Where the microscope and photo lens meet.

• Position: Focus on Science

Whether a close-up of a leafcutter ant, or a micrograph of the neurons derived from marmoset stem cells, or an MRI of the hidden pathways in the human brain, submissions to the University of Wisconsin-Madison's 2015 Cool Science Image Contest continue to put science and nature on eye-catching display.

Sorting through a record number of entries, judges for the contest selected 11 still images and one video as winners of the annual competition. The judges --representing broad expertise in scientific imaging, art, and the science communication-worked through 115 submissions to arrive at this year's winning entries.

"This year's contributions were among the strongest we've had and reflect the diversity and creativity of the university's scientific imaging community," says Kevin Eliceiri, a contest judge and director of the Laboratory for Optical and Computational Instrumentation. "I was struck in particular by the broad number of disciplines and range of techniques represented."

Winning images depended on techniques ranging from MRI to a cell phone camera. The 2015 CSI Contest winners are:

* Zoology graduate student Hilary Bultman for her micrograph of thyme plant floral trichromes.

* Tyler Gordon, graduate art student, for his photograph, taken with the aid of a polariscope, of "Prince Rupert's Drops," a style of glass sculpture.

* Caleb Weisnicht, undergraduate art student, and Andrew Klapper, undergraduate engineering student, for their compilation image of photographs of fungi found in Wisconsin forests.

* Medical microbiology and immunology postdoctoral fellow Sabrina Koehler for her picture of a European beewolf and its honeybee prey.

* Jackson Hetue of the Wisconsin Fast Plants Program in the Department of Plant Pathology, for his timelapse...