2025 winners of the Cool Science Image Contest

Photo gallery

Changes in the world around us accumulate in tiny steps over millions of years, as much in Baraboo Hills quartz cracked by earthquakes as through evolution's pressure on the genes that map the nervous system of a developing scorpion.

The way we use images to explore those changes - as well as other fascinating, surprising and simply beautiful aspects of the natural world - were captured by the winners of the 2025 Cool Science Image Contest.

The winning images will be featured through January in an exhibit at the McPherson Eye Research Institute's Mandelbaum and Albert Family Vision Gallery on the ninth floor of the Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research, 1111 Highland Ave. The exhibit kicks off with a reception - free and open to the public - at the gallery on Friday, Oct. 3, from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.

This year's winners

Prashant P. Sharma, professor, Integrative Biology

Confocal microscope

This teddy bear won't be cuddly for long. It's the embryo of an Arizona bark scorpion. Spots of color map the expression of two different copies a gene that play an important role in nervous system development. The separate expression patterns show researchers how the respective copies' functions have diverged over millions of years of evolution.

Emily Tran, graduate student, Comparative Biomedical Sciences

Tissue imaging fluorescent microscope

Each unique color marks a thready cell in tissue from a mouse bladder as a different type of sensory neuron, reporting different conditions - stretching, contraction, pain - to the animal's nervous system. By sorting out the types, researchers hope to improve treatment of bladder pain in humans.

Emily Tran, Graduate Student, Comparative Biomedical Sciences

LaTasha Crawford, assistant professor, Pathobiological Sciences

Tissue imaging fluorescent microscope

A bundle of mouse nerve cells (with different types differentiated by color) are wrapped in the green of signal-regulating cells called satellite glia. In mammals, bundled neurons like these carry signals from the red cells, called axons, of the extended nervous system to the brain.

Duncan D. Smith, scientist, Botany

Digital camera

Measurements of density and descriptions of cellular anatomy derived from these eucalyptus samples collected across contrasting sites in Australia help researchers understand how differences in moisture levels affect the way trees invest in the structure of their wood.

Christine A. Clark, outreach specialist, Division of Extension

Digital camera

On an early spring morning in a Wisconsin agricultural field, time appears frozen atop the soil - belying the significant role of spring melt in erosion. By many a midday, this ice melts and flows across ground still frozen beneath the surface, carrying vital topsoil away as it goes.

Kumar Sridharan, professor, Materials Science and Engineering

Scanning electron microscope

Oxidation pebbles the surface of a cladding tube, a layer separating fuel rods from coolant in a nuclear reactor, including a 400-nanometer lump resembling the state of Wisconsin. UW-Madison researchers study wear on cladding to explain changes in qualities like heat transfer during potential accident conditions.

Kai Skadahl, financial specialist, Space Science and Engineering Center

Digital camera

The pupils in the eyes of this Chinese mantis (Tenodera sinensis) aren't pupils at all, but a sort of optical illusion. Each mantis eye is covered in thousands of cells with their own bundle of photoreceptors - like your retina, but covering the outside of the eye. The groups of cells you are looking at head-on are not reflecting light back at you, making a dark spot that looks like the pupil in your eye.

Shreya Kotha, research intern, Mechanical Engineering

Digital camera

Droplets of water clinging to a plant after a gentle rain are like tiny physics labs - focusing light, magnifying the textures of the leaves beneath and demonstrating the surface tension holding the water molecules in tidy domes against the pull of gravity.

Eleanor Ford, research intern, Cellular and Molecular Biology

CT scan

The trachea (or windpipe, traced here in yellow) of the alpine ground beetle is relatively unique in every individual, as it is grown as-needed in reaction to low-oxygen conditions during development.

Lena Berry, graduate student, Botany

Microscope

In cross section, the scaly leaves of the Northern white cedar tree are a world of complexity. Cells and cell walls containing stiffening lignin are stained purple, giving researchers the contrast they need to study structures called transfusion tracheids, and how differences in their anatomy make the leaves more or less efficient at moving water.

Nicholas Hagopian, graduate student, Materials Science and Engineering

Yangchen He, graduate student, Materials Science and Engineering

Daniel Rhodes, professor, Materials Science and Engineering

Paul Voyles, professor, Materials Science and Engineering

Scanning transmission electron microscope

Each dot in this cross-section of sheets of two-dimensional crystals of tungsten diselenide, WSe2, represents a column of atoms - tungsten in yellow, selenium in pink. Each sheet is less than a nanometer thick. One layer, in the center, was inserted by UW-Madison researchers to disrupt the stack and help them answer questions about the relationships between material properties and atomic structures.

Matthew Aleksey, graduate student, Geoscience

Bil Schneider, researcher, Geoscience

Scanning electron microscope

This sample of quartz from within an ancient fault in the Baraboo Hills is shot through with microscopic veins of newer quartz formed after tectonic activity cracked the original quartz's crystal structure. The progressive cracking and overlaying of new veins - like growth rings in a tree - can act as a record the tectonic history of the 1.4-billion-year-old geological fault line.

Kerry J. Grosse, policy analyst, Office of Strategic Consulting

Digital camera

The clarity of Lake Michigan waters near Coast Guard Station Sturgeon Bay is largely the result of filter-feeding invasive mussels, one way in which the lake's neighbors have come to understand the way they can affect the life of a body of water that gives back so much - from drinking water and fishing to shipping, recreation and even weather.

About the Cool Science Image Contest

Judges with experience in visual art, scientific imaging and communication chose 13 images from among this year's pool of entries submitted by members of the University of Wisconsin-Madison community. Winners were chosen based on their aesthetic and creative quality as well as their scientific content. Entrants used a range of tools to capture this year's submissions, from the ubiquitous smartphone camera to medical equipment like CT scanners and scientific instruments including telescopes and scanning electron microscopes.

Any visual work created in the course of research, scholarship or self-guided discovery is welcome, and hundreds of people have entered over the contest's 15-year run. Previous winners include scientists who have gone on to win prestigious international image contests, but every year's group of honorees includes relative novices whose curiosity led them to capture something amazing.

The Cool Science Image Contest is supported by Promega Corp of Madison and the UW-Madison Office of Strategic Communication.

The 2025 contest judges were:

• Steve Ackerman, emeritus professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences
• Kevin Eliceiri, professor of medical physics and director, Laboratory for Optical and Computational Instrumentation
• Michael P. King, visual communications specialist, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences
• Mariel Mohns, communications specialist, Morgridge Institute for Research
• Kara Rogers, senior editor of biomedical sciences at Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Ahna Skop, professor of genetics
• Kelly Tyrrell, assistant vice chancellor, content strategy, Office of Strategic Communication