Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of serving as one of several judges for the Nikon Small World contest. Our task was to sit in a dimly lit room and try to rank the hundreds of entries—images taken by professional and amateur scientists around the world using visible-light microscopes.
Some were easy: The rules of the contest, which Nikon has run since 1974, forbid images obtained with nonlight microscopes such as electron-based instruments. Any of those that slipped past the contest's initial screens could be discarded.
But most of the choices were very difficult. Even for someone red-green color-blind like me, the beauty of many of these images was, you might say, blindingly obvious. There were lots of diatoms—tiny single-celled algae—sometimes painstakingly arranged to look like common objects. There were also lots of insects, and some brain scans. But there were also rocks and other man-made items that had never been "alive."
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In this slide show, we present this year's 20 winning pictures, along with captions describing what you're seeing and how the image was obtained.
Slide Show: View Top 20 Winning Photos from the Contest
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