Microscopy technician Teresa Zgoda and student Teresa Kugler, a recent graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology, painstakingly stacked and stitched together hundreds of images to create this winning mosaic of a fluorescent turtle embryo.
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See the year's best pictures of the hidden microscopic world
The winners of the 45th Nikon Small World photomicrography contest showcase the art and science of the otherwise invisible wonders all around us.
Magnifying the otherwise invisible world of microorganisms has advanced fundamental science—and fascinated the public—since Dutch cloth merchant Antoni van Leeuwenhoek first gazed on bacteria using a homemade microscope in the 1600s. Peering through beadlike lenses that he ground himself, Leeuwenhoek described and sometimes hand-drew the delicate shapes of algae, blood cells, muscle fibers, and more that he witnessed through his early eyepieces.
