Nikon just announced the winners of their 14th annual Small World in Motion contest, and the guys are showing off the beauty our eyes can’t see! The Nikon Small World competition (of which the video competition is a part) is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
The videos entered into the competition show life and the unseen, from water droplets evaporating from a butterfly’s wings to the rhythmic movement of tissues in a fly’s embryo. The best photos reveal how even ordinary buildings look amazing up close, and capture scenes too small to be seen with the naked eye.
Almost 400 video entries were considered for this year’s competition; as that article will be slowly long, here are our five honorable mention favorites and 5 winners, as voted on by a panel of photography and science experts. All videos courtesy of Nikon Small World.
“Fruit flies are in our homes, they grow in our kitchens and in our trash cans, they are carried out in the same way as shown in the video,” said Bruno Vellutini, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics and first-winner for his fly embryo video. “I believe the video is very impactful because it shows us how these cell and tissue changes happen every day, all around us – even in normal living organisms.”
Vellutini has a point. Fruit flies are rarely counted among the elephant, the panda bear, the coelacanth, the antelope, or any other variation of the amazing creatures that live on our planet. But at the molecular level, this complex—and truly beautiful—process helps animals from all walks of life survive.
As you can see in the video above, some of the winners include tardigrade and nematode imaging, moving cells in the spinal cord of a fish, and time-varying water droplets at the scale of a butterfly’s wing.
Some of the notable items included in the video show crystal structures, a caterpillar eating a water flea, and dog kidney cells (buckle ups) arranged to form a miniature of Vermeer’s. The Girl With the Pearl Earring. Cells are held in place using DNA connectors, and with a neat twist, they show how humans can replicate their world on a much smaller scale.
To check out some of the honorable mentions in the competition (of which there are many), you can head over to Nikon’s competition website.
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