National Geographic photographer Martin Oeggerli took a series of gorgeous, and (oddly) recognizably sexual photographs of pollen in action. In this gallery - and many other photographs of his in the National Geographic gallery - you can see how the plant sexual cycle works. From feather-borne pollen to a piece of pollen that is growing a sperm injector, every kind of flower smut is represented.

You can see more of Oeggerli's work on his website.

via National Geographic (thanks, Marilyn Terrell!)

Geranium
Flowering quince
Forget Me Not
Indian mallow - this pollen shape is designed to stick to bird wings.
Pine
Snowball blossom - pollen has fallen into the stigma of another snowball blossom, and the pollen is swelling with water. One pollen grain is growing a tube that can inject sperm into the flower.
Willow - this piece of pollen will die, because it got trapped between two petals before pollenating anything.

Every year, the Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Contest invites imaging experts and amateurs to submit their best examples of microscopy - in still and video form. The results, as you can see, are incredible.

The top prize is $5,000 worth of Olympus imaging equipment. In addition, twenty-two of the 2009 winning and Honorable Mention images will also be displayed in a winners' tour that will travel to San Diego, California, New York City; suburban Washington DC; Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other cities. Additional exhibits of BioScapes images will simultaneously be touring cities across the U.S. and Canada throughout 2009-10.

You can see more winners and honorable mentions on the BioScapes page.

Sexual Attraction in Spyrogyra. This classic microscopic subject illustrates sex in lower organisms and shows the power of sexual attraction even in simple algae. One cell becomes quite amoeboid as it squeezes through the narrow fertilization tube that the partner cells have just built between them. The movie was shot in time-lapse over 2 hours. By Jeremy Pickett-Heaps, University of Melbourne, Australia. Third Prize.
Water flea Daphnia atkinsoni. This specimen has a "crown of thorns," a defensive trait induced in offspring only when the parents sense chemical cues released by one of their main predators, the tadpole shrimp Triops cancriformis. The water flea's exoskeleton (exterior structure, green) and subcellular details within the organism (nuclei - tiny blue dots) are both visible. By Dr. Jan Michels, Department of Functional Morphology and Biomechanics, Institute of Zoology, Christian Albrecht
University of Kiel, Germany. First Prize.
Nucleus of a plant cell showing synaptonemal complex, a ladder-like protein structure that forms between pairing chromosomes during meiosis (the cell division required for reproduction). This may be the first-ever high-resolution 3D image of this complex ever captured with light microscopy. The two parallel axes of this complex, which run the length of each chromosome, are seen as two threads spaced 100-200 nm apart and twisting around each other in a helix. By Chung-Ju Rachel Wang, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, USA. 2nd Prize.
Fresh water algae Haematococcus pluvialis, 100x. Phase contrast microscopy. By Charles Krebs, Issaquah, WA, USA. Fourth Prize.
Unicellular alga Penium, treated with the microtubule poison oryzalin. By David Domozych, Department of Biology, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, USA. Fifth Prize.
Single-cell smackdown! Amoeba trying to engulf a yeast cell by Margaret Clarke, Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, Oklahoma City, OK, USA. Honorable Mention.
CAR fish fibroblast. By Maria Nemethova, Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria. Honorable Mention.
Adipose tissue in living animals. Cellular dynamics and structures including erythorycytes, platelets, leukocytes, and endothelial cells are visualized through in vivo imaging. Satoshi Nishimura, Tokyo, Japan. Honorable Mention.
Desmid (green alga) dividing. Desmids are symmetrical cells composed of two identical halves or "semi-cells" that have a complex, highly ornamented and species-specific shape. Every time the cell divides, it is bisected between the two semi-cells. The two daughter cells now have to generate a new, complementary semi-cell to restore the cell's normal symmetry. This morphogenesis takes about 2 hrs. By Jeremy Pickett-Heaps, University of Melbourne, Australia. Honorable Mention.
Mouse cortical neurons (nerve cells in the brain). Each second in the movie replays one hour in real time; total time is 5 days. Scientists are looking at the trajectories of the elongating axons. Despite the disorganized culture environment, note the straight trajectory of axon growth cones. This type of experiment is extremely difficult; researchers spent two years optimizing the biology and imaging conditions to make this long-term imaging possible. By Neville Sanjana, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA. Honorable Mention.
Epidermal layer cells of Lotus japonicus dry seed. By Mayumi Wakazaki and Kiminori Toyooka, RIKEN Plant Science Center, Yokohama, Japan. Honorable Mention.
Drosophila (fruitfly) ovarioles. Fluorescence imaging. By Maria Paula Zappia, IIB-INTECH UNSAM-CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Honorable Mention.
Apicoplast. Confocal imaging. By Bernd Zobiak, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany. Honorable Mention.
Genetically-identified retinal ganglion cells. This study shows that it is possible to target genetically-identified neurons, a non- random approach to studying cell types. By Tim Viney, Friedrich Miescher Institute, Basel, Switzerland. Honorable Mention.
Fungia feeding. Fungia are large individual corals that don't form colonies or reefs. Their large and very expandable mouths allow them to eat large pieces of food compared to most corals. The movie was captured with epifluorescence, using the Fungia's own natural auto-fluorescence stimulated by UV, blue and green excitation light. James Nicholson, Coral Culture & Collaborative Research Facility, NOAA NOS NCCOS Center for Coastal Environmental Health & Biomolecular Research, Fort Johnson Marine Lab, Charleston, SC, USA. Honorable Mention.

The research group, who published an article about their CellScope in today's edition of PLoS One, wanted to figure out a way for doctors in developing countries to diagnose common blood diseases in the field. They hit upon the idea of a smart phone microscope because parts for it have become cheap, and many developing regions have fairly good wireless networks for phones. Using a cheap phone attachment with an LED, the engineers feed magnified images into the cell phone camera. Software on the phone can analyze bacterial counts, or images can be sent via the cell network to labs for quick analysis.

UC Berkeley bioengineer Dan Fletcher led the CellScope research team. He said:

The same regions of the world that lack access to adequate health facilities are, paradoxically, well-served by mobile phone networks. We can take advantage of these mobile networks to bring low-cost, easy-to-use lab equipment out to more remote settings . . . We had to disabuse ourselves of the notion that we needed to spend many thousands on a mercury arc lamp and high-sensitivity camera to get a meaningful image. We found that a high-powered LED – which retails for just a few dollars – coupled with a typical camera phone could produce a clinical quality image sufficient for our goal of detecting in a field setting some of the most common diseases in the developing world.

The team tested the CellScope with samples of infected blood and saliva. As you can see in the images below, the phone camera was able to capture clear images of Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes malaria in humans, and sickle-shaped red blood cells (sickle cells are indicated with arrows). The team also took fluorescent images of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria that causes TB in humans. Using software on the phone, researchers got an accurate TB cell count.

Study co-author David Breslauer said:

The system could be used to help provide early warning of outbreaks by shortening the time needed to screen, diagnose and treat infectious diseases.

This device is about to become an indispensible part of every field medic's kit.

via PLoS One

Developed by a research team in Japan, this method of magnifying the nanoverse is called Synchrotron Radiation Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy. Testing was a joint effort of the University of Hyogo and the KEK Photon Factory (best name evar). How does it work? According to Physics World:

It involves placing a sample of interest in the intense x ray beam of a synchrotron source.

Photons from the beam excite core electrons in the sample's atoms, which then spit out "secondary" electrons as they decay back down to their ground states. These secondary electrons are then detected by the tip of the scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) as they tunnel across the gap. The size of the current depends on the specific type of atom that has produced the secondary electrons, which means that each element has a unique "fingerprint."

I just want to know why the STM is covered in tinfoil. Or whatever that puffy, shiny stuff is. Also, that is seriously the coolest lab picture ever. Tangled wires! X-rays shooting everywhere! Hopefully somebody will get superpowers out of this.

via Physics World

Schmoranzer's microscopy images of "wounded monolayers," "starved fibroblasts" and a "nuclear face" come from the 2008-2009 NanoArt competition organized by NanoArt21.org.

Schmoranzer is a group leader and head of the BioImaging facility at the Molecular Cancer Research Center of Charite Berlin. He says:

Seeing the beauty of cellular structures, like microtubules, after many hours of tiring and repetitive lab-work often gives me the kick to go on. I am glad that scientist like me receive public attention for display of scientific imagery and I am excited to expand on projects like ‘Cell Portraits' by exploring different cellular structures and cell types. I believe that visualizing science – the process of research as well as its end products – will gain importance in the future, not only to draw attention to a particular scientific subject, but also for science education itself.

You can see the rest of the gorgeous nano-art here. [via AzoNano]

The Duke Light Microscopy Core Facility has allowed us to look at everything from liver cells to scallop eyes up close, showing how alien they can appear up close. Here are a few more of our favorites:

More pics, including a Quicktime movie of that fruitfly's dorsal closure, at the link. [Duke University LMCF Gallery]

This superstrength could make the bacteria the perfect ingredient in nanotech devices that have to exert strong pulls on objects around them. Many scientists are already repurposing viruses and bacteria for use in nanotech machines, and now bacteria's mega-power may make it the killer app.

According to New Scientist:

Scientists knew that Neisseria gonorhoeae bacteria use "type four" pili to crawl along a surface and to attach to cells and infect them.

What they didn't know was that these bacteria can bundle pili together to exert long, strong pulls. Michael Sheetz and colleagues at Columbia University in New York put the bacteria in a field of tiny gel "pillars" and measured the amount the bacteria could bend them as a way of measuring the force of their pull.

They mostly saw a lot of short grabs. But one pull in a hundred started out at the same strength as these short pulls, then increased in increments about equal to the force of the original pull, as if the bacteria were calling in more individual pili to help out the first.

This eventually resulted in a pull that was up to ten times stronger than the initial short grab, and it could last for several hours.

Sexually-transmitted bug is the strongest organism [New Scientist]

I'm not sure what this is, but it looks like something out of Lovecraft.

The results of Ledermüller's work were collected into a three-volume set that would have been the eighteenth century equivalent of coffee table books. All three have recently been put online, and you can browse through them for free. Here are two pictures of plant life. The top one shows seeds sprouting, and the bottom shows mushrooms.


If you want to see more, check out the three volume set: Volume One (click "see digitalized document"), Volume Two, and Volume Three.

Recreational Microscopy [via BibliOdyssey]

Just check out the image of a fungal growth attacking another snapdragon seed pod: its tentacles pulsate with a slick malevolence.