Compare a boxy 1980s TV to the sleek high-definition TVs of today: That's a 25-fold difference. Spencer Smith's microscope is a 100-fold difference over the microscopes used today. Smith, of the University of North Carolina's School of Medicine, and his team developed the new microscope, which can simultaneously view individual neurons firing in two or more brain regions of a moving laboratory animal. The microscope will enable researchers to see how different areas of the brain work together to process information.

Credit: NSF

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