"The Best Brain Ever"

Slice by slice, these images of a human brain are perhaps the clearest ever produced. To get their resolution down to a tenth of a millimeter, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital used a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine with a superstrong seven-tesla magnet (typical MRI magnets are only 0.5 to three teslas). They scanned the brain for 100 hours—from top to bottom, side to side and front to back. It helped that their subject, a brain donated to science by a 58-year-old woman who died of viral pneumonia, could stay perfectly still.