显微镜下的生命——2010奥林巴斯生物数字显微摄影大赛作品

Life Unseen: Images of Magnificent Microscopic Landscapes

显微镜下的生命

——奥林巴斯生物数字显微摄影大赛作品

Nature looks fundamentally different depending on scale. This diversity is especially striking in the world of biology, where matter assembles itself in constantly renewing configurations, offering our eyes—aided by scientific instruments—limitless perspectives.

当我们从每一个不同的尺度观看大自然，它都给我们呈现出完全不同的一面。尤其是在各种生命中，微观的物质以不同的装配方式不断变幻。在科学设备的帮助下，微观生命的缤纷多彩更是让我们叹为观止，让我们眼界大开。

Thus, we can find beauty in places we did not suspect—inside a flower from a roadside weed, in the anatomical details of a flea or under a mushroom growing on a dead tree. Some people explore microscopic worlds for scientific reasons; others, such as Laurie Knight, for the sheer adventure. “The reason I do this,” he says, “is that I get to see things that a lot of people can’t really see.”

因此，我们总是在不经意处发现美——在路边野草的花朵中、在跳蚤的精细解剖结构中、在朽木中绽开的蘑菇中。一些人探索微观世界是为了科学目的，另一些人，比如Laurie Knight，只是为了在微观世界中像爱丽丝一样历险。他说：“我做显微摄影是因为我希望看到别人看不到的东西。”

Fortunately, Knight and many others also like to share some of the vistas they discover. Every year scientists and hobbyists alike submit their microscopy art to the Olympus BioScapes International Digital Imaging Competition. These are images whose purpose is, in the words of another serious hobbyist, Edwin K. Lee, “to capture the combined essence of science and art.” And, in turn, every year we at Scientific American like to share with readers some of our favorite shots from that competition. Enjoy.

幸运的是像Knight这样的人也十分乐意与我们分享他们在微观世界的发现。每一年科学家和显微摄影爱好者们都会以他们的显微照片参加国际奥林巴斯生物数字显微摄影大赛（Olympus BioScapes International Digital Imaging Competition）。正如显微摄影爱好者Edwin K. Lee所说的，这些作品的目的是抓住科学与艺术完美结合的瞬间。每一年《科学美国人》都会都会跟读者们分享比赛中最受欢迎的作品。

甲虫的腿

Spike Walker, a retired biology lecturer based in Penkridge, England, was striving for visual abstraction when he captured a detail of a

Dytiscus water beetle’s front leg. Walker used a type of darkfield microscopy in which the object is shot against a blue screen. The blue light shines through the orange of the leg’s exoskeleton. The view, spanning about 1.8 millimeters in width, shows hair (left and bottom) and a suction cup (large disk on right). The males use these suction cups to hold on to females during mating. The image is patched together from 44 shots, each having a different focal plane.

Spike Walker是英国彭克里奇（Penkridge）的一名退休生物教师，他尝试将龙虱（一种水生甲虫）前腿处理成抽象化的图像。Walker使用了一种暗视野显微镜，将拍摄的物体放在蓝色背景前，蓝色的光线透射过龙虱腿的橘红色外骨骼。图像实际宽度为1.8毫米，左下角的是龙虱的刚毛，右上角是吸盘。雄性的龙虱在交配时利用这些吸盘牢牢吸附在雌性身上。这张图片实际上是由44张不同焦平面的照片合成的。

The henbit deadnettle is a common weed. Edwin K. Lee, a retired microbiologist, picked one from the roadside near his home in Carrollton, Tex., to see if it might make an interesting subject for his microscope. He removed the stamens from the flowers and photographed them using polarized light, to enhance the oranges and browns of the anthers, the pollen-carrying heads. The stamens are about three millimeters wide.

宝盖草（henbit deadnettle）是一种常见的杂草。退休的微生物学家Edwin K. Lee从他在德克萨斯州卡罗尔顿的家旁的路上捡起一枝宝盖草，想看看在显微镜下究竟是怎样的。他从花中摘取了雄蕊，为了凸显花药——携带花粉的头部——的橘黄色，他用偏振光拍摄了照片。这些雄蕊的宽度为三毫米。

Tens of thousands of tiny creatures resembling polyps can sometimes be seen attached to rocks or aquatic plants on a single square meter of Normandy’s riverbeds, extending their tentacles (or “cephalic fans”) to capture particles of food, says Fabrice Parais, a hydrobiologist at the Regional Directorate for Environment, Land-Use Planning and Housing. But these creatures are not polyps; they are insects: larvae of blood-sucking blackflies. Parais catalogues and develops methods to analyze specimens such as this one (which he conserved in formaldehyde and shot in darkfield microscopy) so that scientists can monitor biodiversity and thus spot signs of pressure on the ecosystem. Each tentacle is about two millimeters long.

诺曼底地区的河床里，有时候在石头或水生植物上仅一平方米的面积就聚集了成千上万的像水螅一样的小生命，它们伸出的触手四处捕捉食物颗粒，水生生物学家Fabrice Parais这样说。但这些生物并不是水螅，它们是一种昆虫——像蚊子一样吸血为生的蚋的幼虫。Parais将这些蚋进行分类，并研究新手段分析这些样本（用甲醛保存，用暗视野显微镜拍摄）以此来监控生态多样性和环境所承受的威胁。图中每一个触手大约两毫米长。

First prize in the BioScapes competition went to Igor Siwanowicz of the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology near Munich for his confocal microscope picture of the eyes of a daddy longlegs. The false-color image shows a cutaway view of the eyes, with the lenses （

two large ovals), which are spaced less than a millimeter apart, and the retinas, which consist of a single layer of rodlike photoreceptor cells that give the spider rather poor, monochromatic vision. The photoreceptors’ nuclei appear here as cyan, and the cells’ elongated bodies are in a range of colors, from purple to reddish.

生物显微摄影比赛的桂冠被慕尼黑马克斯普朗克神经生物学研究所的Igor Siwanowicz摘得。他的作品是在共聚焦显微镜下拍摄的盲蛛的眼睛。这张假色彩图像展现的是盲蛛眼睛的剖视图，我们能看到两个相距不到一毫米的椭圆形晶状体和具有一层杆状感光细胞的视网膜，这让蜘蛛具有十分有限的单色的视觉。感光细胞的胞核在这里呈现出青色，而细胞的其他部分呈现出从紫色到淡红色的一系列色彩。

Nucleated cells have an internal scaffolding called a cytoskeleton, made in part of filaments of the protein actin. The image shows purified-actin filaments (tens of microns long) that Dennis Breitsprecher grew on a dish when he was a biochemistry graduate student at Hannover Medical School in Germany. Researchers are discovering hundreds of enzymes that regulate the evolving shape of the cytoskeleton, he says. But, he adds, only the right choice of enzymes produces the wavy shapes seen here: “I know what protein to add to make it look nice.”

有核的细胞内部具有一种起支撑作用的细胞骨架，其中一部分是由肌动蛋白组装成的微丝构成。这张照片展示了Dennis Breitsprecher在 德国汉诺瓦医学院做生化研究生时在培养皿中组装的纯化微丝（几十微米长）。研究者们发现上百种的酶能够调节细胞骨架延伸的形状，Dennis说，但只有使用正确的酶才能使微丝长成这里所见的波浪状，“我知道加什么蛋白质进去才能让微丝看起来更美妙”。

跳蚤的器官

Flea organ

Vintage microscopy slides—especially those from the Victorian era—are collectors’ items that hobbyists buy online or in specialized shops. David Walker, a retired petrol chemist from Huddersfield, England, produced this detail of a flea specimen (showing a 0.7-millimeter-long sensory organ called a sensillum) by training his lens on a late-1800s or early-1900s prepared slide he bought on eBay for $15 or so. He altered the colors with photo-retouching software.

蜂蜜蕈

Honey mushroom

Reminiscent of the sensuous folds in some of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings, the mushroom underside visible in the middle image was photographed by Neil Egan of Cleveland. Honey mushrooms are common around the facility where he works (as a quality-control technician for a manufacturer of automotive finishes); he found this one growing on a dead tree stump. Egan says he is not new to looking for beauty in ordinary objects: “The more you look at things, the more interesting they become.”

飞蛾的翅膀

We think of moths as grayish, boring-looking nocturnal bugs. But the sunset moth of Madagascar, or

Chrysiridia rhipheus, is a diurnal creature with beautifully iridescent wings. Scales on the wings have multiple layers of cuticle with varying nanometer-scale spacings between them that produce colors by optical interference. Laurie Knight, a Web developer in Tonbridge, England, took multiple shots of these scales with 20× magnification. He then used special software to meld the shots into one image on his “overclocked,” made-to-spec computer.

我们往往认为蛾子是难看的灰蒙蒙的夜行昆虫。而原产马达加斯加的日落蛾（拉丁名Chrysiridia rhipheus）是昼行性的蛾类，具有绚丽的彩虹般色调的翅膀。它翅膀上的鳞屑是由多层的角质层构成，角质层之间是不同的纳米级间隔空间，产生的光学干干涉让我们看到彩虹一样的色彩。英国汤布里奇（Tonbridge）的web开发人员Laurie Knight对这些鳞屑以20×的放大倍数拍了多张照片，然后利用软件将这些照片拼合成一张大图。

The corals familiar to most of us are colonies of small polyps that build calcium carbonate branches. But mushroom corals, such as this one, are loners. James Nicholson, a retired medical-imaging specialist, photographed the five-centimeter-wide live specimen of an unidentified species for the Coral Culture and Collaborative Research Facility—a laboratory in Charleston, S.C., operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other institutions—where he works as an unpaid consultant. Nicholson and his collaborators want to learn how to monitor environmental stress, such as that resulting from oil spills or rising temperatures. The small bumps are tentacles the animal uses to push food toward its mouth, which is the white slit in the middle.

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