This image, the competition's first place winner, captures the pattern water makes as it flows from beaches out into the Atlantic Ocean. Photographer Sarah Sadri writes:

As a hydrologist, I am fascinated by the natural phenomena of our beautiful planet. The way water in this picture found its way back to the ocean reminded me of a peacock's tail spreading under the sun or a woman's hair blowing in the wind.

This photo, created as a composite of many images, shows the hidden world of fireflies says photographer Albert Kao:

A human sitting outside on a summer night likely appreciates the beauty of flickering fireflies but considers the flashing to be random. It is anything but. For some species, males and female fireflies signal to each other in a multi-step mating ritual, while other species use flashes to lure and devour hapless interlopers. Each species has a unique flash pattern: some are short and punctuated, while others are prolonged. Several species of fireflies may co-exist in the same habitat, creating a cacophony of signals as individuals search in the darkness for others. I took many images of firefly flashes in a small clearing and created a composite image in order to visualize the complex, and largely hidden, world of fireflies.

Unlike most ants, army ants do not build permanent mound-like nests for their colonies. Rather, the worker ants build a living nest with their bodies to protect the queen, young ants, and food.

In this picture, taken on Barro Colordo Island, Panama, workers of the army ant species Eciton hamatum form a bridge with their bodies. This bridge could become the start of a complicated structure with many chambers, all formed from living ants.

This image resulted from a failed experiment that was designed to study the flow of a thin liquid film over a rough surface. Rather than test a natural surface with random roughness, we chose to use an array of square posts, shown here. Unfortunately, the liquid film began to dissolve the posts midway through our experiment, leaving blobs floating on the surface of the film (the leopard-print spots in the image).

This beautiful pattern, contrasting the relative order of the structured posts to the apparent chaos of the flowing blobs, would never have been seen had the experiment succeeded.