Nikon’s Small World competition celebrates the best in microscope photography

Nikon this week announced the winners of its Small World Photomicrography Competition, an event that celebrates the best microscope photos of the year. The winning submission, embedded above, comes from Jennifer Peters and Michael Taylor of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, who used a confocal microscope to capture the formation of the blood-brain barrier in a living zebrafish embryo. Second place went to Walter Piorkowski of South Beloit, Illinois, who used reflected light, image stacking, and fiber optics techniques to photograph two newborn lynx spiderlings (below). You can browse through all the winning photographs here.