It's...Yes...After All

From the whimsically mundane (crystallized soy sauce) to the obligatory (Drosophila compound eye) to the just plain weird (I'm still trying to figure out the mosquito heart), scientists from the big Earth coned down on animals, vegetables, and minerals with light microscopes in Nikon's Small World Photomicrography Contest.

My favorite from this year's recognized pics: trazodone, alpha-estradiol 7256a (100X under polarized light) as a tiny Godzilla. The "Image of Distinction" is from Dutchman Lars Bech, who's evidently been photographing pharmaceutical products on a microscopic scale since at least the mid-1990s. Bech won the contest in 1996 with his museum-worthy abstraction of doxorubicin.

The deadline for next year's entries: April 30, 2011.