Good morning, John.

I got to do something very weird this year. I got put into a room with four other dorks and we, together, judged the Nikon Small World photography competition. Photo micrography, I should say, not photography. Beautiful pictures using microscopes.

We talked about technique, how clever and skilled someone had to be to capture the image. We talked about beauty; how did the images make us feel? And we talked about story. What did the image tell us about the world? 

It was really fun and happened a while ago but now, finally, the results have been released to the world and so I get to give you, right now, the top ten best microscopic images of 2021-- as judged by four experts and me. 

Starting out with number ten: This is a butterfly wing, and there were a lot of butterfly wings, and that makes sense because they are absolutely amazing. But something about the composition of this one, with that huge brown vein and that one misplaced scale, shot this one to the top ten.

Number nine is one that I personally fought for. This is a daphnia. It's a tiny crustacean, and they are not chill! I have followed them with my own microscope, and getting an image this sharp, with this much color contrast is amazing! But in addition to that, this little water flea is covered in, I think, vorticella-- a single celled filter feeder that eats some of the same stuff as the daphnia. And then, up in there-- those little blue dots? Those are baby daphnia!

Number eight is a cross section of a mouse intestine, which we all liked because it's a reminder that a lot of the diagrams in anatomy textbooks are simplifications. A way that fluorescence microscopy is used here really lets you see how surface area is maximized in the intestine, which increases nutrient absorption.

Number seven is the head of a tick. We were all just really pleased when we saw beautiful images of things that we generally find disgusting.

Number six: These are the blood vessels of a mouse's brain. And as impressive and fascinating as it is, I think I primarily liked this one as a piece of art that I would absolutely hang on my wall.

Number five: Again, we love the gross stuff. This is the proboscis of a housefly, and like, maybe you didn't want to see that, but also, it's, like, really amazing. And the more we looked at it, the more we loved it.

In fourth, we have a single sensory neuron of an embryonic rat. Again, we're used to these overly simplified diagrams of neurons with like, a couple dozen branches at max. But neurons can have thousands of dendrites that connect to tens of thousands of other cells.

And now it is time for our top three.

In third place, this leg claw of a louse. We really did hit as many annoying bugs as we could. I like this one because the trachea, which are the holes that they breathe air into their bodies through, they look like the worm holes that Bill and Ted would fly through in space time. Like, the whole things just looks like a galaxy. But it's a louse!

Speaking of galaxies, in second place: This one is a bunch of neurons that were put on two sides of a barrier with tiny channels in it. And then, because the nuclei couldn't fit through those channels, the axons of the neurons did, and they meshed together into this image that absolutely looks like some kind of science fiction mega-structure.

And finally, what beautiful, weird, otherworldly thing did we choose for our number one image of the year? Was it something maybe you've never seen before? Some new discovery? Some tiny organism that only scientists ever pay attention to? No. It is a leaf.

I believe it is the underside of a leaf of the Southern Live Oak, shown in a way that completely re-shapes my understanding of something so simple. This image, which is the result of stacking over two hundred different images focusing on different planes, shows three different vital leaf structures: stomata in purple, trichomes in white, and veins in blue. It's an oak leaf alive and complex and mysterious like I never imagined.

Thanks so much to Nikon Small World for putting this together and for providing these images for this video. There were so many other amazing images, which you can go see if you just go to nikonsmallworld.com I think there were something like a hundred total images that we gave some kind of distinction. It was a wonderful way to spend two days. Thanks to all of the other judges and everybody who submitted their work to this competition. It is a reminder of how amazing our world is, and how amazing our tools for observing it are, and a reminder of how amazing all of the people are who observe this world, and all of the different ways we observe it.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.