• Nature's Drug Fac­to­ries: Vi­su­al­is­ing the In­vis­i­ble

    by Munro Pass­more — For ge­ne­ral au­dien­ces, sci­ence can of­ten seem im­pe­ne­trab­le to un­der­stand be­cause of its in­her­ent scale and com­plex­ity. This is par­ti­cu­lar­ly true in the field of na­tur­al pro­ducts – where we seek to un­der­stand the pro­ces­ses mi­cros­cop­ic or­gan­isms un­der­take to make mo­le­cules we la­ter use as...

  • Col­or­ing a Cell

    Pic­tures Con­sid­ered #57 by Christoph — Our abil­ity to visual­ly per­ceive and dis­cri­mi­nate is al­ways sligh­ly over­whelmed by black-and-white ima­ges. Es­pe­cial­ly, of course, when the ob­jects de­pict­ed are out­side our trained, fa­mil­iar size spec­trum, such as bac­te­ri­al cells and their in­nards. Take for ex­ample Fi­gure 1, the cryo-ET im­age of a ti­ny...