The sharpest science shots from December and January, selected by Nature’s photo team.
After spending December producing our pictures of the year, Nature’s images of the month returns with a bumper round up of the best images and videos from the past two months.
Dippy departure
Aerial arctic
Shifting sheds
Starfish swirls
This video of water movements around an eight-week-old starfish larva won William Gilpin of Stanford University, California, and his colleagues first place in the Nikon Small World in Motion Photomicrography Competition, announced in December. Also in December, Gilpin and his colleagues reported in a paper in Nature Physics1 how these observations can offer insight into these animals’ lives and explain how starfish balance swimming and feeding.
Ant code
Touchdown!
Cold snap
Ultraviolet flowers
Blooming marvellous
Artist John Edmark creates 3D-printed sculptures, which create strange animations when spun. This work is based on the ‘golden ratio’, a mathematical pattern seen in many natural systems, such as plant branching and some shell spirals.
References
Gilpin, W., Prakash, V. N. & Prakash, M. Nature Phys. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphys3981 (2016).
Electronic supplementary material
Nikon Small World in Motion
Blooms II - John Edmark
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Cressey, D. Swimming starfish, a departing dinosaur and a lot of ice. Nature (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2017.21386
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2017.21386