万花筒 2008-05-29&-05-30 显微镜下的美丽世界

The microscope. In their course of their professional work, scientists often take photos of microscopic¹ objects. And often, the resulting images can be quite beautiful. For thirty years, Nikon, the camera company has held an annual competition to select the most striking photos of objects unseen by the human eye. With a closer look at this year’s winning entries, here’s our Ned Potter.

It looks like stained glass, but it’s really part of a dragonfly. A wheel of some sort? No, it’s the coiled tongue of a saltwater snail². The leaf of a cedar³ tree, snowflakes in polarized light. Researchers in the lab looking through microscopes may sometimes do the routine but sometimes when they take pictures they create something of beauty. Liposomes, fat pouches⁴ used in medicines, or rust⁵ fungus⁶ looks like cattails in the marsh⁷ or somewhere. For thirty years, Nikon, the camera and optics maker⁸ has run a competition to find the most beautiful microscope images. And these are some of the winners. The brain of a zebrafish, the embryos⁹ of clawed frogs. Some of these pictures are magnified hundreds or thousands of times, others not as much. That’s a mosquito, that’s a plankton¹⁰ with the eye of a needle for scale. The images are often a celebration of living things, but sometimes the most beautiful pictures come from the most mundane¹¹ things. That is not a rose, it’s soap, slowly draining.

 

1 microscopic   

adj.微小的，细微的，极小的，显微的

参考例句：

• It's impossible to read his microscopic handwriting.不可能看清他那极小的书写字迹。
• A plant's lungs are the microscopic pores in its leaves.植物的肺就是其叶片上微细的气孔。

2 snail   

n.蜗牛

参考例句：

• Snail is a small plant-eating creature with a soft body.蜗牛是一种软体草食动物。
• Time moved at a snail's pace before the holidays.放假前的时间过得很慢。

3 cedar   

n.雪松，香柏(木)

参考例句：

• The cedar was about five feet high and very shapely.那棵雪松约有五尺高,风姿优美。
• She struck the snow from the branches of an old cedar with gray lichen.她把长有灰色地衣的老雪松树枝上的雪打了下来。

4 pouches   

n.（放在衣袋里或连在腰带上的）小袋( pouch的名词复数 )；（袋鼠等的）育儿袋；邮袋；（某些动物贮存食物的）颊袋

参考例句：

• Pouches are a peculiarity of marsupials. 腹袋是有袋动物的特色。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Under my eyes the pouches were heavy. 我眼睛下的眼袋很深。 来自《简明英汉词典》

5 rust   

n.锈；v.生锈；(脑子)衰退

参考例句：

• She scraped the rust off the kitchen knife.她擦掉了菜刀上的锈。
• The rain will rust the iron roof.雨水会使铁皮屋顶生锈。

6 fungus   

n.真菌，真菌类植物

参考例句：

• Mushrooms are a type of fungus.蘑菇是一种真菌。
• This fungus can just be detected by the unaided eye.这种真菌只用肉眼就能检查出。

7 marsh   

n.沼泽，湿地

参考例句：

• There are a lot of frogs in the marsh.沼泽里有许多青蛙。
• I made my way slowly out of the marsh.我缓慢地走出这片沼泽地。

8 maker   

n.制造者，制造商

参考例句：

• He is a trouble maker，You must be distant with him.他是个捣蛋鬼，你不要跟他在一起。
• A cabinet maker must be a master craftsman.家具木工必须是技艺高超的手艺人。

9 embryos   

n.晶胚；胚，胚胎( embryo的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Somatic cells of angiosperms enter a regenerative phase and behave like embryos. 被子植物体细胞进入一个生殖阶段，而且其行为象胚。 来自辞典例句
• Evolution can explain why human embryos look like gilled fishes. 进化论能够解释为什么人类的胚胎看起来象除去了内脏的鱼一样。 来自辞典例句

10 plankton   

n.浮游生物

参考例句：

• Plankton is at the bottom of the marine food chain.浮游生物处于海洋食物链的最底层。
• The plankton in the sea feeds many kinds of animals. 海的浮游生物成为很多种动物的食物。

11 mundane   

adj.平凡的；尘世的；宇宙的

参考例句：

• I hope I can get an interesting job and not something mundane.我希望我可以得到的是一份有趣的工作，而不是一份平凡无奇的。
• I find it humorous sometimes that even the most mundane occurrences can have an impact on our awareness.我发现生活有时挺诙谐的，即使是最平凡的事情也能影响我们的感知。