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The Most Beautiful Thing in the World Today: Plants Up Close

Underneath a microscope, a strange yet mesmerizing new look at familiar flowers

Things get other-worldly when you zoom in, which is how Stefan Eberhard shot this thale cress flower (pictured right). On a microscopic scale, the plant’s reproductive organs—the green represents pollen grains ready for dispersal—are bizarrely beautiful. This image and others are the winners of the 2014 Wellcome Image Awards, a program that celebrates striking imagery captured for scientific and medical use. The overall winner is a CT scan-constructed image rendered in 3D depicting a mechanical heart pump in the chest of a patient awaiting a heart transplant. See it and more here.

Not a flower but “agricultural sludge” by Eberhardt Josué Friedrich Kernahan and Enrique Rodríguez Cañas

 

Lily flower bud by Spike Walker

 

Astrantia flowers by Dr Henry Oakeley

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