Under the Microscope Cambridge University

Matthew Kuo tells us how tiny worm faecal pellets affect how oil pipelines sit on the seabed.

Nanowires growing in real time. Each nanowire is roughly 400 atoms wide.

Dr Andrew Gillis explains how an elephant fish embryo lives off a large yellow yolk sack for 7 to 10 months before hatching out as a fish.
Dr Gillis:
“This is a picture of an elephant fish embryo. Elephant fish are cartilaginous fishes, and are distant cousins of sharks, skates and stingrays. The elephant fish lives in deep water off the coasts of Australia and New Zealand, but migrates annually into shallow coastal bays to lay their eggs. I study the embryonic development of elephant fish, by collecting their eggs by SCUBA diving at their egg-laying grounds. Normally, an elephant fish embryo will live in their egg and feed off of their yolk supply for 7 to 10 months before hatching out as a completely self-sufficient juvenile. However, these embryos may also be cultured outside of their egg cases, as seen here. This allows us to observe and photograph the development and growth of this unusual fish.”

The diameter of the petri dish in the elephant fish picture is 10cm.

More info:
http://www.pdn.cam.ac.uk/~jag93

Music by Peter Nickalls:
http://www.peternickalls.com

Many thanks:
Graduate School of Life Sciences

In this video Dr Sungjune Jung shows us the fluid structures produced by the impact of two liquid jets.

Dr Jung:
“This video shows the evolution of the flow structures generated from the collision of two liquid jets each with a radius of 420um. The jets were ejected from parallel cylindrical nozzles with an internal diameter of 0.85mm.

The collision of the jets resulted in various systems of behaviour which depend on the jet velocities and the liquid properties. We focus on the system where the impinging jets form a liquid sheet which then breaks up into a regular succession of ligaments and droplets, a so-called "fishbone" pattern. This high-speed imaging reveals a fish-like formation for the fluid:
the oval sheet with rims correspond to the fish head, the drops on thin ligaments to its body, and bigger free drops at the end to its tail. We are particularly interested in this fluid formation, because the fishbone phenomenon provides a simple and visual tool to evaluate the properties of inkjet printing fluids, with which the fishbone structure sensitively varies."

Many thanks to Prof Ian Hutchings, Dr Graham Martin and Dr Steve Hoath at Inkjet Research Centre, Department of Engineering.

More info:

Dr Jung's profile:
http://www.oe.phy.cam.ac.uk/people/oepdras/sjj37.htm

Inkjet Research Centre
http://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/pp/inkjet/

Department of Engineering
http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/

Music by Intercontinental Music Lab
http://www.intercontinentalmusiclab.com

This is a beautiful image of human brain cells, which can now be grown from adult skin cells.

Yichen Shi:
"Brain neural stem cells derived from human skin cells: these stem cells express typical marker genes of brain neocortical stem cells, such as Pax6 (Red fluorescent labeled), and form a rosette structure resembling the transection of the neural tube."

The entire image is about 250 μm across (a really thick bit of human hair).

More info:
http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/brain-cells-created-from-patients-skin-cells

Picture taken by Yichen Shi in the Livesey Lab
http://www.gurdon.cam.ac.uk/~liveseylab/fjlhome/index.html

Voice over by Fred Lewsey.

Music by Peter Nickalls: http://www.peternickalls.com

PhD student Paola Cognigni shows us this beautiful image of a fruit fly’s brain and gut.

Paola Cognigni:
“This video shows the anatomical and functional connection between the brain and the gut in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. This work is carried out in Dr Irene Miguel-Aliaga's lab in the Department of Zoology as part of a research project that aims to find and explain the interactions between internal organs and their importance in growth and health.”

The brain is about 700 microns wide (the entire image is something like
1600 microns across): about the size of a pencil tip.

The image was taken in the Zoology Dept Imaging Facility on a Leica SP5 confocal system.

More info and images:
http://www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/zoostaff/miguel-aliaga/main.html

Music by Intercontinental Music Lab
http://www.intercontinentalmusiclab.com