photomicrography

On Aetiology, Tara C. Smith continues her series on the science of The Walking Dead, explaining how diseases spread and how they might cause zombiism. One thing that would be observed in any real contagion would be an incubation period— the time between when a virus (for example) enters your body and you start showing symptoms of infection. For a virus like the flu, this could be about two days during which you don’t feel sick but could still be infecting people around you—even if you don’t bite them. Tara also expresses nerd rage at the show's "doctors" pursuing antibiotics to treat the flu…
THIS image by Dominik Paquet of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich is one of the winners of the 2009 Nikon Small World Photomicrography competition. It's a confocal fluoresence microscopy image of zebrafish larvae expressing a mutant form of human Tau protein, which forms the neurofibrillary tangles that are a pathological hallmark of Alzheimer's Disease. The work is described in this recent paper. Below are two more images from the competition. This image of pyramidal cells in the mouse cerebral cortex was created by Celine Plachez of the University of Maryland School of Medicine.…