Michał Januszewski

The zebrafish larva is almost transparent, and its brain can be examined under a microscope. But even in such a tiny creature, neural connections are so tangled that sorting them out by hand is nearly impossible. Scientists made a clever move: they built an exact computer replica of the larva, where every connection is known.

Modern microscopes see the brain in exquisite detail: not just the synapses themselves, the contact points between neurons, but also the molecules they are made of. Such images are becoming more common and cheaper to produce.