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Clusters of comets coming for you? ☄️ Not quite. This timelapse captures something far smaller: an animal's kidney cells dividing, imaged with confocal microscopy. The glowing orange traces each cell's internal transportation network, reorganizing & splitting as cells divide. 📸: Andy Moore

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Those tiny bumps on your tongue have a name: taste papillae, home to the taste buds behind every flavor you’ve experienced. Confocal microscopy paints a mouse's taste papillae in vivid color: pink taste buds, yellow nerves, & blue-green nuclei. 📸 Dany Gaillard & Linda Barlow, @cuanschutz.bsky.social

That lush, green "grass" you see? It's inside your eye. These vivid layers are retinal pigment epithelial cells, or RPEs. Located at the back of the eye in a layer of the retina, they help protect your photoreceptors — the cells that turn light into vision. 📸: NIH

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#HHMIInvestigator Eric Betzig & team use a single microscope that does the work of a dozen, capturing life in 5D (3D + time + color). But the data it generates is too vast for humans to analyze alone, so they're building "a sherpa to guide us,” i.e. an AI to unlock MOSAIC's potential: bit.ly/3RN2GVj

#HHMIInvestigator Kafui Dzirasa & team have built a biological "wire" called LinCx that connects carefully chosen neurons — bypassing broken brain circuits rather than repairing them — and, unlike existing tools, offers cellular-level precision: bit.ly/4wDcmln.

Beyond thrilled to welcome our inaugural cohort of #CechFellows — 176 talented undergrads who will spend 9 weeks this summer contributing to real scientific discovery alongside leading HHMI scientists across the country, & at our Janelia Research Campus! hhmi.news/4dBq7tb

Before the lab bench, there was the baseball diamond. #GilliamFellow @jpflores.rbind.io brings the resilience he learned as a former D3 shortstop to his research on how DNA's orientation helps cells adapt to stress. Psst: Applications for this year's Gilliam competition open 9/1! bit.ly/Gilliam26 🧪

Wheat, rice, & corn feed the world, yet we still don't fully understand their seeds' biology. #HHMIInvestigator Mary Gehring's lab has built a gene expression “map” of seed development in a plant model that could help improve crops’ ability to withstand environmental stress: bit.ly/4u1p62y.

Celebrating #HHMIInvestigators Michael Elowitz (Caltech) & Yang Dan (Emeriti), recognized for their incredible contributions to research as newly elected Fellows of the @royalsociety.org! bit.ly/4nPHaLs

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Directional elements: the preprints are out! 1/n Congratulations to our amazing team: biorxiv.org/content/10.6... biorxiv.org/content/10.6... biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We screened for principles governing global brain dynamics by developing a set of new methods: 1) conformal immersion microscopy;

Karl Deisseroth