A synaptic vesicle
Winner Art of Neuroscience 2012
Martijn Steenwijk is this year’s winner of the Art of Neuroscience competition, organized by the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience. Click on the link to watch his movie.
Gallery shows four honorable mentions.
Brain tissue
Light micrograph of a section cut through human nervous tissue showing nerve cells in gray matter of the brain. Nerve cells are seen as cell bodies (brown) with round central nucleus.
![neurolove:
This is an image of rat hippocampal neurons with the surrounding glia from Nikon’s small world contest [Source]. They have used fluorescent tags to get these beautiful colors (like GFP- green fluorescent protein). The hippocampus is the part of the brain responsible for memory encoding and is one of the first places affected by Alzheimer’s Disease. Here, it looks like the green are the hippocampal neurons, the blue are the cell nuclei (which hold genetic information), and the red seems to be some sort of scaffolding protein/glia. Glial cells are something I don’t talk about often, but they make up a lot of brain tissue and seem to be pretty important. (Most neuroscientists don’t really study or talk about them much right now- which is not to say that they should be ignored! They just often are.) Glia are cells found all around neurons, but they don’t send signals the way that neurons do. They are mostly spoken about in terms of providing support for neurons, but they may also have their own important functions (I’ll talk about one of them in the next post). I mostly just love how beautiful the brain is!
Also, don’t forget about NeuroLove on twitter!](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyzebw7jV81qb6etto1_400.jpg)
This is an image of rat hippocampal neurons with the surrounding glia from Nikon’s small world contest [Source]. They have used fluorescent tags to get these beautiful colors (like GFP- green fluorescent protein). The hippocampus is the part of the brain responsible for memory encoding and is one of the first places affected by Alzheimer’s Disease. Here, it looks like the green are the hippocampal neurons, the blue are the cell nuclei (which hold genetic information), and the red seems to be some sort of scaffolding protein/glia. Glial cells are something I don’t talk about often, but they make up a lot of brain tissue and seem to be pretty important. (Most neuroscientists don’t really study or talk about them much right now- which is not to say that they should be ignored! They just often are.) Glia are cells found all around neurons, but they don’t send signals the way that neurons do. They are mostly spoken about in terms of providing support for neurons, but they may also have their own important functions (I’ll talk about one of them in the next post). I mostly just love how beautiful the brain is!
Also, don’t forget about NeuroLove on twitter!
You are made of Ever Morphing Four dimensional Fractals!
(Vertical progression through the human brain)
A healthy human brain (left) compared to the brain of a 90 year old (right) which is only two thirds the size of the young brain. Over time, white matter decreases and the brain shrinks. This gradual shrinkage is most extreme between age 70 and 80.
dvdp:
Diffusion Spectrum Imaging, A new imaging technique, developed at Massachusetts General Hospital, makes it possible to see in detail how neural fibers criss-cross the brain and connect its regions. Read more
//via wanderlustmind
