万花筒 2008-05-29&-05-30 显微镜下的美丽世界

（单词翻译）

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.