Emma Bryce

What you’re seeing is a close-up of the human placenta, pictured from the side that would face a fetus in the womb. The twisting white branch is the umbilical cord. “If somebody didn’t know what a placenta looked like, they might think this is a landscape with its rivers and tributaries,” says Christine Iacobuzio-Donahue, a […]

Belize's “blue hole,” an exquisite sinkhole famous for its pristine diving, offers clues into the decline of ancient Mayan cities that has fascinated archeologists for so long. André Droxler, a marine geoologist at Rice University in Texas, has done several years’ research in and around the blue hole, a collapsed underwater cave near the Yucatán Peninsula […]

David Livingstone collected beetles, I presume? That’s the question curator Max Barclay pondered recently when he stumbled upon a box containing beetles, some of which bore tags with the famous Scottish explorer’s name, at London’s Natural History Museum. The specimens are evidence that Livingstone concertedly collected beetles during his six-year journey along the Zambezi River […]

These multicolored mohawks aren’t decorative. They illustrate connectivity in brain networks in patients with brain damage (left and middle) and in a person with a healthy brain (right). What’s surprising is the apparent similarity between the middle patient and the healthy one. In the picture, “the height of the arc over the head represents the […]

What looks like an expansive crater on some exotic planet is in fact a view into a common mouse’s eye. Each of the vibrant colors reflects the identity and metabolic function of one of the 70-80 types of cells in the mammalian retina. To create the image, Bryan Jones, a retinal neuroscientist at Utah’s Moran […]