Biology

Potentially Habitable Planet Discovered Around Nearest Star
A new planet with the potential of sustaining life was discovered by astronomers at Queen Mary University Of London orbiting Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun – 4.2 light years away. Using small wobbles in the trajectory of Proxima Centauri…

Branched synaptic arbor in fillet
The Drosophila neuromuscular junction is a beautiful and yet powerful model synapse for in vivo studies of development, physiology, cell biology and plasticity. This illustration by Saskia Van Vactor shows a field of ventral longitudinal body wall…

The Brain is a Series of Tubes
The brain is made of up billions of neurons and even more connections between neurons. We can get an idea of how neurons are connected across the human brain using a type of brain scan called diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI). How…

Retinal Corona
Image contributed by Yu Wang, a third year graduate student at Harvard Medical School. Glial cells support the proper function of neuronal cell types and are also responsible for cleaning up cell debris such as leftover neurotransmitter molecules (what…

Skin Deep: Illuminating our body's immune defenses
Presented by Vinidhra Mani The skin is our first barrier to entry of pathogens. The tightly regulated immune system in our skin provides us with a robust arsenal to combat potential invaders, yet also has checkpoints to ensure that the battlefields…

Tubular
These images show cross sections of the different compartments of the developing gut in a chick embryo: esophagus (top), small intestine (middle), and large intestine (bottom), at days 6, 8, 10, and 14 (left to right). As the chick develops, the shape of…

Cytoskeleton Four Ways
This Bovine Pulmonary Artery Endothelial (BPAE) cell is stained to show two components of the cytoskeleton – microtubules in green, and actin filaments in red (in the top right panel). The cell is a crowded place, so one of the functions of the…