Started on 6 October 2026 as a fork of Deadly Berries, All the Way Down, to take the same real-scale zoom to every part of the body. That story lives on here: under Explain, pick Story to follow one atropine molecule from a deadly nightshade berry in your hand to your heart.

The body is BodyParts3D, © The Database Center for Life Science, licensed under CC Attribution 4.0 International. I've simplified it and left out the reproductive organs, so it can be anyone's body.

Everything is drawn at its real size and in its real place, and the zoom moves at a steady pace per power of ten, so a long stretch on the ladder takes a long time. Shapes are simplified. Below about a fifth of a micrometre things are smaller than a wavelength of light, so they don't look like anything at all: from there down, the colours and shapes are a faithful sketch. The pink glow that marks the atropine molecule is far bigger than the molecule.

The virus is a phage much like T4, which infects gut bacteria. Its DNA really is packed in layers about 2.5 nm apart, though not in rings as tidy as these.

The receptor is the M2 muscarinic receptor in the heart's pacemaker, which is the one atropine blocks to make the heart race.

The brain trip, added on 10 October 2026, goes into the patch of the left motor strip that moves your right hand. Its nerve cells are made up, not traced from a real brain, and drawn about one in a thousand, as Golgi's stain shows them. Their signals are slowed right down. The AMPA receptor is the real shape of GluA2 from the Protein Data Bank (3KG2), by Sobolevsky, Rosconi and Gouaux (2009), with its clamshells closed round glutamate as in 1FTJ, by Armstrong and Gouaux (2000).

The way into the neuron's cell body, added on 11 October 2026, goes on through its nucleus to your own DNA. The nucleosome is drawn to the measurements of the first one seen atom by atom, by Luger and colleagues (1997, 1AOI), with its histones as simple shapes. The chromatin is the loose tangle of beads that Ou and colleagues saw in whole cells in 2017, rather than the neat fibre of older textbooks, though how this tangle folds is made up.

The way into a dendrite, added on 11 October 2026, follows a kinesin carrying cargo up a microtubule. The kinesin's head, the tubulin it stands on and the ATP in its pocket are the real shapes from the Protein Data Bank (4HNA), by Gigant and colleagues (2013), which caught the head splitting its ATP, with aluminium fluoride standing in for the last phosphate; it's drawn here as the phosphate. The second head, the stalk and the cargo are drawn as simple shapes, and so is the microtubule's lattice, made of copies of that tubulin. The inside of the dendrite is based on electron microscope pictures, but where each thing is in it is made up.

The way into a mitochondrion, added on 11 October 2026, can start from four of them: in the neuron's cell body, in its dendrite, in the bouton at the synapse and in a heart muscle cell. Inside they're all the same, so the trips share the same folds, the same ATP synthase and the same ATP. The synthase is the real shape of the bovine enzyme from the Protein Data Bank (6ZQM), by Spikes, Montgomery and Walker (2020), and the pocket where it makes ATP is from 1H8E, by Menz, Walker and Leslie (2001), which caught ADP and the phosphate being joined, with aluminium fluoride standing in for the phosphate; it's drawn here as the phosphate. The proton pumps are simple shapes, and the folds are tidier than real ones, which bend and branch.

The eye trip, added on 11 October 2026, goes in through the pupil of your left eye. BodyParts3D's eye has no fovea or blind spot, so they're placed where they'd be in a real eye, 4.5 mm apart, and the back of the eye is painted from photographs of it; the cornea and lens don't bend the light here. The retina's layers, rods, cones and discs are drawn to their real sizes, but where each cell is is made up. Rhodopsin and the retinal it holds are the real shapes from the Protein Data Bank (1U19), by Okada and colleagues (2004), the cow's version, which is 93% the same as yours; the rows of pairs it lies in are as Fotiadis and colleagues saw them in 2003, and transducin is drawn as simple shapes.

The way into a red blood cell, added on 30 October 2026, starts from a capillary beside the heart cell, behind the brain's spines or under the eye's rods, where the blood is held still for you to look. The cells are their real size, folded like parachutes in the narrow capillaries as real ones are. Haemoglobin is the real shape of yours, carrying oxygen, from the Protein Data Bank (2DN1), by Park, Yokoyama, Shibayama, Shiro and Tame (2006). It's packed as tightly as in a real cell, but each molecule further out is drawn as a rough lump, and the skin's proteins, sugars and spectrin net are simple shapes, spaced as they really are. The blood group sugar is the real tip of a type 2 chain carrying the A antigen, from 7Q1W, by Wu, Crost, Owen, van Bakel and colleagues (2021); type B is drawn from it with the GalNAc's N-acetyl group swapped for the OH that galactose has there, and type O without the tip.

Rendered live in your browser with three.js, in the same four colours as the rest of the site.