THE MOST BEAUTIFUL INVISIBLE THINGS
Invisible beauty has serendipitously become a BeautifulNow theme this week, with our Beautiful Invisible Man post and this post, featuring winners of Nikon’s 2012 Small World Photo Competitions, which showcase the most beautiful things in the world that you never see, that is unless you are aided by an electron microscope.
Nikon is not only a favorite brand of camera for professional photographers, its advanced optics make it a favored brand of microscopes for the scientific community. The community sends in their best microphotographs to compete. A panel of judges, a mix of scientists and journalists juries the entries. We’ve got some of our faves here. But you can see them more on Nikon’s Small World site.
The subjects of these photographs range from the tiniest single celled organisms to the earliest beginnings of more complex lifeforms to pollen grains and the insects which aid in their distribution. One of the strangest beauties in the competition was a photo of a garlic flower primordium, which looks a bit like a psychedelic alien brain, pictured above.
Photo: Dr. Jennifer L. Peters, Dr. Michael R. Taylor, Blood Vessels in Zebrafish Brain
The top juried prize went to a photo of a real brain. This winning photo of blood vessels in a developing zebrafish brain is a stunner. Leveraging the magic of fluorescent tagging, together with a confocal microscope, it shows us elegance, evoking a baroque biological neon sign.
Photo: Esra Guc, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Dextran Bead with Sprouting Cells
Nikon’s competition is also open to popular vote, whose top prize went to Esra Guc for his photo of a dextran bead employed as a microcarrier for industrial cell growth.
Photo: Walter Piorkowski, Live newborn lynx spiderlings
Hairy Lynx Spider hatchlings look monstrous in a photo at 6X magnification. While a moth antenna at 100X magnification goes beyond the point of scary, with it’s intricate repeated patterns splayed across the screen.
Photo: Dr. Donna Beer Stolz, University of Pittsburgh
Moth Antenna
Magnification alone isn’t enough. These photographers use a palette of highly specialized dyes, some tasked with staining DNA, some made of fluorescent protein, and others designed to tag, highlight, and provide contrast to help us see the structures and systems that form these miniscule lifeforms. Many of these photographs are created using image-stacking techniques, in which a series of photos are taken at multiple focal points and are digitally processed together to achieve a greater depth of field than could ever be achieved with a single image. These are just a few sample techniques pulled from an ever-evolving bag of photomicrography tricks.
Photo: Dr. Dylan Burnette, National Institutes of Health, Osteosarcoma Cell
A deadly osteosarcoma cell growing inside its unlucky host, forms a gorgeous abstract painting, when magnified 63X. Even algae are elevated to works of art. A red algae frond looks like a fractal Ikat design against a black field, while a desmid, a single-celled green algae looks like a twinned Australian fire opal.
Photo: Dr. Arlene Wechezak, Ptilota Algae Frond
Photo: Marek Mis, Desmid (Green Algae)
We are passionate about the beauty teeming in microscopic worlds. Check out our other related posts, including microscopic seeds, blood cells and sea slugs:
http://www.beautifulnow.is/bnow/artist-rob-kessler-shows-us-the-beauty-of-microscopic-seeds
http://www.beautifulnow.is/bnow/beautiful-gift-donate-blood
