This is the 40th year that camera maker Nikon has held its Small World competition, which seeks the best magnified images melding science and art. Last year, freelance photographer Wim van Egmond
won first place for this magnified image of
marine plankton. "For 20 years, I've been looking through a microscope, and every time I see things I haven't seen before,"
van Egmond told CNN.
This winning image of a zebrafish embryo was injected with vibrant colors based on depth to convey spatial information, as well as to make it visually appealing.
Dr. Jennifer L. Peters, one of the image's co-creators, said the photo "not only captures the beauty of nature, but is topical and biomedically relevant."
"My art causes a dissonance for its viewer -- a conflict between the culturally imprinted perception of an insect as something repulsive and ugly with a newly acquired admiration of the beauty of its form," said Dr. Igor Siwanowicz, referring to his winning image of a
common green lacewing. In real life, the bug's head was just 1.3 millimeters long, requiring great skill to dye and fix it in place for the shot.
This image of a mosquito heart was magnified at 100x. "Mosquitoes remain one of the greatest scourges of mankind," photographer
Jonas King said in 2010. "Malaria infects hundreds of millions of people annually and is believed to have a major impact on the economies of endemic regions."
More than 2,000 entries were submitted for the prize in 2009. That year, the winning entry showed a
thale cress anther, the male sex organ of a small flowering plant. "As part of my work as a research scientist, I have been taking photographs through the microscope for almost 30 years to observe the processes in living cells," researcher and photographer Heiti Paves said.
This exquisite image shows Pleurosigma, or marine diatoms, that were magnified 200 times. It was taken using darkfield and polarized light.
In 2007, first place went to this image of a double transgenic mouse embryo at 18.5 days.
Gloria Kwon, a researcher at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Institute, used widefield microscopy and red and green fluorescence.
This detailed image is the cell nuclei of a mouse colon magnified 740 times. It was taken by Paul Appleton, a regular entrant to the competition who has contributed a
number of "Images of Distinction."
An up-close image of the
common housefly took top honors in 2005. The same year, Nikon added a new award category of "Images of Distinction" to recognize some of the more notable entrants.
The 2004 winner was a failed experiment, according to Seth A. Coe-Sullivan, who at the time was a graduate assistant at the Research Laboratory of Electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The image is of quantum dot nanocrystals deposited on a silicon substrate and magnified 200 times using light reflectance. "The only reason I kept it was to document the failure. I wish I could say I spent hours getting it right, but that wasn't the case,"
Coe-Sullivan told Advanced Imaging Pro.
Serial place-getter Torsten Wittmann won with this shot in 2003 of magnified mouse cells.
Thomas Deerinck won first prize with his
first entry, a portion of a rat's brain, in 2002. He's now one of the competition's most prolific winners, and in 2008 joined the judging panel. "Aesthetics is obviously a big part of the judging, but almost as important is the technical merit of the image and how difficult or rare it was to capture," Deerinck told CNN. Capturing microscopic images requires patience, steady hands and a "lot of preparation and persistence," he said. "One of the jobs of a scientist is to convey and communicate information in a concise and accurate manner, and it helps on occasion if it also happens to be beautiful science."
Fresh-water rotifer feeding among debris
Avicennia marina (mangrove) leaf
Newt lung cell in mitosis (five different structures)
Endothelial cells
Mouse fibroblasts
Doxorubin in methanol and dimethylbenzenesulfonic acid
Larva of Pleuronectidae
Cross section of very young beech
Fossil fusulinids in limestone
10-year old preparation of barbital, fenacetine, valium and acetic acid
Polyurethane elastic fiber bundle
Crystals evaporated from a solution of magnesium sulfate and tartaric acid
Multiple exposure of a knitting-machine needle
Gold residue and gold-coated bubbles in a glassy matrix
Crystals of influenza virus neuraminidase isolated from terns
Live water mount of Hydra viridissima capturing Daphnia pulex (water flea)
Formalin-fixed whole mount of a spiral nematode (multiple exposure)
Inclusions of goethite and hematite in Brazilian agate
Suctorian attached to a stalk of red algae, encircled by a ring of diatoms
Silverberry scaly hair whole mount
Collapsed bubbles from an annealed experimental electronic sealing glass
Larvacean within its feeding structure, dyed with red organic carmine that the larvacean syphoned in while filter feeding
Stalked protozoan attached to a filamentous green algae with bacteria on its surface
Gold, vaporized in a tungsten boat, in a vacuum evaporator
Crystals of rutile (titanium dioxide) and tridymite (a polymorph of quartz) in a cobalt-rich glass
Encysted parasitic roundworm (trichinella spirals)
Oxalic acid crystals during precipitation