Nikon Small World

From slime mold resembling a cute mushroom to an unprecedented look at the embryonic hand of a gecko, this year’s winners of the Nikon Small World photo contest reveal the stunning sights of a hidden microscopic universe.

The Nikon Small World in Motion contest delivers a mind-bending array of videos highlighting the microscopic world. This year features psychedelic salts, a nightmarish feeding session and a spectacular depiction of neural cells in a fish embryo.

Ever wondered what the inside of a dinosaur bone looks like in close-up? Or how about a few grains of pollen caught in knots of cotton fabric? Wonder no more thanks to hand-picked highlights from this year’s incredible Nikon Small World Competition.

A groundbreaking video of single-celled organisms moving around the gut of a termite has won this year’s Nikon Small World in Motion Competition. In its 11th year, this video microscopy contest continues to deliver astounding glimpses of tiny worlds.

The incredible winners from this year's Nikon Small World photo awards strike a unique balance between art and science, offering everything from a surreal close-up of the grooves in an old vinyl record to a stunning image of hippocampal neurons firing.

Zooming in on the motion of the microscopic, the winners of the Nikon Small World video contest offer up the closest one can get to shrinking down to the size of Ant-Man and experiencing the weird and wonderful world of polyps, proteins and parasites.

Nikon’s Small World competition has been running for nearly 50 years and it is one of the most compelling and reliably spectacular photo contests in the world. This year's contest featured many mesmerizing images like this small white hair spider by Javier Rupérez.

A surreal close-up of a weevil eye has taken the top prize at this year’s Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition. The magnificent annual photography competition, now in its 44th year, celebrates the skill and artistry in the world of microscopic photography.

The Nikon Small World in Motion competition is more than just a microscopic video competition. This glimpse into the world in miniature showcases a variety of hypnotically strange sights from a laser bouncing around a psychedelic soap membrane to trippy fractal footage of soy sauce evaporating.

​Every year science and art collide in the Nikon Small World in Motion Photomicrography Competition. This year's top three winners include hypnotic water patterns made by an eight-week-old starfish larva, a predatory ciliate stretching its rubbery neck to gobble up prey, and a blooming fungus.