LIFE STUDIES

The Royal Society for Photography’s Science Photographer of the Year competition has yielded beautiful images from fields as diverse as chemistry, palaeontology, fluid mechanics and climate change.

The Royal Photographic Society’s Science Photographer of the Year competition is in only its second year. It’s yielded a spectrum of classic images celebrating the remarkable stories behind scientific exploration and application.

Photographer: Richard Germain Spherical anomaly (left): A clear glass sphere placed inside a patterned tube distorts the light passing through it. The distortion is greater at the sphere’s edges due to spherical aberration, when the light entering a lens can’t be brought to a common focus point.

Photographer: Simon Brown Reef maker (above): SS Thistlegorm, a British naval ship, was sunk by German bombers in the Red Sea in 1941 when it was barely a year old. The wreck site, which is slowly integrating into local corals, was rediscovered by pioneering diver Jacques Cousteau in the early 1950s, and today is a well-known destination for recreational divers – seen at lower right. This image, winner of the Science Photographer of the Year in the General Science category, combines 15,005 frames to create an orthophoto (an aerial image geometrically corrected so it’s as uniform as a map).

Photographer: Kym Cox And baths, I’ve had a few (above): What happens if you put soap film in front of a loudspeaker through which Frank Sinatra’s 1969 hit “My Way” is playing? The sound output’s different frequencies create different patterns of thickness in the soap film, which show up as different colours. Fast fact: singer/songwriter Paul Anka wrote the English lyrics to “My Way”. The original music and (French) lyrics were written by French songwriting duo Claude François and Jacques Revaux; their version, released in 1967, is called “Comme d’habitude”.

Photographer: Rafael Fernandez Caballero Ghost casualty (left): A sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) drifts, hopelessly entangled in a discarded fishing net – a “ghost net”. Lost and discarded fishing equipment, known as “ghost gear”, accounts for about 10% of global marine litter – up to 640,000 tonnes, or about three times the gross tonnage of a super-sized cruise ship.

Photographer: Norm Barker Millennial hues (below): Colours shine from a polished section of fossilised dinosaur bone. The myriad shades are a result of changing mineral content as the fossil formed – they don’t reflect the underlying structure of bone. Captured through a microscope, this image’s field is a tiny 1.2mm.

Photographer: Sue Flood Life on thin ice (above): A polar bear (Ursus maritimus) stands on an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean, an image of unstoppable change. Northern hemisphere polar sea ice has declined so rapidly due to climate change that some studies predict commercial shipping in the Arctic Ocean will be economically viable in the next few decades.

Photographer: Norm Barker Tracks of my tears (bottom): Johns Hopkins School of Medicine pathology photographer Norm Barker said of this frame of a human teardrop: “Mammal tears are made up of several varieties of proteins but the actual liquid is very high in saline.” Barker timed the creation of his image for when the tear starts to dry and crystallise: grief frozen, joy framed.

Photographer: Don Komarechka Frost circle (below): The photographer says: “We had a few days this winter with the right conditions to create a certain kind of magic. Cold temperatures and calm air allows the creation of soap bubbles that quickly freeze into solid orbs of frost. During the freezing process, they become something magical.”

Photographer: David Maitland Turing’s insight (above): The hypnotic patterns here were formed by a Belousov-zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction in a petri dish. Drops of one chemical were added to another in the dish; the drops seem to radiate concentric rings and spirals as waves of chemical concentrations move through the petri gel. Alan Turing first predicted the mathematics behind oscillating chemical reactions in the 1950s – well ahead of the first observations of the BZ reaction.