World of the small

Every now and again, the MSN home site presents some interesting stuff that's relatively free of the medias general tendency to -all too commonly- report sciency things in a short sighted dim witted sort of way.

Here is a fascinating exposition of winning images from Nikons annual small world phot0micrography competition. Check it out!

Some of my favorites:

Artists rendering of an alien cyborg? Actually a chicken embryo photographed at 6X. ( by Tomas Pais de Azevedo of Lisbon, Portugal, using stereomicroscopy.)

A Borg mother ship? Really, a 14x image of rare mineral called arsenuranospathite. (It was submitted by Stephan Wolfsried of Germany.)

Rows of towels hanging in the midst of some Florence neighborhood? No, this beauty is a 100x magnification of scales on the wing of Urania riphaeus, the sunset moth. (The fiber-optic illumination was submitted by Charles Krebs from Issaquah, Wash.)