A 25-year-old German photographer won the 2026 Nikon Small World competition with a microscopic image freezing ink droplets in midair as an inkjet printer deposits them onto paper. Ars Technica reports that Ole Bielfeldt "beat out 1,802 other entries hailing from 69 different countries." From the report: Bielfeldt became interested in photomicrography during the COVID-19 lockdown after discovering an old microscope in his parents' attic. He figured out how to build an adaptor out of a tube and some wood to connect the microscope to his father's camera and taught himself the art through trial and error, building custom tools as needed. He documents how he captures transformative images of everyday objects with behind-the-scenes videos posted to macrofying, his photography and videography brand.
It was Bielfeldt's curiosity about the inner workings of inkjet printers that inspired his winning entry, but capturing the action of ink drops being deposited on paper was a challenge, given that the process happens so quickly. The droplets, for instance, moved faster than the camera's shutter speed. Bielfeldt's solution was to deconstruct the printer so that the paper moved under a stationary (rather than moving) printhead, and then take the image in a dark room, using a flash to serve as the shutter, thereby freezing the ink drops mid-air. There was no need for pricey equipment. Bielfeldt does not use AI in his images, preferring to rely on traditional techniques. "Ole Bielfeldt's winning image embodies what makes Nikon Small World so powerful: the intersection of microscope imaging, ingenuity, and artistry," said Eric Flem, a spokesperson for Nikon Instruments. "By using a microscope objective in a different way, he transformed a familiar object into something altogether new and previously unseen. It is a reminder that the microscope is not only a scientific tool but also a creative one, capable of expanding how we see and imagine the world around us."
The full list of winners can be found here.
Receiving an award that carries his name felt like one of those full-circle moments.Β
The research behind the award
The original research from Rapid7 Intelligence emerged after months of investigating stealthy access inside telecommunications environments. This wasn't malware dropped during a conventional intrusion, but long-term strategic positioning: passive backdoors, kernel-level capabilities and covert access, quietly settled into critical infrastructure and in no hurry whatsoever.
Telecom networks carry our communications, our identities and, increasingly, everything governments and businesses run on. So when an adversary sets up camp there, the impact goes well beyond one compromised machine or one unlucky company.
Virus Bulletin's community nomination noted that the work paired deep technical investigation with real-world impact, including long hours with agencies and CERTs around the world and tools, scripts, intelligence and detection capabilities for defenders. That's the part I'm happiest about, as this wasn't research for publication alone. Remember that a PDF has never stopped an intrusion.
Publishing research is a checkpoint, not the finish line
We're still doing the research. Since the original report, Rapid7 Intelligence has analyzed hundreds more samples, found previously undocumented BPFDoor variants, and tracked changes in the operators' tradecraft. Our follow-up work covered new httpShell and icmpShell variants built to make detection even harder. In further publications, we went beyond BPFDoor to additional Linux implants and infrastructure targeting telecom and network-edge environments, including AVERAT and techniques that hide in ordinary-looking traffic like SMTP.Β
That's how this work goes. You find something, you share it, someone sends you another sample, a CERT spots something in their environment, an analyst notices the one odd function nobody looked at twice, and you're back down the rabbit hole. Anyone who thinks an initial report is the finish line has never received "just one more sample" at 4 p.m. on a Friday.
And truthfully, I also love that this happens in the open. From the outside, our industry looks like a cage match over attribution, naming conventions and whose acronym is cooler. But when something truly matters, researchers, vendors, CERTs and governments put that aside and share, because protecting people beats winning the naming argument.
This award belongs to the team: Rapid7 Intelligence
Research like this never belongs to just one or two people. It belongs to the analysts still staring at code after everyone else has gone home, the people who question an assumption because something doesn't add up, the people that keep the show running, and the detection engineers who turn findings into something defenders can use. It also belongs to the people collecting samples, maintaining infrastructure and correlating intelligence, and to the CERTs, agencies and peers who trusted us enough to share what they saw.
I'm proud of the Rapid7 Intelligence team, and not because of the trophy. I'm proud of why we got it: we took a hard problem, did the hard work, and then tried to make the result useful to someone else.
To the next generation of research
Today, the conversation has evolved to include autonomous agents, AI-generated malware and machine-speed attacks. Tomorrow it'll be something new. My motivation stays the same: I want to leave the digital world a little safer for the generations that come after us.
Somewhere right now, a young researcher is opening a debugger for the first time and wondering how on earth the thing works. Someone will investigate the Stuxnet of their generation, and someone will eventually sit in the chair I'm in now. Our job isn't just to detect today's attacks. It's to share what we learn, build tools, mentor people and make sure they start a few steps ahead of where we did.
University of Wisconsin-Madison physicist Francis Halzen has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to understanding astrophysical neutrinos. Halzen led the development of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory beneath the Antarctic ice, which has helped trace high-energy neutrinos back to cosmic sources such as supermassive black holes and opened a new era of "multi-messenger" astronomy. Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from UW-Madison: Embedded in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, IceCube uses thousands of light sensors to survey the universe for neutrinos, nearly massless particles that rarely interact with other matter. Neutrinos provide information about the workings of black holes, galaxies and other objects in the cosmos. "IceCube is like no other telescope in the world," says UW-Madison interim Chancellor Eric M. Wilcots. "And there is no other scientist quite like Francis Halzen, whose idea to create a neutrino detector under almost a mile of ice has led to a remarkable multinational and multi-institutional scientific collaboration and a fundamental shift in how we think about the universe."
Unlike the neutral neutrino, cosmic rays are charged particles whose paths cannot be traced directly back to their sources. But the powerful cosmic accelerators that produce them, like supermassive black holes, will also produce neutrinos. These so-called "ghost particles" travel nearly undisturbed from their accelerators, giving scientists an almost direct pointer to their source. Along with observations by other telescopes, the neutrino first detected by IceCube provided the first-ever evidence of a source of high-energy cosmic rays, whose origins have been notoriously difficult to pinpoint since their discovery over 100 years ago by 1936 physics Nobel laureate Victor Hess.
Login
