Scientists have worked out a way to take better pictures of tiny parts of our bodies called cells, using disposable nappies.

Professor Boyden and his colleagues found that with a special preparation based on the chemical in nappies that absorbs lots of liquid, they could make brain cells taken from rats swell to four and a half times their usual size.

Our bodies are built from lots of different cells, in the same way models can be built from LEGO blocks.

Usually, scientists use microscopes to see more details of tiny things. Microscopes make what you are looking at much much bigger, so you can look at an ant, for example, through a microscope and see lots of things you would otherwise miss.

The trouble is that if you want to look at something really really small, like a cell taken from a dead rat’s brain, you need a much more powerful – and expensive – microscope.

‘We decided to try something different, and physically magnify the cells themselves,’ said Edward Boyden, associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the USA.

That helped the researchers to use ordinary microscopes to see more detail, such as the structures that pass signals to other brain cells.

In the future, Professor Boyden and his team plan to use their new method to study brain diseases.