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We've all seen totally gorgeous microscopy photos before — but there's still something startling about seeing an arresting picture of a beautiful lattice, only to realize it's a set of mutated cells. Or an insect slowly murdering another insect. Or a horrible parasite, feeding off its host. Part of the thrill of microscopic photos is seeing the loveliness in nature's many killers and things we might consider abominations. More »
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The beauty of microphotography is seeing the universe in an incredibly small space. There are strange creatures and startling vistas — like this 20x portrait of green lacewig larva, taken by Igor Siwanowicz of the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology. More »
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Mice are energetic little buggers, which is bad news for scientists who want to get a look at their brains while they're scurrying around. But at last, researchers have perfected a high-powered, miniaturized fluorescent microscope that can be mounted on a mouse's head and used to monitor the activity of as many as 200 brain cells while the mouse goes about its business. More »
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Usually when you see extreme close-ups of insects, they look like terrifying monsters. The segmented eyes, the tiny cilia, the barbed limbs, and so on. But award-winning photographer Igor Siwanowicz manages to make his insect micrography... cute? More »
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Look at this weird, forbidding landscape — it's not a newly discovered cave system on Mars, it's a microscope image of a human eye. Suren Manvelyan's arresting photographs will make you never want to stare into someone's eyes again. More »
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When you're looking at the world through a microscope, appearances can be deceptive. Vegetables look like minerals, and tiny creatures look like alien invaders. Just check out the incredibly gorgeous winners of this year's Nikon Small World microphotography competition. More »
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A few years ago, Alan Jaras told a science fiction story on Flickr, using images of crystals he'd photographed under a microscope. He called it MicroWorld. Here are a few of the breathtaking images and the incredible tale they tell. More »
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The neurotransmitter dopamine isn't just beautiful under polarized light - it's also a neurotransmitter that can get you high. Photographer Spike Walker just won an award for his breathtaking micoscopic photography. Check out some more breathtaking images below. More »
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In one of the portraits from our bizarre gallery of insect faces, you can see what happens when a fly sticks out its tongue. It's a disturbingly human expression on an otherwise alien visage. More »
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This geranium is having sex right now, before your very eyes. Those little grains of pollen clinging to the flower's stigma are competing to plunge their genetic material deep into this flower and reproduce. More »
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Ever wonder what it looks like when algae have sex? Now you'll find out in this winning video from the Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Contest. More winning entries in our gallery, which includes an amoeba vs. yeast cell smackdown. More »
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The medical tricorder is now closer than ever to reality. A group of Berkeley engineers have invented a mobile phone microscope that can photograph microbes in your blood, and analyze them for disease. More »
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This crazy machine is a new kind of microscope that can identify a chemical based on just a few atoms. Awesomely, it sucks up intense X-ray beams from a synchrotron to do it. More »
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Here's a microscopy image of a fibroblast, stained with a few different antibodies. The green is microtubuli, the red is cell-contacts and the blue is DNA. It's just one of Jan Schmoranzer's amazing nano-art images. More »
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This glowing green monstrosity isn't a radioactive Doctor Who monster, it's a common fruitfly, part of Duke University's awesome microscopy gallery. (The right image shows a larval brain, the left shows dorsal closure.) Gallery below. More »
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Gonorrhea, a bacteria that's transmitted via sexual intercourse and causes painful swelling, may turn out to be the perfect molecular machine. A group of researchers at Columbia University have announced findings proving that the bacteria can use its pili, long filaments that act like limbs, to pull with a force equivalent to 100,000 times its weight, and hold it for hours. Here you can see a video of a gonorrhea bacterium pulling on tiny, flexible columns around it (the pili, which you can't see, can stretch up to ten times the length of the bacterium, and you can see several columns moving rather far away from the bacteria). I've added some music by Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives that might express what the bacteria is secretly thinking. More »
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Europeans learned about the wonders of the microscopic world from drawings like this one, created by amateur microscope enthusiast Martin Frobenius Ledermüller in the 1760s. He put bugs, plants, and crystals under the microscope and produced fascinating, highly-symmetrical renderings of what he saw. We've got some etchings much weirder and more alien than this fly below. More »
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Every science fiction lover starts out by taking the world around them apart: unscrewing the cover from the cable box, putting shit in the microwave to watch it explode, asking their teachers and parents WHY the dog can't talk, or WHY we have to work for money instead of donuts. That's why this image delights me. Aaron Messing took a foam peanut, sliced it thinly, and put it under the microscope. The result? Beautiful deconstructed foam. [Aaron Messing Microscopy Gallery] More »
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Anne Bruce is a microscopy photographer who likes to put antique watches, gears, and gauges under her low-power microscope. She creates glowing, strange images of tarnished gears and fragments of watchfaces that look like giant, rusting dynamos and the remains of nineteenth-century factories. We've got a gallery of her haunting work after the jump. More »
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This creepy monster skull is actually a snapdragon seed pod, magnified by an electron microscope. Just as you'd always suspected, the microscopic world turns out to contain nothing but slimy textures and sinister craggy shapes, judging from Karin Jones' haunting microscopy photos. More »
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