Tiny Things Win Big in Nikon Photo Contest

The votes are in, and the winner of Nikon’s annual Small World Photomicrography Competition is…Arabidopsis thaliana! You know, the thale cress anther? OK, it’s the male sex organ of a small flowering plant, and enterprising Estonian Heiti Paves, a scientist at the Tallinn University of Technology who is probably of no relation to celebrity hairstylist Ken, managed to photograph a bunch of them under 20 times magnification (resulting in the photomicrograph pictured above). “As part of my work as a research scientist, I have been taking photographs through the microscope for almost 30 years to observe the processes in living cells,” said Paves, whose winning image reminds us of a painfully inflamed devil strawberry.