New images of life developing in the womb have been made possible with advanced technology that has given clearer pictures than ever before of the earliest moments of human embryos. Click on the link below to see a video that shows, for example, what the heart looks like at only five weeks. This video was made by Alexander Tsiaras, who combines art and technology to explore the unseen human body.

http://www.ted.com/talks/alexander_tsiaras_conception_to_birth_visualized.html

Mr. Tsiaras, while a professor at Yale, used techniques for scanning the interior of the human body initially to aid NASA scientists. He later adopted them to explore the growth of life in the womb that enabled him to see things that had never been seen before “that just made you marvel,” he said at a recent conference.

Some of the more astonishing things never seen before:

• The human heart at 25 days, which is “just basically two strands” of tissue; and within five weeks early atria and ventricals.
• By nine months, the body has almost 60,000 miles of blood vessels, only one mile of which is ever visible.
• Inside the genetic structure of each cell are the instructions saying exactly where a cell should go; as a mathematician, Mr. Tsiaras says the “the complexity of these mathematical models of how these things are indeed done are beyond human comprehension.”

Mr. Tsiaras is also author of several books, including “From Conception to Birth: a Life Unfolds.”

The video is from his presentation to the INK Conference of TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) in 2010.