Photographs of the world hidden in plain sight. This is what the Nikon Small World photomicrography contest stands for, showing us each year how ordinary objects can make the mundane look spectacular.
A glimpse of the underside of a southern live oak leaf has won first place in the 2021 Nikon Small World photomicroscopy contest. Jason Kirk, director of the Vital Microscopy and Optical Imaging Core at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and A microscope enthusiast, he took the award-winning photo with a microscope that he finished building in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. He tested his homemade device on a variety of objects from his garden, including tree leaves . Here it is shown at a 60-fold magnification, with the leaf trichomes in white, the vessels in cyan, and the stomata in violet.
“Many times, you put weird things under the microscope and see how they look,” says the author of the photomicrograph. “That’s what happened to this.”
The image is a composite of about 200 stacked images. The trichomes of the leaves are white and protrude from the cyan-colored vessels, which carry water. The surrounding purple stomata regulate the flow of gases such as carbon dioxide.
The second prize was awarded to Esmeralda Paric and Holly Stefen for their cosmic image showing hundreds of thousands of networked neurons. Despite looking like something we would see at the end of a telescope, the microscopic image actually shows a microfluidic device containing around 300,000 network neurons separated into two sections . Between the two sections, axons can be seen covering the gap. It is just another of the 100 images submitted to the contest.
Here are some of those selected this year:
