There are plenty of large, incredible things in this world, from canyons to oceans and huge fossils left behind by dinosaurs. But most of the things that make up our wide world are small–tiny even. Often, these things escape notice because they are simply to small for the human eye to see. Which is where Nikon’s annual Small World competition comes in. Every year a panel of judges selects the most stunning images of very small things. Often, the people who capture these images are scientists, who come across these stunning images in the course of their daily work. Nikon received over 2,000 submissions from 83 countries for this year’s competition.

First Place: Bee Eye

Second Place: Mouse Colon

Third Place: Bladderwort

Fourth Place: Mammary Gland

Fifth Place: Brain Tumor

Sixth Place: Moss

Seventh Place: Starfish

Eighth Place: Mouse Ear

Ninth Place: Flower Buds

Tenth Place: Clam Shrimp

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It’s the classic story of any nature documentary. A predator hunts down its prey. The hapless victim struggles to escape, but is overpowered and consumed. It’s the (very small) circle of life.

The winners of the fifth annual Nikon Small World in Motion were announced today, and the winning video featured this classic life and death struggle played out in miniature. Winner Wim van Egmond captured the encounter between two types of ciliates (single celled organisms) by filming the hunt at a visual magnification of 250X.

“Wildlife is so close to us, yet most of us never look close enough to see it,” van Egmond said in a statement. “A pool in your garden is actually a miniature underwater jungle teeming with life. If you want to see the world, your backyard is a great place to start.”

See van Egmond’s winning video here:

Wim van Egmond has participated in the Nikon Small World photography and videography contests for several years now, placing or winning numerous times. That’s not to say that van Egmond didn’t have some stiff competition.

Second place was taken by Danielle Parsons, who captured this incredible and mesmerizing look at the gut contents of a termite:

And in third place is this horrifying reboot of Alien by Gonzalo Avila featuring a parisite wasp larvae breaking out of its host caterpillar and spinning a cocoon. As awful as it might seem, these parasite wasps are actuallly helping keep down the populations of invasive moths in Australia and New Zealand.

The winners received $3000, $2000, and $1000, respectively, to be put towards Nikon products.

The contest’s photography winners were announced in October.

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Wonders of the world come in all sizes, and to see the smallest, you’ll need access to a microscope—or some truly incredible videos. With Nikon’s annual Small World in Motion video competition, science buffs get a chance to experience theater on a microscopic stage. Onward, for the winners.

This year’s winning video was made by William Gilpin, a PhD student at Stanford, and his colleagues. Using a time lapse technique similar to the methods used by astronomy photographers to capture stars streaking across the sky, Gilpin filmed tiny beads in the water around a single starfish larvae, watching as the starfish manipulated the water currents to bring food into its tiny body. This behavior hadn’t been seen before, and studying the manipulation of the water currents could one day allow for better water filtration systems.

Second prize went to Charles Krebs, who filmed the giraffe-like ciliate Lacrymaria olor, as it stuck its neck out to feed on other, smaller microbes. Lacrymaria olor is a natural hunter, picking out its pray with its long appendage.

Wim van Egmond took third prize in the contest, with a beautiful time lapse of flower…ing mold. The fruiting bodies of Aspergillus niger usually ‘bloom’ on fruits.

Prizes for the first, second, and third place winners was given in the form of money to be used toward the purchase of Nikon products: $3,000, $2,000, and $1,000 respectively.

Honorable mentions were awarded to 17 other videos, ranging from cheese mites on a cheddar rind to growing Paracetamol (acetaminophen) crystals and killer cells attacking a cancer cell. Get a taste of each video, below.

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The good life

Every year since 1961, animal-loving camera enthusiasts have sought the title of Wildlife Photographer of the Year. These are 2017’s winners, running the gamut from a devastating scene of rhino poaching to a sweet snapshot of a playful fox.

The grand prize winner Brent Stirton was awarded £10,000 (over $13,000) for his haunting photo of rhino poaching in South Africa. People in London can see these images, and 84 others selected by the judges, on display at the Natural History Museum from now until May 28, 2018.

If you’re a photographer who sees these pictures and thinks, yeah, I can do that, you’re in luck. Entries for next year open on Monday, October 23. But expect some ferocious competition. This year there were 50,000 entries from 92 countries. Here are some of the very best:

Memorial to a species

Photojournalist Brent Stirton captured this image while working on a project documenting rhino poaching. The black rhino was shot for its horns, now removed, in the Hluhluwe Imfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa.

“Brent’s image highlights the urgent need for humanity to protect our planet and the species we share it with,” Natural History Museum Director Sir Michael Dixon says. “The black rhino offers a sombre and challenging counterpart to the story of ‘Hope’ our blue whale [skeleton unveiled earlier this year]. Like the critically endangered black rhinoceros, blue whales were once hunted to the brink of extinction, but humanity acted on a global scale to protect them. This shocking picture of an animal butchered for its horns is a call to action for us all.”

Giant gathering

Sperm whales gather in large numbers off the coast of Sri Lanka. This may be a sign that sperm whale populations are recovering in the aftermath of being hunted nearly to extinction. To get this shot, Wu had to dodge blizzards of whale skin flakes, oily secretions, and clouds of dung.

Crab surprise

Justin Gilligan was documenting a kelp transplant experiment near Tasmania when the ocean floor started moving. A huge rush of spider crabs—covering an area the size of a football field—strolled by, with one unlucky crab ending up the dinner of a hungry Maori octopus.

The grip of the gulls

What were you doing at age five and a half? Probably not taking an award-winning photograph like Italian Ekaterina Bee, who snapped this picture while feeding bread to seagulls on a boat off the coast of Norway.

Palm-oil survivors

On Boreno, elephants must contend with human encroachments like this palm oil plantation. These plantations are a major source of deforestation, putting elephants like these in peril.

Contemplation

Despite the serene countenance, photographer Peter Delaney captured this image of Totti the chimpanzee on a bad day. Totti had been trying to attract a mate for over an hour with no luck. As Delany remembered in a press release, “He lay back, hands behind his head, and rested for a moment, as if dreaming of what could have been.”

Polar pas de deux

While on a ship in Svalbard, photographer Eilo Elvinger spotted these polar bears, a mother and cub, attracted to a spill from the ship’s kitchen on the snowy ground.

Stuck in

Ashleigh Scully saw this female red fox diving for its dinner in Yellowstone National Park, hoping to catch a tasty mouthful of vole underneath the blanket of snow. Unfortunately, she was unsuccessful, and had to try again later.

Tapestry of life

Alpine vegetation in Norway’s Lofoten Islands glows on an autumn day.

The ancient ritual

A female leatherback turtle lays her eggs in the sand in the Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge on St Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Leatherbacks are the largest sea turtles in the world today.

The ice monster

No wildlife here. This composite photo shows divers swimming around a segment of an Antarctic ice shelf. It took 147 individual images to capture this eerie scene.

The incubator bird

Australian brush turkeys don’t sit on their eggs to keep them warm. Instead, the males build a massive nest filled with warm, decaying leaves and soil. They keeps the temperature around a toasty 92 degrees Fahrenheit, adding or removing insulation as necessary.

The jellyfish jockey

Near Tahiti, a lobster larvae (top) hitches a ride on a mauve stinger jellyfish (bottom), steering it around the sea—and using its mode of transportation as a convenient source of snacks.

Nikon D5 + 17–35mm f2.8 lens at 24mm; 10 sec at f8; ISO 1600; Nikon flash at 1/64th power + tungsten gel; Nikon remote release.Giant gatheringTony Wu, USAWinner 2017, Behaviour: Mammals Doze

There’s more than one predator in this picture of a termite mound in Brazil. An anteater tries to get to the tasty termites inside, while the larvae of click beetles try to lure termites out with their bioluminescent glow.

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Capturing stunning images of launches might not be rocket science, but it does take skill. Professional photographers don’t just point and shoot. They also set up some of their cameras far away from the actual launch site and take pictures remotely.

Bill Ingalls, a veteran NASA photographer, had set up six remote cameras to capture images of the May 22 launch of a SpaceX rocket carrying two spacecraft for the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission, a joint project between NASA and Germany.

Five of his cameras performed beautifully, capturing images like this:

One did not.

“I had six remotes, two outside the launch pad safety perimeter and four inside,” Ingalls said in a NASA post . “Unfortunately, the launch started a grass fire that toasted one of the cameras outside the perimeter.”

Even though this camera was the furthest away, at a quarter mile from the launchpad, the fire ignited by the launch destroyed it swiftly, before firefighters could extinguish the blaze.

The camera was dutiful until the end, taking pictures until it melted. Luckily, the memory card inside was still safe, which meant Ingalls captured this incredible series of photos, from launch, to fire, to I’m melllllltiiiiiiing.

A Facebook post that Ingalls wrote about his camera’s destruction, along with accompanying pictures quickly went viral. But it’s not the first time that Ingalls has had a camera destroyed during a launch.

Back in 1995 he was in Kahzakstan photographing the launch of a Soyuz rocket (headed for the Mir space station). The launch kicked up rocks, one of which sheared off the side of his Hasselblad camera, sitting just 10 feet in front of him.

In nearly 30 years at NASA, Ingalls has photographed launches, landings, astronomical wonders, astronauts, and presidents. For his next adventure, he’s heading back to Kazakhstan on June 3, for the landing of crewmembers from the ISS. The melted camera, on the other hand, is probably headed to Washington, where it will go on display at NASA headquarters.

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We typically think of insects as pests or pestilences, carrying disease or gnawing their way through our gardens before we can get a bite. But they are also gorgeous creatures, as photographer Levon Biss explores in his latest book, Microsculpture: Portraits of Insects. The book is a continuation of his Microsculpture exhibit at Oxford’s Museum of Natural History, which displayed bugs from the collection in a larger-than-life way.

To get the highly detailed portraits, he took over 8,000 shots of a single specimen and stitched them together, a process that takes about three weeks to complete.

Here are 10 fantastic creatures from the book for you to enjoy. And when you’re done admiring the belles of the bug ball, check out more beautiful bug photography in some of our other insect-centric galleries.

The branch-backed treehopper from Belize has an oddly elongated thorax that curves up, creating an almost perfect circle. Treehoppers, which send out low vibrations through trees to communicate with each other, have evolved a variety of different shapes and sizes of spectacular headgear, and scientists aren’t entirely sure why. It could involve camouflage or defense from predators.

The common reed beetle is actually now a rather rare resident in the United Kingdom. They develop underwater, but still need to breathe, and rely on air-filled sacs in wetland plants to get the larvae the breath of fresh air they need.

There are over 25,000 longhorn beetle species known to science, including this jewel-toned variety from Nigeria. Its larvae eat dead wood, and can take up to 20 years to develop into adults like this magnificent specimen, with fine butterfly-like scales providing stunning color.

It might share a name and a shape with the more famous praying mantis, but this mantis fly is unrelated to more pious counterparts. However, both use their grasping legs to grab on to their prey, and dig in for a meal.

It might look like a muskox with curving, horn-like antennae, but this flightless creature is actually a moth. It lives, Biss says, in the remote reaches of the Indian Ocean on the Prince Edward Islands, where it feeds off scraps that build up in albatross nests.

The Peruvian Amazonian purple warrior scarab is not to be trifled with. It emerges at dusk throughout the Amazon basin, and acts as a distinct cleaning service for the region, carving up dead animals with its serrated legs.

The short-nosed weevil could be a stand-in for Snow White, with its light-reflecting scales. This species, from Brazil, has yet to be investigated in full.

Tiger beetles, like this one from Boreno, are fierce hunters that can pursue prey so quickly that they temporarily lose sight of the world around them. They frequently stop in their blurred pursuit of their meals, using their antennae to avoid obstacles.

This tortoise beetle from China may look imposing, but it likely fed on leaves. These beetles, Biss writes, wear their domed armor like protection (or maybe camouflage), but their larvae use a different approach, covering themselves in a coating of discarded skin and feces.

This treehopper, unlike its earlier mentioned circular cousin, has a triangular outgrowth that looks almost like a shield. The orange and black colors are typically a warning sign in nature, saying to all would-be predators; ‘Danger: not eat.’

Excerpted from Microsculpture by Levon Biss. October 2017, Abrams Books. Published with permission.

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Astronomers released some incredible images of our Solar System last week—let’s take a peek at some of the highlights.

Neptune

Above is the clearest picture of Neptune ever taken from Earth. It’s even better than similar pictures taken by the Hubble.

The trick is adaptive optics, which use deformable mirrors (and sometimes lasers) to reduce blurring to the images caused by the presence of the atmosphere. Read more about how a similar system works here.

Titan

The Saturn mission of our faithful explorer Cassini lasted over a decade and sent back incredible pictures and data. Though it was intentionally crashed into the surface of Saturn last September, its data is still changing our view of the solar system.

These images of Saturn’s moon Titan were taken in the infrared. Cassini gathered pictures of the satellite for 13 years, and all that data has now been converted into these stunning views. According to a NASA press release these images “represent some of the clearest, most seamless-looking global views of the icy moon’s surface produced so far.”

Clouds of Jupiter

On July 15, the Juno spacecraft, currently in orbit around Jupiter, made a close flyby of the planet, and captured this stunning picture of high-altitude clouds forming in the planet’s North North Temperate Belt (yes, two Norths) just below Jupiter’s North Polar region.

Juno is giving us some incredible images of our largest planet. If can’t wait for more, and you want even more pictures of Jupiter, check out our Jovian guessing game.

Pluto’s true colors

Some pretty amazing images of Pluto awed the world when they were released back in 2015. But New Horizons—the spacecraft that took the images—had cameras that could see well beyond the spectrum of visual light available to us mere humans. The result was gorgeous pictures, but not pictures that matched what we’d see if we managed to fly all the way out there and gaze at Pluto with our own eyes. This new image corrects that, and allows us a glimpse of what Pluto might look like without false-color alterations.

Click here to see Pluto’s moon Charon in true colors as well. If you’re interested in learning more about the process, see this Twitter thread from planetary astronomer Alex Parker—who processed the photos—for more details on how he adjusted the colors to match what our eyes are capable of seeing.

New volcano on Io

Bonus picture! It’s not as clear and stunning as the pictures above, but this red-hot image of Jupiter’s moon Io also made the news this week. Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system, gushing lava in such vast and impressive amounts that Earth’s eruptive summits look positively puny by comparison.

This week, researchers announced that they’d identified a potential new volcano on the moon, using infrared data collected last December by the Juno spacecraft.

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Flowers are fantastic, rainbows are ravishing, but bugs are often neglected as being creepy and crawly, when in reality they’re remarkably colorful. Enjoy scrolling through a rainbow of bugs.

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