Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:
The human brain is so complex that scientific brains have a hard time making sense of it. A piece of neural tissue the size of a grain of sand might be packed with hundreds of thousands of cells linked together by miles of wiring. In 1979, Francis Crick, the Nobel-prize-winning scientist, concluded that the anatomy and activity in just a cubic millimeter of brain matter would forever exceed our understanding.
“It is no use asking for the impossible,” Dr. Crick wrote.
Forty-six years later, a team of more than 100 scientists has achieved that impossible, by recording the cellular activity and mapping the structure in a cubic millimeter of a mouse’s brain — less than one percent of its full volume. In accomplishing this feat, they amassed 1.6 petabytes of data — the equivalent of 22 years of nonstop high-definition video.
“This is a milestone,” said Davi Bock, a neuroscientist at the University of Vermont who was not involved in the study, which was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.