Zebrafish 'inner ear' development wins science video prize
By Ben Gruber This is a video of a lateral line, an organ that allows fish to sense water movement, developing in a zebra fish. Using an imaging technique called Selective Plane Illumination Microscopy, which uses sheets of lights to illuminate sub-cellular activity, Dr. Mariana Muzzopappa and Jim Swoger from the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona Spain, claimed top honors in this year's Nikon Small World in Motion Photomicrography Competition. The entry was one of hundreds submitted for the contest, which aims to highlight the latest techniques of scientific imaging. Second place went to Dr. Douglas Clark from San Francisco, California who used polarized light to create a time-lapse movie showing crystals forming on a single drop of a solution saturated with caffeine in water. Clark's time-lapse condenses 20 minutes of crystallization into 40 seconds. Third place honors went to Dr. John Hart from the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science at the University of Colorado-Boulder for a detailed look at oil floating on the surface of water. The video shows pools of water a fraction of the size of a human hair slowly evaporating, as the oil form into larger droplets. This microscopic view of the fluid dynamics involved when oil and water meet could offer researchers clues on how better to deal with future oil spills.
