It's from Nikon Small World in motion competition, where the best entries air selected for their beauty and uniqueness.

But there's much more to these images than their eye catching appearance.

They're also helping to answer some of the world's biggest questions.

Researchers captured this process of melanoma cells, morphing into two compartments footage obtained by placing the cancer cell under extreme confinement.

We can create environments in which we manage the micro environment of the human body, and we're watching the cell adapt and move in this micro environment.

So we call one part the small round part of cell body and the loan part leader blob and the leader.

Blip always leads the cell body, too.

It's other location during cell motility.

Knowing how cells adapt and change in this environment is a vital piece of information on how cancers form and move throughout the body.

You help understand cell motility.

Hopefully, one day we can help reduce the spread of cancer, and he isn't alone.

Scientists glorious Latam and Stefan Detwiler were able to track the development and movement of cancerous cells in a zebrafish embryo the small blue dot you can see moving through the pink and purple dots in other cells.

Thes dots air thanks to a fluorescent component that can refused to any protein first extracted from jellyfish by the late noble prize winner Roger Chen.

By filming the whole teach you, we can actually analyze what happens in the whole animals, but then we consume in and look with very precision that was happening in particular cells.

And since zebrafish share over 70% of their genetic building blocks with humans, this footage can help inform research on how cancer cells interact in humans only if we know the context of a cell, we can truly understand how it migrates through a body and how it interacts and which cells are important on its path through a body.

The more information scientists gather in this area, the more they'll be able to detect cancer cells earlier information and understand their movements after.

But this type of microscopic imagery of zebrafish isn't limited to just cancer research.

It can also help in understanding human body development.

The zebra fish is a really great model because it's obviously transparent as it develops, and we can watch blood vessels as they grow.

That's exactly what you've been watching here.

A zebrafish embryo developing and forming blood vessels, the speckles shown in green.

We're interested in the genes that are involved in determining which vessels, their arteries and veins were interested in.

How blood vessels nowhere to grow in the developing embryo.

Understanding.

Blood vessel development allows researchers like Daniel to track and monitor how blood moves in the early stages of body formation, a vital piece in the puzzle.

When developing targeted therapies for cancer treatments, you can also use similar techniques.

Toe Learn how that blood is pumped in the first place by looking at microscopic hearts, a two day old zebrafish heart.

To be precise, there's about 1% of babies that are born with heart defects for the U.

S.

Last year.

That represents 40,000 Children.

And if you want to help these kids, we need to get a lot more information about hearts before they're born.

Looking at how the heart works in microscopic detail is a major step.

There's always been a sort of a question of how this heart pump, what are the minimal elements required to pump blood in the heart, and that's what I'm trying to uncover.

Anjali and her colleagues watch the beating zebrafish hearts to pinpoint specific functions and mechanisms like how the heartbeats without backward blood flow, which will help uncover these mysteries and, importantly, help prevent birth defects.

And this technology is advancing so much that scientists are now even ableto look at microscopic images of our brain because this isn't a dazzling lightning strike in the night sky, it's actually growing brain cells.

Andy More, a postdoctoral associate at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, looked at the growth of active neurons in rat embryos.

This footage shows a critical step in brain development the period when the neuron decides which of the many nure ites become the acts on the part that will be in charge of sending an electric current.

And until images such as Andy's, this information wasn't properly understood.

Turns out a lot of these things that we thought we understood really well from textbooks, maybe didn't get things quite Aziz right as they could have now that we have the live movies in front of us and all these new technologies that way, usedto look at those questions and and his team can start to look at how neurons transmit, function and develop in extreme detail, as well as looking at how these cells grow and how proteins within the brain move and push things around, which in turn allows them and other researchers to see how severe neurological diseases like a L s form as well.

But other images in the competition went a little more old school and help shed light on important ecosystems.

Erik Lind captured this collection of images of a freshwater snail embryo in which you can see the heartbeat as it develops.

And Richard Kirby, ah, plankton specialist, captured this horseshoe worm larva thes species might not be as well known as other stars of aquatic life, but it's one of the biggest hidden worlds of life on this planet.

Then changes at the bottom will translate to changes at the top.

So looking at the base of the marine food chain gives you a a way to understand what's happening in the ecosystem and changing the ecosystem in particular.

But this year's winner of the Small World in motion competition wasn't alive.

It all.

The star of the show was a simple water droplet, technically micro droplets that are 80% water and 20% ethanol.

The video was taken by Xiaoyan and Causey Robbie, whose research focuses on creating surfaces that repel water, which you can see happening in the video, something that could help manufacturers create energy efficient technologies like improving air conditioning units or stopping pipes from freezing in the winter time, or even preventing your glasses from fogging up.

And it's this image that encapsulates what microscopic images do best, bringing us all into the unseen world of the small and minuscule and offering a vision of the future, okay?