Downward Spiral
While this may resemble a spiraling slide from a Tim Burton movie, it is actually something much more mundane. It is the inside of a newborn rat’s ear: the cochlea. Thecochlea, which has a shape that’s often compared to that of a snail’s shell, is the auditory part of the inner ear and receives sound in the form of vibrations. The green sections are sensory hair cells, and the red section is spiral ganglion neurons. And considering the size of a newborn rat, this must be tiny. The image was taken by Dr. Michael Perny of Bern, Switzerland, who works for the Institute for Infectious Diseases.
