Zoom Into the Human Bloodstream Illustration (Small)

Description

This award-winning illustration shows the circulatory system across ten orders of magnitude, from the heart to oxygen atoms in a red blood cell.

Vast scale differences are usually shown through separate images (e.g., the Eames’ Powers of Ten). This illustration employs the artistic convention of perspective—typically used by landscape painters—to show multiple scales in one frame.

This image travels from the human scale at top to the atomic scale in the foreground. Placing objects from the circulatory system in one frame clarifies connections between components, highlighting the system’s reliance on structures at very different scales. This illustration, created by the Exploratorium with illustrator Linda Nye, won the NSF/Science Magazine Visualization Challenge in 2008.

This is a low-resolution image (1.8 MB), but the illustration is also available as an annotated poster in the nisenet.org catalog.