Video: A close-up of life inside the fetus

A doctor from Lisbon, Germany won the grand prize for reconstructing a small-scale life in a moving state, thanks to an authentic video of the development of a fetus of quail for 10 consecutive days.

The elaborate, vivid video of the growing fetus of the quail of Dr. Gabriel G. Martins from the Gulbenkian de Ciencia Institute in Lisbon, Germany was awarded the first prize of the annual "Nikon Small World in Motion" competition . now on. Mr. Martins used more than 1,000 photos taken under a microscope to create a short 3D video, fast-forward the time of the embryonic 10 days inside a quail egg, with "virtual" slices most authentic.

The second prize of the contest belonged to expert Michael Weber of Max Planck Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics Institute (Germany) with a video showing the normal beating heart of a 2-day-old embryo. The simulated heart is only 250 micrometers in size, slightly more than the diameter of a human hair. In the reconstructed video, viewers can observe the movement of blood cells through the heart and adjacent blood vessels.

The third prize of the competition was eventually awarded to Dr. Lin Shao of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (USA) with a short video of a living HeLa cancer cell. The video is special in that, for the first time, it describes in detail the inner mitochondria in a living cell in 3D.