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One of my least favourite episodes in Australia was contracting pneumonia, with an associated pleural effusion. However, when they finally got around to sticking a tube into my chest to drain the fluid, I did manage to scrounge a CD full of MRI images of my own chest (I paid for them, after all).

There’s something both fascinating and strangely unsettling about seeing one’s inner secrets reconstructed in 3D on a computer screen (and I’ll recommend OsiriX for such trickery, by the way), especially for the kind of scientist who is used to looking at protein structures, and certainly nothing larger than a single cell.

But MRI is strangely beautiful, and this is nowhere better illustrated than these reconstructions of … fruit and veg:

Inside insides is simply that: the insides of food, from broccoli to watermelon. Strangely mesmerizing, from dancing kiwi fruit seeds to the Munch-like swirling of durian fruit.

I’m reminded that a colleague in Australia once taped a cockroach to the back-stop of an in-house X-Ray generator. Amazingly, the little blattid lived, but unfortunately history is silent on whether a diffraction pattern was collected. It strikes me that anyone with access to MRI, X-Ray sets or whatever must have at least once, maybe late one night, placed something unusual in the machine.

What’s the strangest picture you’ve ever taken?

(H/T Jennifer Browne)