The New York Times has a fantastic article on Carl Schoonover. Midway through a Ph.D. program in neuroscience at Columbia University, he shares his passion in “Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century”. The picture "SpinyNeuron" from 2009 above was taken using Electron Microscopy, to reveal a world previously unseen by light based microscopes.
An electron bean scans the surface, each single electron bounces away, a dectector captures and maps the otherwise invisible contours of the central soma and its branch like dendrites.
A single neuron (in red), with all it's connecting neurons highlighted (yellow). This illuminating shot was created by using a modified rabies virus engineered to contrast with the surrounding brain structure.
