The Prepared Citizen.

What it means to be human.

"News Items is the best go-to source to get smart early in the morning, but also giving a subscription to News Items to a colleague makes a grateful friend forever." — Fred Fielding, former White House Counsel to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

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1. 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. More on this here. (Source: nytimes.com)

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2. Nature:

This brings us to today’s announcement of the MICrONS project. The team made and designed tools to allow dense neural reconstruction at scale. The resulting data set includes 200,000 cells and 523 million connections in the primary visual cortex and surrounding areas of a mouse. A unique contribution of the MICrONS project is that it also includes in vivo functional data from around 75,000 of the neurons. Even landmark connectomics studies, such as FlyWire, include only the anatomical data. The inclusion of functional data means that we can directly relate connectivity to function and decipher the elusive algorithms of the cortex. (Source: nature.com)

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