10 Incredible Microbiology Photos
These are the top ten photos from Nikon's 2013 Photomicrography competition.
10. A Dinosaur bone preserved in volcanic rock is magnified ten times to give us a clear view of dinosaur fossils like we've never seen.
9. That's not spider man on a bad hair day magnified 85 times, it's an insect tangled in a spider's web ready to be eaten. Brrr. That one gave me the shivers.
8. The leaf of Barbilophozia, or commonly known as a leafy liverwort, and a cyanobacteria, which produces oxygen, are both magnified 50 times. What's interesting about this photo is the symbolism behind the plant and bacteria together. Without cyanobacteria oxidizing earth's early atmosphere, the rich biodiversity of this world wouldn't exist.
7. When you think of a ladybug, you don't think of the massive horn like claws and the adhesive pads on its legs but this magnification is proof that they're there.
6. This chameleon embryo was photographed using a simple brightfield microscope technique to land in the top ten. The embryo was lit from below to show the cartilage in blue and the bone in red.
5. Like a photo of a river delta from space, the hippocampal neuron in the temporal lobe of the brain is magnified 63 times here. The purple spots are excitatory contacts, probably working to store long term or short term memories in the brain.
4. Magnified 40 times, this is the clearest photo of a paramecium we have, it may look familiar because paramecium's are used most commonly to study biological processes in biology classes.
3. Up close and personal with a marine worm magnified 20 times, it uses those tentacles to breathe.
2. The retina of a turtle's eye magnified 400 times
1. First place goes to this image of a colonial plankton organism zoomed in 250 times to highlight its helix body movement.
Which photo was your favorite or surprised you the most? If you want more photos from the competition, check out the website I've linked below. Thanks for watching.