Best scientific images
Employees and guests of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) can now view the great variety of imaging techniques in a traveling exhibition – from satellite images to a glimpse inside a body cell. The best twenty images submitted to Helmholtz Imaging’s first "Best Scientific Image Contest" are on display in Building 84 at Campus Buch. They include four images from the MDC. Unfortunately, due to omicron, the presentation is not open to outside visitors.
"The exhibition offers a fantastic opportunity to connect research fields across the board, anchoring the lively exchange within the Helmholtz community and with the general public," says Professor Thoralf Niendorf, coordinator of Helmholtz Imaging at MDC.
Employees from 15 Helmholtz centers participated with 114 images. A jury of international researchers and an image curator judged the images on their scientific merit, originality and visual impact. The prizes for the best three entries - donated by Siemens Healthineers and Phillips - are worth a total of 2000 Euros. The images will remain at MDC until February 14 2022. Next stations for the travelling exhibition will be the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg and the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg.
Warm congratulation from the Helmholtz President
The president of the Helmholtz Association, Professor Otmar D. Wiestler, said: "The images represent all research domains across Helmholtz, our programs and centers, and a great diversity of imaging modalities."
“The monkey's fiber architecture revealed by Polarized Light Imaging”
“War and Border” Visualization of the land surfaces changes from 2000-2019 on the Turkey-Syria border based on the analysis of Landsat satellite image time-series.
„Gentle gelatinous giant“ The 'rabbit-eared' comb jellyfish “Kiyohimea usagi” as observed in 2018 by GEOMAR's manned submersible JAGO in the Cabo Verde deep sea at 115 m of depth.
First prize went to Professor Markus Axer and his team at Jülich Research Centre. The winning image shows the courses and orientations of nerve fibers in the cerebellum of a juvenile vervet monkey brain. The fiber architecture was made visible with polarized light.
Second place went to "War and Border" by Dr. Ingmar Nitze and his colleagues from the Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, the Alfred Wegener Institute. They compiled it from satellite images from the Turkish-Syrian border in the years 2000-2019. The light blue colors on the Turkish side in the north indicate a large increase in vegetation on predominantly irrigated agricultural land. In contrast, on the Syrian side vegetation has greatly decreased, shown in red. This is likely due to the war in Syria.
Third place honors the hidden biodiversity and unexplored nature of the deep sea, the largest habitat on our planet. Dr. Henk-Jan Hoving and the team from the GEOMAR submersible JAGO submitted an image of a rabbit ear ribbed jellyfish "Kiyohimea usagi". The encounter off Cabo Verde was the first published observation of this species in the Atlantic.
About Helmholtz Imaging
The platform bundles expertise from the Helmholtz Association on imaging techniques and makes it available to an international imaging community. Helmholtz Imaging brings scientists and engineers together, facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration, and thus bridges the gap between theory and application.
