Science Snaps Win Prizes

摘要

From his home in Stafford, U.K., retired schoolteacher Spike Walker snapped four of the 20 images that won the 2010 Wellcome Image Awards, announced this week. The pictures, created by stacking as many as 44 different frames captured through a microscope, reveal surprising details about four different insects in vivid color. These include the hooks on a caterpillar's belly, a mosquito's feathery antennae, the hairs on a coiled ruby-tailed wasp, and the suckers on the foreleg of a great diving beetle, with which it grasps females during mating (pictured). "The beetle was one I found in a large collection of Victorian slides a friend was wanting to get rid of," Walker says. "The wasp just flew into the kitchen one day." His four photomicrographs, along with the 16 other winners, which included a scan of a patient's aneurysm and an image of a 3-day-old mouse blastocyst undergoing its first cell division, are on display at the Wellcome Collection in London.