It's a Small and Wonderful World: Stunning Images of Science Under the Microscope

Looking down a microscope always reminds us how much we can’t see with the naked eye. The winners of the 2011 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge provide a tantalizing glimpse into the micro- and nanoscopic world.

This image of a thin slice of a mouse’s eye, above, was dyed so that different tissues show up as different colors. Muscles are pale yellow, for example, and the sclera is green.

No, this isn’t a cliff—it’s far too tiny. Each layer of titanium carbide—an exceptionally hard material used in energy storage devices, solar cells, and the like—in the stack pictured here is only 5 atoms thin.

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