The Nikon Small World in Motion competition, established in 2011 as a video counterpart to the long‑standing Small World Photomicrography Contest (since 1974), awarded its 2026 top prize to Nguyen Nam Nhat of Vietnam for a microscopy movie depicting a tiny roundworm interacting with a single‑celled organism. The original winner, Ning Xu of Tsinghua University, had submitted a video showing the rhythmic beating of cilia in the airway epithelium of a child with a rare respiratory disorder; Xu stated he employed artificial intelligence only to enhance and visualize features in reconstructed grayscale images, denying that AI generated the experimental footage, the cilia, or their motion. After an investigation, Nikon determined the entry violated competition rules and disqualified it, prompting a reshuffle of the rankings. Benedikt Pleyer from Bavaria, Germany, moved to second place with a film of jellyfish larvae trapped in water droplets; Andrew Moore of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (USA) took third for a recording of synchronized mitotic divisions in adjacent cells; Patrick Hickey of Hypha Research Ltd. (Edinburgh, Scotland) secured fourth by visualizing mitochondrial and chloroplast dynamics in Turtle Vine leaf cells; and Igor Adameyko claimed fifth with a time‑lapse of a brightly colored sea slug (Cyerce kikutarobabai) in motion. The competition continues to highlight advances that enable high‑resolution, time‑lapse imaging through light microscopes.