1998, October

1998 October Mystery Image
Image by Dennis McDaniel

The image is of a fungal cell. It was made using a special microscope called a scanning laser confocal microscope. The different colors are a result of three different lasers which excite molecules which have been attached to specific structures within the cell. The green color represents the microtubules, which make up part of the skeleton of the cell. The orange represents areas of the cell where microtubules originate, and the round blue objects are nuclei. As you can see, these cells contain many nuclei. (Image by Dennis McDaniel)

For those of you that are curious, here are some numbers from our list of guesses.

• 26% guessed that is was a jelly fish.
• 16% guessed that it was either bacteria or a virus.
• 16% guessed that it was a cell or part of a cell. So they are partly correct.

Some of the creative single answers are listed below.

• Bone
• Jelly Fish
• Quantum theory: light as a packet
• Inside of an atom
• A small organism that lives in the abyssal zone of the ocean.