Quail Embryo Wins Top Prize in Nikon Competition (Video)

A time-lapse video of a developing quail embryo has fetched a Portuguese scientist the first prize in Nikon’s 2013 Small World in Motion Competition.

This year’s winning video shows a sequence of virtual slices of a 10-day-old quail embryo growing inside an egg. The video is made up of more than 1,000 images that display the anatomy of the 23-millimeter-long specimen in crystal-clear detail.

The second-place video shows the beating heart of a two-day-old zebrafish embryo. You can see individual blood cells getting pumped through the heart, which is slightly larger than the width of a human hair. A video illuminating the details of a living cell’s mitochondria took third place.

Agencies/Canadajournal