no. 2
no. 3
Beautiful scarab by Michael Richardson. This picture was one of the winners in the primary school category of
Up Close and Spineless, an invertebrate photography competition run by the Australian Museum in Sydney. The photographer, Michael Richardson, noted that his subject (and pet) "loves to eat banana".
To see more of the winning images, including spectacular photographs of huntsmen spiders and paper wasps, visit
this gallery.
no. 4
This stunning photomicrograph of a chick embryo won the public vote and the "image of distinction" award in this year's
Nikon Small World competition. It was taken by Tomas Pais de Azevedo, of the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, using a technique called
stereomicroscopy You can find other winning photographs from the competition in
this gallery.
no.5
Beetles are sometimes called "living jewels" because of their iridescent colours. This image is a close-up of the surface of a tiger beetle's wing case; the optical effects are produced by photonic crystals and sophisticated reflectance mechanisms.
To see more images of beautiful beetles, take a look at
this gallery of images, taken from a review paper in the
Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
no.6
Blast wave by Phred Petersen. This astonishing image was awarded first place in the New Scientist Eureka Prize for Science Photography competition, run in conjunction with the Australian Museum. It shows the propagation and reflection of a blast wave originating from the explosion of a
percussion capon the tip of a toy rocket. The wave is travelling at the speed of sound and compresses the air as it passes, causing a refractive index gradient, shown here with colour
Schlieren photography. The wave also passes downward through a perforated plate (its shadow is the horizontal bar), creating multiple wave fronts that recombine in the bottom of the picture.
You can find this image and the other top 25 entries to the New Scientist Eureka Prize for Science photography in
this gallery .
no.7
This
solargraph shows the path taken by the sun as it travelled across the sky above the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, UK, between 19 December 2007 and 21 June 2008 - the winter and summer solstices. It was taken in a single six-month exposure by photographer
Justin Quinnell, using a pinhole camera strapped to a telephone mast.
To see more of Justin Qunnell's solargraphs visit
this gallery.
no.8
A stellar dendrite snowflake with branches and side branches. This photograph was taken by
Kenneth Libbrecht of CalTech, using a specially-designed snowflake photomicroscope. To see more of Kenneth Libbrecht's beautiful snowflake pictures,
this gallery. You can find out more about how snowflakes form, and how Libbrecht and others are trying to make artificial snowflakes, in
this article.
no.9
Life within the pouch by Jason Edwards. This is a baby red kangaroo suckling. Its mother, a orphan hand-raised by humans, had been living in the open desert for many years but happened to visit a cattle station at the same time as her human foster mother. The kangaroo mother allowed a peek inside her pouch for this picture.
This image was one of the top-ranked images in the New Scientist Eureka Prize for Science Photography, run in conjunction with the
Australian Museum. You can see a selection of the best images in
this gallery.
no.10
This image,
Visualizing the Bible, was created by Chris Harrison of Carnegie Mellon University and Christoph Römhild of North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church and was awarded an Honorable Mention in Illustration in the
International Science and Engineering Visualisation Challenge. The lower part depicts all 1189 chapters of the Bible as a bar graph; the length of each bar is proportional to the number of verses in the corresponding chapter. The coloured arcs in the upper part represent 63,779 cross references between chapters, with different colours denoting varying distances between connected chapters.
You can see more winning images from the competition in
this gallery.
no.11
Deadlock by David Maitland. This image was winner of the Animal Behaviour category in the Natural History Museum's
Wildlife Photographer of the Year competitionThe photographer came across this life-and-death tableau at about midnight: a cat-eyed tree-snake, coiled around a branch, was locked in an embrace with a Morelet's treefrog - a critically endangered species.
To see more winning images from the competition see
this gallery.
no.12