Best science photo 2008

The award is awarded annually by the US National Science Foundation and Science magazine, for photographs using modern technology to realize complex scientific topics.

The tiny diatoms create an image of a fern forest when they attach to the host's body that lives on the bottom of the sea. Mario De Stefano from University of Naples Naples, Italy, captured this tiny forest in the Mediterranean with an electron microscope scanner.

Overcharging a tiny engine's energy causes a cotton thread to twist in a strange way, creating the image. Andrew Davidhazy from Rochester Institute of Technology in New York captured this image due to a random flaw when twisted too much.

Beams of senses suck on an ink's arm. Each of these suction cups, about 400 micrometers wide, smaller than a human hair, is surrounded by "fangs" with hard chitin. The squid uses powerful vacuums to hold onto the prey. The work of Jessica Schiffman, a doctoral student at Drexel University.

Journey into the bloodstream, describing a close-up view of the human circulatory system. Jennifer Frazier's photo from San Francisco's Exploratorium

Rainbow Bible, with nearly 64,000 instructions referenced between each chapter, represented by the curves above the black graph (Graph contains many black lines, each line is a chapter in the Bible, and the length of the line is number of stanzas).

A close-up view of one of the most dangerous enemies of humans - melanoma cells. Photos of Donald Bliss and Sriram Subramaniam from the US National Institutes of Health.

"The truth is even more bizarre than fiction" - a picture of three beetles eating butterfly wings, surrounded by a field of vitamin C crystals.

A few mouse clicks can allow students to explore each part of a plant cell, such as this mitochondria - also known as the cell's energy plant. Program of Gene Digitization Laboratory, created by Spongelab Interactive laboratory based in Toronto, Canada.

A type of unsuccessful "sandwich" of polymers creates an impressive image of sunken and sunken areas. Ye Jin Eun and colleagues from Maidson University, Wisconsin, put two types of polymer together and dipped into the water as part of an experiment. Although this polymer is unusable, the picture of it is won.

Even the bacteria that cause sore throats can be beautiful, as you see in the picture above, when they interact with the immune system. The author is Etsuko Uno from the Walter and Eliza Hall Medical Research Institute.