Though Wired.com readers selected 10 excellent photos in our water photo contest, we here at the Photo Department like to fight for the underdog. Here are our 10 favorite submissions that we think deserved more attention.

Our next bi-monthly photo contest is summer. Let us office shmoes live vicariously through your best summer photo. Check out the contest page for more information.

Left:

Amazon Worker
Submitted by Fernando Martinho

Photographer's comment:

"This man works producing charcoal of illegal wood. He drinks the same water he is destroying...."

Water Feet
Submitted by Elliot Carvalho

Photographer's comment:

"A kid takes a dive on Ipanema Beach, Rio de Janeiro"

Floating in Color
Submitted by Kristarella

Photographer's comment:

"On Lake Macquarie, New South Wales, Australia."

Puddle Beamer
Submitted by AmsterS@m

Photographer's comment:

"BMW reflected in a puddle in Amsterdam, shot with my Sony Ericsson S700i mobile-phone cam."

Falling Drops
Submitted by Anonymous

Photographer's comment:

"Drops of water falling from the wall in Hong Kong"

Mnemonic
Submitted by Orion Schmidt

Photographer's comment:

"View of St. Sebastian's Church in Salzburg, Austria. Taken on a Nikon pocket point-and-click."

This Sunset Brought to You By:
Submitted by Petter Duvander

Photographer's comment:

"Take that for showing all those horrible infomercials!"

Red Bridge
Submitted by Paco Alcantara

Photographer's comment:

"A bridge in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan"

Nature's Testament
Submitted by Vilhjalmur Ingi Vilhjalmsson

Photographer's comment:

"Skogarfoss, a 60-meter-high [nearly 200-foot] waterfall in southern Iceland. Legend tells that behind the waterfall is a treasure chest filled with unimaginable riches. The story goes that a man ventured behind the falls and grasped the handle on the chest, only for it to vanish in front of his very eyes."

Cubicle
Submitted by vofi

Photographer's comment:

"Built in 1902, and still smooth."

1657: The blood stops circulating in the body of the scientist who definitively established that blood indeed circulates. William Harvey is dead.

Most scientists and physicians in Harvey's time were still blindly following the second-century Greek physician Galen, who proved that arteries contain blood. But he thought that the liver converted food to blood and that the arteries and veins are distinct systems. Galen warned his students not to be content with book knowledge, but 14 centuries of doctors relied instead on Galen's many anatomical treatises and did not themselves perform dissections.

In the century before Harvey, Belgian anatomist Andreas Vesalius published charts of his own dissections. Vesalius' work literally resurrected the practice of dissection of human cadavers: It was still widely forbidden, and for centuries to come often had to be performed in secret on newly dead bodies stolen from cemeteries by "resurrection men."

Cairo physician Ibn al-Nafis had established the "lesser circulation" between heart and lungs in the 11th century. Hieronymus Fabricius, of Italy, published a work on the valves in the veins in 1603, but he mistakenly saw them as imposing a speed limit on the flow of blood from the heart. However, al-Nafis' work was not widely known in Christian Europe, and no one put it together with the true import of Fabricius' research.

Until William Harvey.

Harvey experimented on animals and even on surface veins in the limbs of living humans. In 1628, he published his magnum opus, Anatomical Disquisition on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals -- often called De Motu Cordis for the literal heart of its original Latin title.

It demonstrated conclusively that the heart pumps blood to the rest of the body, and that the veins return the blood to the heart. With the microscope not yet available, Harvey could not see what connects the smallest arteries to the smallest veins, but he postulated the existence of the capillaries.

Harvey also served as a royal physician. How did he get a plum job like that? The man was talented, but he also had the good judgment to marry the daughter of another royal physician.

As doctor to King Charles I, Harvey did a lot of scrambling during the English Civil War, losing most of his scientific papers and ordinary possessions to anti-royalist riots. He fled London to Oxford with the court in 1642, then left the court (and his job) to return to London in 1646. Thus, he was not royal physician when the king was beheaded in a public execution on a London street in 1649. Plenty to learn about the motion of blood there.

Harvey published his second major work, On Generation in Animals, in 1651. In it, he propounded the notion that an animal embryo grows gradually, in parts, and does not exist fully formed in miniature in the ovum, as much current theory then held. Harvey's ideas, as with circulation, were based on direct observation and measurement.

But the founder of modern experimental physiology, cardiology and embryology was again impeded by not being able to observe the microscopic level: the earliest, smallest stages of embryonic growth. Antony van Leeuwenhoek did not make the first practical microscopes until two decades after Harvey's death.

Harvey died at age 79. The cause of death was a stroke, which we now know to be a circulatory disease.

Source: PBS' Red Gold

Something quite interesting happens in the first few minutes of Ninja Gaiden II: The dead people don't vanish.

About five minutes into the game, I finished my first battle, and it was a grisly spectacle of carnage. I'd killed about seven guys, and their corpses lay scattered about. Then I went around the corner to save my progress at the "sacred statue."

When I turned around ... the bodies were still there.

All seven of them. Everything was intact: the fractal flowers of blood on the walls, the body pieces I'd severed from their hosts -- a couple of legs, a stray arm -- scattered like doll parts.

Why was this so weird? Because the bodies weren't gone.

In the originalNinja Gaiden, every time you killed someone, within a few seconds the body would poof away in a cloud of eldritch smoke -- leaving nothing behind, not even a bloodstain. You'd dispatch 20 guys, go around the corner to snare some loot, and when you came back a few seconds later, the fight scene was as clean and sterile as an operating room.

This phenomenon is not limited to the first Ninja Gaiden. Over the years, I've noticed that most of the seriously violent games I love deal with the corpses by simply whisking them away. Take the recent Grand Theft Auto IV: I'd butcher my way through a gunfight, wander off to admire the view out a window, then on the way back to my car discover that the bodies were gone, neatly as if they'd been Raptured. Nothing left behind but their ammo!

On the one hand, this vanishing-body thing is such a blasé convention of gameplay that it's barely worth mentioning. No big deal, right? Often the designers make the bodies disappear for reasons of gameplay, because leaving all the bodies piled up is ludologically impractical: If every monster killed in World of Warcraft hung around forever, Azeroth would be so chest-deep in stinking corpses that you couldn't walk anywhere. The sheer metric tonnage of killing in our favorite games essentially requires that there be some sort of cleanup crew.

But still, I wonder if there isn't a moral effect here, too.

I mean, I've been gaming for 25 years. How many people -- or monsters, or entities, or robots, or whatever -- have I killed? If you add up all those gunfights, laser battles, BFG attacks, crazy Japanese RPG spellcasting deaths, throat-slittings from behind, starcraft pulverized by plasma missiles: Man, it's probably nearing a million or something. That's war criminal territory.

So when you put it that way, this idea -- that the bodies of everyone we kill just sort of wink out of existence -- is so hilariously pregnant with misplaced dread that it's practically Freudian. It's as if our violent games can't quite bear to have us face up to the dimensions of what we're doing. So they just get rid of the evidence.

Now, I'm not saying that games turn us into killers, or that I'm going to stop playing these things. I'm just ... sayin'.

All of which brings me back to Ninja Gaiden II, the Xbox 360 game that hit stores Tuesday. Unlike in its prequels, the bodies hang around. Indeed, they hang around for a good long while. After I'd killed my way through about seven battles, I experimentally backtracked all the way to the beginning, and sure enough -- every body was still lying there, every blood fleck on the ceiling intact. I peered off the edge of a promontory to spy a battleground far below and, yep: There's that guy I disemboweled. Still dead.

Now, did this change the emotional, or even moral, timbre of the game?

In some ways, yes. You really do get a better sense that you're a sociopath when the evidence of your crimes is stacked around you. (The human bodies, anyway; magikal beasts still vanish in a puff of smoke, but since they were probably undead in the first place, you could mount some legalistic argument that you didn't technically kill them. Or something.)

On the other hand, you could argue that the moral and aesthetic content of all those racked-up corpses isn't negative. It can be meaningful in a sneaky way: As I meandered back over the scenes of my previous slaughters, the preposterously huge body count sometimes had a Wagnerian feel to it -- all this senseless, tragic death!

Other times it felt self-parodic. The jumbled piles of cut-off legs felt more like the severed-limb knight scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, or maybe Ovid's gore-flecked parodies of Greek combat in The Metamorphoses. By leaving the bodies in, the game manages simultaneously to take the violence more seriously, and less.

We're going to see more and more of this -- because unless I'm mistaken, the new trend seems to be to leave the bodies onscreen. Maybe it's the stronger pixel-pushing abilities of next-gen consoles, which makes it easier to leave the bodies around for Halo-style looting. Personally, I applaud this trend, because it brings these hidden moral and narrative dimensions to the fore, at least slightly.

Let the dead lie. We'll learn something about them -- and, maybe, ourselves.

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Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.