The Wellcome Trust, a medical research charity, has just announced the winners of its 2008 imaging contest. Above is my favorite, a picture of a microscopic blood vessel that has ruptured. You can see single red blood cells slowly leaking out. This was taken by Anne Weston, with a scanning electron micrograph. She says the rupture "is due to a mutation in the ephrin-B2 gene that causes the blood vessels to be more fragile than normal leading to an increased rate of haemorrhaging . . . This kind of leaky blood vessel is frequently found in tumours and in certain other human diseases. " Below, we've got a couple more of the winners.
Hello to my new desktop wallpaper. Annie Cavanaugh took this with a scanning electron micrograph. "Red blood cells clearly showing their biconcave disc shape," is how she describes it. I just want to dive in! They look so puffy and soft.
Yirui Sun took this outer-space-looking picture of stem cells implanted into a mouse brain with a confocal micrograph. He says these are "Mouse neural stem cells, labelled with green fluorescent protein [that] have been transplanted into the brain of a newborn mouse and are developing into oligodendrocytes and astrocytes." In other words, those stem cells are acclimating and turning into brain cells.
Check out the Wellcome site for more images.