Science and the US National Science Foundation announced the winners of their annual International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. "The aim is to promote cutting-edge efforts to visualize scientific data, principles, and ideas—skills that are critical for communication among scientists and between scientists and the general public, especially students," writes Colin Norman, Science's news editor.

Bryan William Jones from the University of Utah Moran Eye Center won for his Metabolomic Eye photograph in which he used computational molecular phenotyping to define the different tissues of the eye. In the informational posters and graphics category, Johns Hopkins University's Miguel Angel Aragon-Calvo and Julieta Aguilera and Mark Subbarao from Adler Planetarium won for their representation of the growth of galaxies. TSRI's Graham Johnson, NCMIR's Andrew Noske, and IMB's Bradley Marsh's video of a pancreatic cell won in that category. Finally, the top prize in the games category went to the creators of Foldit, Seth Cooper, David Baker, Zoran Popović, Firas Khatib, and Jeff Flatten at the University of Washington.

The Guardian also picked its favorites, which it highlights here.

The healthcare sector in the US added just more than 30,000 jobs last month, reports The Wall Street Journal's Health Blog. The overall economy added 243,000 jobs. However, the blog notes that the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics breaks the numbers down by facility type, not job description. "For example, the report shows that hospitals added 12,700 jobs, but doesn't say whether those were nursing, IT, or cafeteria positions," it says.

When NASA astrobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon released a study in December 2010 that described a bacterium that seemed to grow on arsenic and incorporate it into its DNA, researchers were at first amazed. Some, however, were skeptical, and tried to replicate Wolfe-Simon's work. University of British Columbia microbiologist Rosemary Redfield has posted a paper on ArXiv that refutes Wolfe-Simon's conclusions, reports ScienceInsider's Elizabeth Pennisi. "Redfield … has grown the bacterium in the presence of arsenic and found no evidence of its uptake in the microbe's genetic material," Pennisi says. Redfield says she doesn't plan to do anymore follow-up research at this point, and adds that the "burden of proof" is back on Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues to show "better data than they did in their paper."

Wolfe-Simon and her group tell ScienceInsider their work is just beginning, but they don't plan on commenting on Redfield's work until it has been peer-reviewed and published.

In a report published online in advance in Science this week, Duke University's Robin Hopkins and Mark Rausher discuss the strength of reinforcing selection in nature "by demonstrating strong selection favoring an allele conferring increased pigment intensity in the plant Phlox drummondii in areas of sympatry with the closely related species P. cuspidata," they write. Hopkins and Rausher also say non-random pollinator movement is behind such reinforcing selection in P. drummondii and P. cuspidata.

Over in this week's issue, researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle report "a genome representing the as-yet uncultured marine group II Euryarchaeota, assembled de novo from 1.7 percent of a metagenome sequenced from surface seawater." The team says its study demonstrates that high-coverage mate-paired sequence "can overcome assembly difficulties caused by inter-strain variation in complex microbial communities, enabling inference of ecosystem functions for uncultured members."

And in Science Signaling, researchers at the University of Utah School of Medicine and the University of Basel show that in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, "PAS kinase promotes cell survival and growth through activation of Rho1." Upon isolating PSK1 and PSK2 in a suppressor screen of a temperature-sensitive mutant of target of rapamycin 2, or TOR2, the team found that "post-translational activation of yPASK, either by cell integrity stress or by growth on nonfermentative carbon sources, also suppressed the growth defect resulting from tor2 mutation," it writes.

"Mediocre to awful" is not the description most people want to hear about the quality of science education in the US. But a new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute shows that many state standards for science education are worthy of a failing grade, reports Scientific American's Anna Kuchment at the Budding Scientist blog. "Standards are the foundation upon which educators build curricula, write textbooks and train teachers," Kuchment says. "They often take the form of a list of facts and skills that students must master at each grade level. Each state is free to formulate its own standards, and numerous studies have found that high standards are a first step on the road to high student achievement." Only California and the District of Columbia were awarded As. Indiana, Massachusetts, South Carolina, and Virginia scored A-minuses, while Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, and several others scored Fs.

The study's lead authors found four factors that contribute to the quality of standards, Kuchment says — "an undermining of evolution, vague goals, not enough guidance for teachers on how to integrate the history of science and the concept of scientific inquiry into their lessons, and not enough math instruction." For example, eight anti-evolution bills were introduced in six states in 2011, she adds, and in some states, standards for introducing science into the classroom are "vague to the point of uselessness."

There is some good news, however. Twenty-six states have agreed to write new standards that will be "more rigorous and specific" than what they currently have, Kuchment says.