Anatomical audio book covers for Penguin

Today I stumbled upon these beautiful anatomical audio book covers for the Penguin Children's Classics range. They are the work of the advertising agency Y&R in Malaysia.

Visions of the heart

I love photomicrography and spend a lot of time on the Nikon Small World website perusing snapshots of the scientist's trade. Today's photographs, however, come from the projects funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF). BHF asked the researchers of it's 1200 projects to submit the best images that they have produced in the course of their work for their Reflections of Research competition. Here's what they came up with -

Winner: Feeding the heart
Professor Nicolas Smith, Kings College London and University of Oxford
This virtual model shows the blood flow through vessels serving the heart. During the heartbeat, different amounts of pressure are put on the different blood vessels that feed the heart – shown here in different colours.

Runner up: What colour is your heart?
Dr Vanessa Ferreira, Dr Stefan Piechnik, Dr Theodoros Karamitsos and Professor Stefan Neubauer, University of Oxford
This collage of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of the heart is inspired by a new imaging technique called T1-mapping. T1-mapping uses colour to give more information about heart disease than standard black and white MRI scans.

Shortlisted: A fatty plaque
Professor David Greaves (University of Oxford) and Professor Ed Fisher (NYU & Eastman Visiting Professor in Oxford)
This image is a cross-section of a "fatty plaque" from a mouse artery. Fatty plaques are a mixture of "bad" LDL-cholesterol, immune cells and other material, which can build up in arteries and eventually rupture, releasing a blood clot which can cause a heart attack or stroke. This image was created using a technique called immunoflourescence microscopy.

Dr Patrizia Camelliti, Imperial College London
This image shows human heart cells growing on a bioengineered "scaffold". Cells have been stained with fluorescent molecules to identify the nuclei in blue, and the cell body, in pink. The research behind this image involves working out the roles that different cells play in heart structure and function, and particularly the relationship between cells and their surrounding environment.

Dr Elisabeth Ehler, Kings College London
Beating heart cells – called cardiomyocytes – sit within a "scaffold" that keeps the heart in shape. Problems with this scaffold are a hallmark of some types of heart disease. This image shows a green cardiomyocyte in a Petri dish. It appears to be making contact with another type of cell, called a fibroblast, shown in red. Fibroblasts help produce the scaffold that holds the heart in shape. Understanding how these different types of cell interact will aid our understanding of how heart disease develops.

You can see all the photos at the BHF website and also the Best Video Awards.

All photographs copyright of British Heart Foundation. Descriptions of photos from British Heart Foundation.

Ali G on science

Ali G on Science. Remixed by the talented guys at Symphony of Science.

Infinitely useful EM diagram

(click to enlarge) The talented comics of XKCD dot com

Stunning time-lapse skyscapes

El Cielo de Canarias / Canary sky - Tenerife from Daniel López on Vimeo.

Music: Matti Paalanen , Angel's Tear (Aeon 2) 

The above video was shot solely from the Teide National Park on Tenerife in the Canary Islands over the course of a year.

Colours of the brainbow

by Jean Livet, Harvard University

Brainbow-ing involves neurons of the brain being mapped with flourescent proteins, allowing them to glow with specific colours under a light source. By controlling the proteins involved it is possible to give each neuron a different colour.

In 2000 Jeff Lichtman and Joshua Sanes began playing around with the neurons of mice, and after crossing different genetic lines, created mice with three different shades of cells, blue, green and yellow. By 2007 the Brainbow technique was developed.

Tamily Weissman, "Brainbow” transgenic mouse hippocampus (40X)

The Havard Gazette describes the process in full detail if you're interested.

Spiral nebula

Messier 101
Hubble Legacy Archive, ESA, NASA; Processing and additional imaging - Robert Gendler

There's no denying it - galaxies are beautiful. M101, also know as the Pinwheel Galaxy, is a particularly sexy set of spiral arms and is 170,000 light-years across (twice the size of our own humble milky way).

The red marbling comes from hydrogen gas and occurs in areas where new stars are formed. The white and blue lights are stars and dust and, behind them, background light and galaxies.

M101 is in the constellation Ursa Major, know to me as a child as the Big Dipper or the Plough which can be seen through most of the year in the northern hemisphere.

Mostly though, it's pretty.