Nikon just posted the results from their annual photo micro-graph competition, and the winning images are simply stunning. One of the things that struck me about this year's images was the significant leap in imaging technologies based on florescent DNA tagging combined with the use of confocal microscopy and volumetric tomography, even over last year's images.I really enjoyed browsing the Nikon site, going back in time, to see how science has advanced over even a couple of years. Clearer vision brings clearer insight, as they say; these images let us see things never seen before and witness processes first-hand that were mere hypothesis last year. More than insight, there is wondrous beauty and complexity in every image. Here are a few of my favorites from the 2007 gallery, but don't miss browsing the rest on the home site.Zebrafish embryo midbrain and diencephalon showing neural fibers in blue and developing neural interconnections in red, by Michael Hendricks of the Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, National University of Singapore.Erpobdella octoculata (fresh water leech) muscle strands surrounding a central nerve cord at 25x magnification, by Vera Hunnekuhl, Department of Zoology, University of Osnabrück, Osnabrück, GermanyGiant unilamellar and multilamellar ...

Photographer Mike Theiss recently toured Greensburg, Kansas, the small town at ground zero of that monster tornado. Having seen the stock news footage on CNN, I still hadn't really internalized the true power and energy unleashed in the EF-5 storm with winds howling at over 200 mph. Check out these photos of the utter devastation, linked directly from Mike's site.From Mike's comments on Spaceweather.com:"The power of the wind from this EF-5 tornado was evident," says Theiss. "I documented a fork stuck in a tree, a Kansas license plate ripped off a car and stuck in a tree, ...

Or, How to Make Your Camera Work More Like Your EyesAnyone who has ever tried to snap a few photos with a modern camera has probably felt the frustration that the camera often fails to get the exposure quite right, with things that you can see clearly either washed out and over-exposed, or invisible in the shadows. The intrepid among you may have even gone so far as to turn the switch to manual, only to discover that it is really hard to do too much better than the automatic system. You end up with these types of exposure-bracketed images: The sky detail is only visible in the lower exposure (faster shutter speed) and the building detail is only visible in the higher exposure. And yet when you look directly at the scene, everything is clearly visible to the naked eye. The reason for this is that through an amazing combination of the iris' aperture dilation, and the logarithmic response of the photo-receptive neurons in retina, the human eye automatically adapts to an incredibly broad range of illumination intensity as it scans across ...