The winners of the ninth annual Olympus Bioscapes Digital Imaging Competition have been announced and they’re as good as you would expect given that they were selected from from nearly 2,000 entries from 62 countries. 

This year’s winner is by Ralph Grimm, a teacher from Australia who made this video of a colony of microscopic rotifers from a lily pad in his pond.

Dallas architect and artist Jacob Haynes went all out for his “microscopic universe” themed Christmas tree this year. His laser-cut micro-organism ornaments are amazing, but his  pipe cleaner DNA garland really completes the look:

Felice Frankel is a photographer and a research scientist in the Center for Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She puts both areas of expertise to use in her work for books like No Small Matter, On the Surface of Things and Envisioning Science that bridge the divide between art and science. 

Science is lovely in silk (at least it is in the hands of Karen Kamenetzky).

Kamenetzky on her work:

I dye, paint and stitch cottons and silks to create boldly colored wallhangings inspired by microscopic/cellular imagery - a kind of visual invented biology with textiles. I find this imagery metaphorically rich since all change fundamentally happens on this infinitesimal level.

Carbon: Cosmic Worlds of Charles Lindsay is grand in both scale and vision. 

About the project:

Carbon is a creation of fictitious worlds, drawing on my interest in the aesthetics of space exploration, microscopic discovery and abstract symbols. I am intrigued by the idea that so much of our expanding scientific knowledge is based on images from beyond our body’s normal scope of vision. I am also interested in the challenge and implications of comprehending our relative scale within the universe.

These ‘photographs’ are made from negatives which utilize a carbon emulsion on a transparent base - the result of my experiments and manipulation. Numerous generations in the fluid’s history create minute evaporation trails, rendering an archeology of time.

Both the stills and videos are generated from extremely high resolution digital scans of the drawn negatives. I am also applying this data to 3D topographic motion programs and producing electronic sound pieces in response to the imagery.

Lindsay has given as much thought to how his work should be displayed as to the work itself. To get a better idea of the scope of his project, you can see his installation concept in this video:

3 - CARBON installation concept from charles lindsay on Vimeo.

The Guardian has put together a gallery of the winners of the Science magazine 2011 International Science & Engineering Visual Challenge. Apps like Powers of Minus Ten (an app that allows the user to zoom into the human body, exploring worlds at different levels of magnification) look particularly interesting. Check it out here

scinerd:

Super Small: Top 20 Microscope Photos of the Year

Every year, Nikon brings us some amazing microscope photos from its annual competition. This year’s winners include images of a dinosaur bone, a microchip, a mouse nerve and HeLa cells.

We’re never disappointed with the photos from the Nikon Small World contest, and the top 20 judges picks contained in this gallery suggest that the photographers just keep getting better. These photos were selected from more than 2,000, but if you disagree with the judges, you can still pick your favorite in the popular vote contest throughout October.

Order from Top-Down, Left-Right; Ant head, frontal view - Green lacewing larvae - Liverwort - Microchip surface - Retinal flatmount of mouse nerve fiber layer - Graphite-bearing granulite from Kerala, India - One Blade of grass - Grains of sand - Porites lobata (lobe coral) - live specimen displaying tissue pigmentation response with red fluorescence.

Check out the rest after the link

Brilliantly colored life forms dance across the wall in … [this] installation project composed of a series of hand painted petri dishes. Artist Klari Reis uses reflective epoxy polymer to depict microscopic images…Working with biotech companies in San Francisco, Klari uses organic cellular imagery and natural reactions to explore our complex relationship with today’s biotechnological industry.