The Nikon Small World photomicrography competition was expanded to include video three years ago, and the result has been an incredible look into living things on the microscopic scale. This year's winning video, above, is a three-dimensional look through a 10-day-old quail embryo growing inside its egg.
The video, by Gabriel Martins of University of Lisbon, is a sequence of virtual slices through the 23-millimeter-long specimen made up of more than 1,000 images.
Second place (above) went to this video of the beating heart of a live two-day-old zebrafish embryo. The heart, captured by Michael Weber of Germany's Max Planck institute of Cell Biology and Genetics, is only a tiny bit bigger than the diameter of a human hair. In the video, you can watch blood cells flow throw the heart.
The third place video is an incredible look inside of a living cell. This video by Lin Shao of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute shows mitochondria within the cell using a technique that combines various time points into a three-dimensional image.
