Free Lantern

Nikon has an annual competition called International Small World Competition which is meant for those involved in photography through the light microscope. The following picture is the second place winner. Real beauty, isn’t it? The picture is a fluorescent picture of a 3 day old embryonic zebra fish brain. Michael Hendricks, has taken this picture as part of his PhD work.

Michael Hendricks, © 2007 Nikon Instruments Inc

For more great pictures go to the web page of this competition and watch these amazing photo’s. On the other hand some of my colleagues might wanna take part in the next year’s competition.

Read more »

As I was surfing in the internet I saw these beautiful pictures of Mobula Ray, in the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. In this page you can read about them and see some more pictures.

Talking about fishes and ocean, a while ago I was discussing with a colleague that how few is our knowledge about ocean and the living things in it. Although ocean is accessible (or at least more accessible than space) we still don’t know many things about it (even less than what we know of space).
I just read in “The Gear Beyond” (Nature’s blog) that an international group of marine scientists met at the weekend to ask for $3 billion. Good luck for them as this money will boost up the research in this field.

Read more »

If you work in life science, as I do, it often happens that you want to prepare a presentation for a meeting or a talk, and you have to spend hours preparing illustrations to make it easier for the audience to understand your subject.
A colleague of mine sent me an interesting website today (thanks Marco!) that makes life much easier for life scientists or medical/biological students to prepare illustrations and presentations.

Servier, a French Pharmaceutical company has provided a new service called “Service Medical art” or SMART which is a collection of thousands of professionally designed medical elements in powerpoint slides and is free of charge for educational purposes. You can surf through the contents, find what might help you and use it. Most importantly you can ungroup the pictures in powerpoint and use them to make your own presentation.
They also have a few general stuff, so even if you’re in medical or Biological sciences it is worth a short look at this valuable collection.
I’m sure I’ll be using SMart, I thought I can introduce it here so others can use it too. If I find other open sources like this I’ll introduce them here, if you happen to notice an interesting source please leave a comment and share it.
I hope “SMart” people will keep their good work going!