Photo by Harvard University

While photography can often show us sides of our world we may not be familiar with, it can also reveal ones we never even knew existed. In an award-winning microscopic photo (seen above), science and art collide to show us a sliver of these worlds.

Taken by scientists Sung Hoon Kang, Boaz Pokroy and Joanna Aizenberg, from the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the photograph offers an astonishing view of something we take for granted every day: plastic.

The image, captured with a high-powered electron microscope camera, shows microscopic plastic fibers that measure just 250 nanometers in diameter (1/500th of a human hair) as they wrap around a plastic green sphere. The image won first prize at the International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, and beat out other stunning entries like a salt molecule surrounded by microbes and a close-up of a self-fertilizing flower.

But the winning photo, titled “Save Our Earth, Let’s Go Green,” is more than just an image to the scientists who captured it — they see it as a statement about environmental sustainability.  “Each hair represents a person or an organization,” says Aizenberg. “It shows our collaborative effort to hold up the planet and keep it running.”

To read more about the winning image, and to see a slide show of all the spectacular photographs, check out ScienceMagazine.com.