Art and Science Meet in a Photo Contest

Most artists believe that their profession has little in common with science. But they might change their minds if they could see the images honored in this year's Visions of Science Photographic Awards competition. The contest, which celebrates science-related images, is sponsored by Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis; Science Photo Library, which licenses science images; the Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper; and other supporters.

Entrants competed in the categories of medicine and life, action, close-ups, people, concepts, art, scientists at work, and young photographer for prizes worth up to £1,000, about $1,840.

Selected from a pool of about 1,300 entries, the winning images will tour science and arts centers in the U.K. to encourage public understanding of science. They include a picture (top right) captured with a transmission electron microscope that shows an iron crystal (yellow) threaded inside a carbon nanotube. The magnetic field lines formed by the iron were revealed by electron holography. This image was created by Rafal E. Dunin-Borkowski, a Royal Society research fellow in the materials science and metallurgy department at the University of Cambridge. He also was honored for a colorful field emission transmission electron microscope picture showing the different orientations of a magnetic field in a thin metal film.

David McCarthy, who runs an electron microscope unit at the University of London's school of pharmacy, credits a "happy accident" for his dramatic shot (top) of a polymer microcapsule that appears to be exploding. When he was preparing the drug-delivery capsule for its close-up, an air bubble on its surface burst, revealing the smaller drug-carrying microcapsules inside. McCarthy obtained the image with a scanning electron microscope and colored it digitally.

Stephen Gschmeissner caught the "gross but cool" side of science in his image (right) of the absorbent side of a used adhesive bandage after it was removed from a cut. Red blood cells and a web of pale gray fibrin--the protein found in blood clots--lie on top of the large, dark gray fibers of the bandage. A commercial photographer and chief scientific officer at Cancer Research UK, a charitable organization that funds research, Gschmeissner used a field emission gun scanning electron microscope and digital colorization to produce the picture. He used the same techniques to show mites feeding on dead skin cells in an eyelash hair follicle.

Other pictures include a confocal microscope image of a cell growing in culture that reveals the cell's nucleus, the structural protein tubulin, and the contractile protein actin. Photographers used cameras to catch a ladybug munching on an aphid and to show the striations caused by dust trapped between layers of snow in a Swiss glacier. And several prize-winning photographs portray the high social and medical costs of obesity in the U.S.