The best science images of the year are all about life, death, sex, and disease

This week, the Wellcome Trust — a UK-based biomedical research charity — announced the 2015 finalists for their annual photography competition. The 20 images span a range of disciplines and imaging techniques, from a simple photograph of an elderly woman with a curved spine, to a composite image of a boll weevil taken with a scanning electron microscope.

"The breath-taking riches of the imagery that science generates are so important in telling stories about research and helping us to understand often abstract concepts," said Adam Rutherford, a scientists and judge for the Wellcome Image Awards, in an accompanying press release. "It’s not just about imaging the very small either. It’s about understanding life, death, sex, and disease: the cornerstones of drama and art."

"IT’S ABOUT UNDERSTANDING LIFE, DEATH, SEX AND DISEASE."

All of these elements are certainly present in this year's line-up, with images of skeletons — both 3D-printed and computer generated — as well cells, nerves, models, and body parts. There's pictures of animals like the tiny parasitic wasp just 0.75 millimeters in length, and of creatures not yet fully formed, such as the five-month fetus of an unborn horse, still enveloped in the cloud-like swirl of a uterus.

The winning images from the competition will be announced later this month on March 20th, with the whole collection then displayed across the UK and in the US at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Koch Institute and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

All images credited to Wellcome Images.

This confocal micrograph shows the nerves in a cross-section of an adult mouse's brain. (Image credit: Luis de la Torre-Ubieta)
An illustration of grains of pollen being released from a a flower in the Asteraceae family. (Image credit: Maurizio De Angelis)
This photograph shows the spine of a 79-year-old woman with kyphosis, or "dowager's hump." (Image credit: Mark Bartley)
This image shows the lungs of a mouse, with the pink spots used to indicate microparticles being delivered to the lungs to research cancer medicine. (Image credit: Gregory Szeto, Adelaide Tovar, and Jeffrey Wyckoff)
An image in the style of the 19th Century drawings of the French neurologist Joseph Jules Dejerine. It shows an MRI of a healthy, adult human brain. Image credit: Dr Flavio Dell'Acqua.
Transmission electron micrographs were used to create this color-coded representation of a fruit-fly's nervous system. Image credit: Albert Cardona.
Each of these bumps contain lenses, which work together to form a greenfly's eye. It can spot quick movements, but can't see far. Image credit: Kevin Mackenzie.
A scanning electron micrograph of a brain cell with a rectangular hole cut in it. Image credit: Khuloud T Al-Jamal, Serene Tay, and Michael Cicirko.
This scanning electron image shows the head of a boll weevil. (Image credit: Daniel Kariko)
The colors in this image show chemical reactions in part of a mouse kidney. (Image credit: Jefferson R Brown, Robert E Marc, Bryan W Jones, Glen Prusky and Nazia Alam)
This ion beam scanning electron micrograph shows the coral-like branches of a Purkinje cell, or neuron. Found in the brain of a rat. (Image credit: Prof M Hausser, Sarah Rieubland, and Arnd Roth)
An old anatomy model. It was about to be thrown out from Trinity College in Dublin before it was rescued by the photographer. (Image credit: Anthony Edwards)
The uterus of a pony with a five month old fetus. The pony was killed in England as part of a regular cull of ponies in the New Forest. (Image credit: Michael Frank)
This is a micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) scan of the skull and front legs of a Tuatara — a reptile native to New Zealand with the characteristics of both lizards and amphibians. (Image credit: Sophie Regnault)
The surface of a cat's tongue from an old Victorian slide. It shows the rough texture of the tongue. (Image credit: David Linstead)
A 3D-printed model of the back of the ribcage and lungs of a woman diagnosed with cancer. (Image credit: Dave Farnham)
An interactive multi-sensory unit used to distract nervous or anxious children undergoing treatment in hospitals. (Image credit: Geraldine Thompson)
A super-resolution micrograph shows an NK cell (the pointed mass on the left) wrapping around a second cell (the slightly less pointy mass on the right). (Image credit: N Dieckmann and N Lawrence)
This photograph shows the interior of a goat's reticulum — the second of its four stomachs. (Image credit: Michael Frank)
A tiny parasite wasp that lays its eggs in other animals. It's just .75 millimeters long. (Image credit: Andrew Polaszek)