Friday beautiful science

The lab across the hall from me just got a confocal microscope (for the low, low price of $200,000). In honor of that, I'm presenting these confocal shots of a developing mouse embryo, taken from the Wellcome Images site, a storehouse of biomedical images available free to the public. Check them out.

These embryos are at the 8 and 16 cell stages, only a few cell divisions after fertilization.