Science has a reputation problem. For many people, it’s something that lives in dusty journals, spreadsheets, and dry conferences where people speak in acronyms. But real science is vibrant. It’s messy, colorful, uncertain, and often breathtaking. Sometimes (not always, but sometimes) it’s just beautiful.

The Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition tries to remind us of this every year. They look for the stories behind the science, hunting for images that capture the raw mechanics of reality, from the violent magnetic storms of our local star to the delicate architecture of a single nerve cell.

Here is the best of the 2025 collection.

Category: Competition Winner Dr. Martín J. Ramírez (sample by Dr. Jonas Wolff).

Dr. Martín J. Ramírez takes the top prize with a scanning electron microscope image of spider silk from a sample by Dr. Jonas Wolff. The sample matters a lot because this isn’t normal web silk. It belongs to the Australian net-caster spider, an arachnid that doesn’t wait for prey but actively hunts with a stretchy, sticky net held in its legs.

To work, the net needs to absorb massive kinetic energy without snapping. The image reveals the secret: the silk threads are composite cables. They feature a soft, elastomeric core wrapped in a sheath of harder, meandering fibers. The photo captures these “looping” structures that allow the silk to stretch dramatically. It is a chaotic, mesmerizing visual of nature’s polymer engineering, magnified to 50 microns.

Category: Astronomy Winner. Image credits: Imran Sultan.

Science is both big and small. Imran Sultan turned his lens toward our star during this peak of activity in July 2024, capturing a view of the sun that the naked eye can never see. By filtering for Hydrogen-alpha light (a specific slice of the red spectrum) he cut through the blinding glare to reveal the chromosphere, the sun’s lower atmosphere.

The resulting image, inverted to highlight contrast, shows prominences dancing along the solar limb. These are loops of glowing gas, suspended by magnetic fields, towering several times the size of the Earth. Sultan stacked roughly one minute of frames to reduce noise, creating a portrait of a star that looks less like a celestial body and more like a living, breathing entity composed of fire.

Category: Earth Science and Climatology Winner. Image credits: Michael Meredith.

Michael Meredith takes us into the frigid darkness of an Antarctic winter aboard the research vessel RRS Sir David Attenborough. Winter expeditions here are rare and dangerous, but they are essential to understanding how glaciers behave when the sun vanishes. This shot captures the ship’s searchlights cutting through the gloom of Börgen Bay, illuminating the William Glacier.

The context is grim but vital: these glaciers are retreating rapidly due to warming oceans. In the photo, scientists and crew watch the ice, gathering data on the glacier’s characteristics just hours before a massive chunk calved off into the sea. It is a haunting reminder that the machinery of climate change grinds on continuously.

Category: Astronomy Runner-up. Image credits: Dr. Aman Chokshi.

Dr. Aman Chokshi captures the surreal moment of sunrise at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, a singular event that follows six months of absolute darkness. There’s a bit of visual trickery as this isn’t a standard landscape; it is a 360-degree “little planet” projection that wraps the horizon into a sphere, emphasizing the isolation of the station.

The image is a collision of celestial forces: the green and magenta bands of the aurora australis dance at the base, sparked by solar particles slamming into Earth’s magnetic field, while the Milky Way arches overhead. To take the photo, Chokshi battled temperatures below –70°C with severe wind chill.

Category: Behaviour Runner-up. Image credits: Irina Petrova Adamatzky

Irina Petrova Adamatzky captured this a portrait of evolutionary genius found on the wings of the Atlas moth. The moth is huge, spanning up to 30 centimeters. But it’s defenseless. Its only real defense lies in the graphical details.

Adamatzky’s sharp focus on the wingtips reveals patterns that they perfectly mimic the heads of snakes, complete with “scales” and “eyes.” This visual trickery exploits the instinctive fear birds have of reptiles.

Category: Ecology and Environmental Science Runner-up. Image credits: Kees Bastmeijer.

Kees Bastmeijer captured the grace of Japanese Red-crowned cranes in Hokkaido, but his focus is on the intersection of ecology and culture.

While biologists study the cranes’ “uncoordinated dances” as a sign of reproductive fitness, Bastmeijer draws a parallel to the indigenous Ainu culture, where these dances inspire human movement and song. The stark, high-contrast image of the cranes against the snow serves as a plea for a different kind of conservation — one that values indigenous wisdom and “unwritten rules” as much as Western environmental law. It suggests that saving a species also means saving the stories we tell about them.

Category: Microimaging Runner-up. Image credits: Swetha Gurumurthy.

Swetha Gurumurthy provides a stark, monochromatic view of the human motor system. This high-contrast image shows the “neurites” — the branching highways that connect motor neurons to muscles. Using a stain called TUJ-1, Gurumurthy highlights the young nerve fibers derived from stem cells.

The significance here is medical. These specific cells were reprogrammed from the skin cells of patients with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis). By recreating these networks in a dish, researchers can watch how the disease dismantles the body’s communication infrastructure. The image is beautiful, resembling a fractured city map, but it represents the frontline of the fight against a devastating neurodegenerative disease.

This set of stunning images, showcase the lovely overlap between art and science. These are just a few snapshots of the beauty of the natural world, space and the science itself.