万花筒 2008-05-29&-05-30 显微镜下的美丽世界（在线收听）

The microscope. In their course of their professional work, scientists often take photos of microscopic objects. And often, the resulting images can be quite beautiful. For thirty years, Nikon, the camera company has held an annual competition to select the most striking photos of objects unseen by the human eye. With a closer look at this year’s winning entries, here’s our Ned Potter.

It looks like stained glass, but it’s really part of a dragonfly. A wheel of some sort? No, it’s the coiled tongue of a saltwater snail. The leaf of a cedar tree, snowflakes in polarized light. Researchers in the lab looking through microscopes may sometimes do the routine but sometimes when they take pictures they create something of beauty. Liposomes, fat pouches used in medicines, or rust fungus looks like cattails in the marsh or somewhere. For thirty years, Nikon, the camera and optics maker has run a competition to find the most beautiful microscope images. And these are some of the winners. The brain of a zebrafish, the embryos of clawed frogs. Some of these pictures are magnified hundreds or thousands of times, others not as much. That’s a mosquito, that’s a plankton with the eye of a needle for scale. The images are often a celebration of living things, but sometimes the most beautiful pictures come from the most mundane things. That is not a rose, it’s soap, slowly draining.