Okinawa star sand

OIST aims to have every single high school student in Okinawa, like these students from Uruma City, visit the university before they graduate.

A giant foraminifera called a xenophyophore appear as tiny dirt clods next to the robotic arm that collects them. Photo courtesy of JAMSTEC

An 8 cm large xenophyophore specimen from Ogasawara Trench showing clear growth rings. Photo courtesy of Beatrice Lecroq  

Brain slices of older tissues prepared with ice-cold (blue) and warm (red) preparation methods, as demonstrated by Shiwei Huang and Marylka Yoe Uusisaari in a paper in Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience. The asterisks (*) indicate visible neurons. While no healthy neurons are visible in the left image, seven are visible in the right. Abbreviations: PN, Purkinje neuron layer; ML, molecular layer; GrC, granular cell layer.

Shiwei Huang (right) is a member of the Computational Neuroscience Unit and Marylka Yoe Uusisaari (left) is a part of the the Optical Neuroimaging Unit.