The clip is the creation of Gabriel G. Martins with the University of Lisbon in Portugal

Apr 24, 2014 09:01 GMT  ·  By

This past April 23, Nikon announced the winners of its 2013 Small World in Motion Competition, and the first clip below is the one that won first prize.

This video is the creation of Gabriel G. Martins with the University of Lisbon in Portugal, and it is made up of as many as 1,000 different images that the researcher pieced together in order to obtain an accurate image of a quail embryo.

According to Live Science, Gabriel G. Martins's clip covers 10 days of gestation, and it was created using a technique known as optical tomography.

The second video is the work of Michael Weber of Germany's Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, and it won second place in Nikon's 2013 Small World in Motion Competition.

Just like Gabriel G. Martins' clip, this second one sheds light on the life of an embryo. However, this embryo is not a quail, but a zebrafish one, the same source informs.

In case anyone was wondering, the thing pulsing in the center is the embryo's heart, which is about as wide as a human hair. This video was created using light sheet microscopy.

Lastly, the third video was pieced together by Lin Shao with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia. It was made with the help of fast 3D wide-field structured-illumination microscopy, and it shows a living and twitching HeLa cancer cell.