This has been on my radar for a week, but I’ve suddenly realized the closing date is tomorrow.
Nikon’s Small World Photomicrography competition.
Small World is regarded as the leading forum for showcasing the beauty and complexity of life as seen through the light microscope. For over 30 years, Nikon has rewarded the world’s best photomicrographers who make critically important scientific contributions to life sciences, bio-research and materials science.
Unfortunately I don’t have access to the kit anymore (any lonely cell biologists want to invite me over for lunch?), although I’m tempted to enter Mercedes Benz just for fun…
now what is that? it looks cool though. I would enter it 🙂 maybe magnify it a bit??
A negative of a teeny, tiny girrafe doing the splits?
I could submit upwards of a hundred thousand slightly out of focus cells, freshly prepared today, but they’re supremely unattractive. Unless I argue that it’s Impressionist cell biology…
Mmm. Best I could do is a ten-year-old, honest-to-goodness film photo of a C. elegans, out of focus and taken with the wrong optics on the scope.
Oh, and it was a Leica microscope… which I suspect might get me banned from the competition, permanently. 😉
Seems to be glowing – it’s not your UFO is it?
Hah. A montage, Jenny—like those pictures that are made up of smaller pictures. That might have a certain geek cool factor.
Could be, Stephen. Care to go up in a weather balloon and take a look?
Wow…all I can think of is tiny sea creatures with names ending in -fora.
Speaking of not quite that tiny, we seem to have invented the best science game ever here (the Small Girl comes home asking if we can pleeeeeeeeze do science). It’s called “What Weighs A Thousand Grams?” This is a follow-on to “What Weighs A Gram?” — she’d been totally caught up in playing with the little plastic balance that came with my chemistry set. A gram’s easy with the little plastic weights. But a thousand grams, as it turns out, is quite a lot. We haven’t got there yet. She runs around the house collecting things to put on my kitchen scale. Last night she loaded it up with two placemats, a potholder, a stuffed bear, the chemistry-kit balance and weights, two pebbles, a bottlecap, a bracelet, a dreidel, paper she’d made in school, and a few other things, and I don’t believe that needle went past 300g. We’ll try again tonight. I’m curious to see whether the concept of density will emerge. (She did suggest putting herself on the scale, but I told her it’s got to be stuff that a) fits on the scale and b) allows her to read the number. Once we get to 1kg we can move on to the bathroom scale, though I haven’t said so yet.)
Amy – approximately one squillion of those star-shaped things of Richard G’s would probably weigh about a thousand grams, I suspect.
This reply probably 100% useless.
Yes, because Amy’s comment was interesting — but I missed it, somehow.