small stuff, big images –
This year Nikon Small World images are just as mind-blowing as the rest.
Enlarge/A copper oxide mineral’s crystals look out of this world at high magnification.
Covering the news means that most of what you do is new. While you may revisit a topic, it typically only happens after something about that topic has changed. Nevertheless, fall science coverage has a certain familiarity. First, there’s the utter insanity of the Ig Nobel prizes, followed shortly by the mad rush to explain why people are being given actual Nobel Prizes before the news goes stale.
Somewhere after that, however, I get to experience one of my favorite tasks of the entire year: wading through dozens of absolutely spectacular images, trying to figure out which ones are most compelling. Yes, it’s time again for theNikon Small World microscopy contest.
As you’ll see below, there are no bad images. But the best of them are both works of art and reminders of how limited our perspective on the world around us can be. Change the scale, change the wavelengths, or alter how things are prepared, and even familiar items like amino acids or a flower can be radically different from how we normally experience them.
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This alien-looking landscape is formed by mold; the “trees” are how it makes and spreads its spores.
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This astonishing image captures the complex crystal forms that can occur when two related chemicals (in this case, amino acids) are crystalized together.
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Each of these clusters is a milk-producing gland in a lactating mammal. The brightly lit cells surrounding them helps force material into the ducts that bring it to the animal’s offspring.
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This otherworldly looking object is … a geranium.
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This is a lynx spider, which has some flamboyant coloration around its eight eyes.
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While this looks a lot like a nautilus, it’s actually an ammonite, part of a group of similar species that were common in the oceans until the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.
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This bizarre-looking object was formed by giving immune cells called macrophages, which normally swallow and digest invading bacteria, something that was too big to be swallowed.
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Jan van IJken captured this image of diatoms, which can grow as single cells or form colonies like this.
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Andrei Savitsky somehow managed to cut a smooth cross section through a tulip long before it develops and unfolds its brilliantly colored petals.
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It took combining a stack of hundreds of images, each with a slightly different focus, to get an image of a complex, 3D object like this turtle.
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I’m rather fond of spiders and find many species cute. This one captured by Javier Rupérez, however, is giving me nightmares.
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No, that’s not a punk haircut. Those are fine sensory bristles on the antennae of a male mosquito. In other species, similar hairs are used to pick up female pheromones.
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The branching structure here is a newly formed blood vessel, sprouting smaller vessels to supply the intestinal surface of a mouse embryo as it grows.
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This alligator embryo looks remarkably like a bird embryo at a similar stage, hinting at their relatedness. The fluorescence highlights its developing cartilage and nerve bundles.
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Most images of dividing cells highlight the structures that help pull them apart. But this photo by Jason Kirk highlights both the DNA (blue) and the endoplasmic reticulum, a series of tubes that surrounds the nucleus.
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While microscopy often focuses on living things, some of the most spectacular images come from crystals, like this one formed of vitamin C.
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