Latest news with #MachineIntelligencefromCorticalNetworks
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
The Largest Brain Map May Have Just Changed Neuroscience
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." A new package of papers examines the largest map yet of mammalian brain tissue. The map shows one cubic millimeter worth of neurons in the visual cortex of a mouse. Many brain functions, particularly the senses, are similar across different mammal species. Scientists have mapped an unprecedentedly large portion of the brain of a mouse. The cubic millimeter worth of brain tissue represents the largest piece of a brain we've ever understood to this degree, and the researchers behind this project say that the mouse brain is similar enough to the human brain that they can even extrapolate things about us. A cubic millimeter sounds tiny—to us, it is tiny—but a map of 200,000 brain cells represents just over a quarter of a percent of the mouse brain. In brain science terms, that's extraordinarily high. A proportionate sample of the human brain would be 240 million cells. Within the sciences, coding and computer science can sometimes overshadow the physical and life sciences. Rhetoric about artificial intelligence has raced ahead with terms like 'human intelligence,' but the human brain is not well enough understood to truly give credence to that idea. Scientists have worked for decades to analyze the brain, and they're making great progress despite the outsized rhetoric working against them. That said, artificial intelligence designed for specific tasks is essential to research like this. In a series of eight papers in the peer reviewed journal Nature, the team behind the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) project—hailing from the Allen Institute, Baylor College of Medicine, and Princeton University—described how they used machine learning to 'reverse engineer the algorithms of the brain.' The field in which scientists map the brain and other parts of the nervous system (of humans or any other creature) is called connectomics. The term comes from the same suffix as in biome or genome, referring to a complete picture or map of something. This work expands on the connectome—which is only the physical map—by adding data about each neuron's function. In one of the team's papers, the researchers were able to make an overall classifying system to cover 30,000 neurons by their different shapes, or morphologies. These neurons are excitatory, meaning they're involved with transmitting messages in the brain. The alternative to excitatory is inhibitory, which is circuitry that stops a message from being passed, like an insulator. Inhibitory neuron shapes are better understood, partly because their shapes can be separated into diverse (but discrete) groups. In this study, scientists used machine learning to help classify excitatory neurons, which seem to need a more complicated classifying system. By turning the neurons into measurements, observations,and layers, the scientists could then use statistical methods to find how often certain types or qualities of these cells appeared. This may sound like an oxymoron, but code can generalize more precisely than human scientists are able to. '(1) Superficial L2/3 neurons are wider than deep ones; (2) L4 neurons in V1 are less tufted than those in HVAs; (3) the basal dendrites of a subset of atufted L4 neurons in V1 avoid reaching into L5; (4) excitatory cortical neurons form mostly a continuum with respect to dendritic morphology, with some notable exceptions.' The conclusion about a continuum is really important. Having categories for neurons can be and has been useful in studying the brain, but computing power can deepen this understanding and add a great deal of nuance. With more information, we can turn broad types into something more individualized. Another paper in the set found confirmation of an existing theory that 'like connects like' within neuron structures. Neurons that perform certain tasks in the visual cortex of the mouse brain reach out and link up with each other, whether they're adjacent or layers apart. Because of the size of this dataset, the scientists were able to extend this established theory into further-away parts of the brain region. And since even this large mapping of brain tissue is still very incomplete, the number of 'like' neurons is likely even higher in reality. The data and maps from this project are available for the public to check out by following the instructions on their website. It's wild that you don't even have to download anything—you can map the brain using your web browser. You Might Also Like Can Apple Cider Vinegar Lead to Weight Loss? Bobbi Brown Shares Her Top Face-Transforming Makeup Tips for Women Over 50
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
A Single Cubic Millimeter of Brain Tissue May Have Just Changed Neuroscience Forever
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." A new package of papers examines the largest map yet of mammalian brain tissue. The map shows one cubic millimeter worth of neurons in the visual cortex of a mouse. Many brain functions, particularly the senses, are similar across different mammal species. Scientists have mapped an unprecedentedly large portion of the brain of a mouse. The cubic millimeter worth of brain tissue represents the largest piece of a brain we've ever understood to this degree, and the researchers behind this project say that the mouse brain is similar enough to the human brain that they can even extrapolate things about us. A cubic millimeter sounds tiny—to us, it is tiny—but a map of 200,000 brain cells represents just over a quarter of a percent of the mouse brain. In brain science terms, that's extraordinarily high. A proportionate sample of the human brain would be 240 million cells. Within the sciences, coding and computer science can sometimes overshadow the physical and life sciences. Rhetoric about artificial intelligence has raced ahead with terms like 'human intelligence,' but the human brain is not well enough understood to truly give credence to that idea. Scientists have worked for decades to analyze the brain, and they're making great progress despite the outsized rhetoric working against them. That said, artificial intelligence designed for specific tasks is essential to research like this. In a series of eight papers in the peer reviewed journal Nature, the team behind the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) project—hailing from the Allen Institute, Baylor College of Medicine, and Princeton University—described how they used machine learning to 'reverse engineer the algorithms of the brain.' The field in which scientists map the brain and other parts of the nervous system (of humans or any other creature) is called connectomics. The term comes from the same suffix as in biome or genome, referring to a complete picture or map of something. This work expands on the connectome—which is only the physical map—by adding data about each neuron's function. In one of the team's papers, the researchers were able to make an overall classifying system to cover 30,000 neurons by their different shapes, or morphologies. These neurons are excitatory, meaning they're involved with transmitting messages in the brain. The alternative to excitatory is inhibitory, which is circuitry that stops a message from being passed, like an insulator. Inhibitory neuron shapes are better understood, partly because their shapes can be separated into diverse (but discrete) groups. In this study, scientists used machine learning to help classify excitatory neurons, which seem to need a more complicated classifying system. By turning the neurons into measurements, observations,and layers, the scientists could then use statistical methods to find how often certain types or qualities of these cells appeared. This may sound like an oxymoron, but code can generalize more precisely than human scientists are able to. '(1) Superficial L2/3 neurons are wider than deep ones; (2) L4 neurons in V1 are less tufted than those in HVAs; (3) the basal dendrites of a subset of atufted L4 neurons in V1 avoid reaching into L5; (4) excitatory cortical neurons form mostly a continuum with respect to dendritic morphology, with some notable exceptions.' The conclusion about a continuum is really important. Having categories for neurons can be and has been useful in studying the brain, but computing power can deepen this understanding and add a great deal of nuance. With more information, we can turn broad types into something more individualized. Another paper in the set found confirmation of an existing theory that 'like connects like' within neuron structures. Neurons that perform certain tasks in the visual cortex of the mouse brain reach out and link up with each other, whether they're adjacent or layers apart. Because of the size of this dataset, the scientists were able to extend this established theory into further-away parts of the brain region. And since even this large mapping of brain tissue is still very incomplete, the number of 'like' neurons is likely even higher in reality. The data and maps from this project are available for the public to check out by following the instructions on their website. It's wild that you don't even have to download anything—you can map the brain using your web browser. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Scientists believe this mouse brain map is the next Human Genome Project
Scientists have achieved a feat once believed impossible, constructing the largest functional map of a brain to date, which they believe could eventually lead to the discovery of medications for hard-to-treat brain disorders like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Using a piece of a mouse's brain no larger than a grain of sand, scientists from across three institutions created a detailed diagram of the wiring that connects neurons as they send messages through the brain. The project, called Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS), offers unprecedented insight into the brain's function and organization that could help unlock the secrets of intelligence. David Markowitz, a scientist who helped coordinate the project, said the data, published April 9 in the journal Nature marks 'a watershed moment for neuroscience, comparable to the Human Genome Project in their transformative potential.' In the study, scientists looked at a small piece of the mouse's brain called the neocortex, which receives and processes visual information. It's the newest part of the brain in terms of evolution, and differentiates the brains of mammals from other animals, according to researchers. A team of researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston started by recording brain activity in a portion of the mouse's visual cortex roughly the size of a grain of salt while it watched a series of YouTube clips and movies. Scientists at the Allen Institute, a research center in Seattle, then sliced that piece of the mouse's brain into more than 25,000 layers, each a tiny fraction of the width of a human hair, and took high resolution photos of the slices through microscopes. The material was sent to a team at Princeton University, in New Jersey, which used artificial intelligence to reconstruct the pieces in 3D. Other scientists compared their approach to understanding a car's combustion engine. 'Just as an engine is composed of pistons, cylinders and a fuel system, the brain consists of neurons and synapses – the tiny, specialized connections at which neurons communicate,' two Harvard researchers wrote in a companion piece to the Nature article. The data set from the research contains 84,000 neurons, 500 million synapses and neuronal wiring that could extend the length of New York's Central Park nearly one and a half times, molecular biologists Mariela Petkova and Gregor Schuhknecht wrote. Findings from the studies have led to discoveries of new cell types, characteristics and ways to classify cells, researchers said. The achievement also puts scientists closer to their larger goal of mapping the wiring of the entire brain of a mouse. 'Inside that tiny speck is an entire architecture like an exquisite forest,' Clay Reid, a senior investigator who helped pioneer this area of study, said in a statement. 'It has all sorts of rules of connections that we knew from various parts of neuroscience, and within the reconstruction itself, we can test the old theories and hope to find new things that no one has ever seen before.' Researchers view wiring diagrams as a foundational step that scientists can build on and, eventually, potentially use to find treatments for brain conditions like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and schizophrenia. They compare the studies to the Human Genome Project, which created the first complete map of the DNA in every human cell. The Human Genome Project has led to profound advances in drug discovery, treatments and disease screenings and helped pave the way for revolutionary gene therapies to treat certain diseases, including some cancers. With a functional map of the brain, researchers say they now have the ability to understand the brain's form and function and have opened up new pathways to study intelligence. Nuno da Costa, an associate investigator at the Allen Institute, described the data they collected as a 'kind of Google map' of the piece of the visual cortex. 'If you have a broken radio and you have the circuit diagram, you'll be in a better position to fix it,' he said in a statement. 'In the future, we can use this to compare the brain wiring in a healthy mouse to the brain wiring in a model of disease.' This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: A mouse watched YouTube. Then scientists mapped its brains.
Euronews
10-04-2025
- Health
- Euronews
Scientists produce complex map of mouse's brain that could unravel mystery of how ours work
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks to a mouse watching clips from 'The Matrix,' scientists have created the largest functional map of a brain to date – a diagram of the wiring connecting 84,000 neurons as they fire off messages. Using a piece of that mouse's brain about the size of a poppy seed, the researchers identified those neurons and traced how they communicated via branch-like fibres through a surprising 500 million junctions called synapses. The massive dataset, published on Wednesday by the journal Nature, marks a step toward unraveling the mystery of how our brains work. Related Scientists shed light on the many ways women's brains change during pregnancy The data, assembled in a 3D reconstruction colored to delineate different brain circuitry, is open to scientists worldwide for additional research – and for the simply curious to take a peek. "It definitely inspires a sense of awe, just like looking at pictures of the galaxies," said Forrest Collman of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in the United States, one of the project's leading researchers. "You get a sense of how complicated you are. We're looking at one tiny part... of a mouse's brain and the beauty and complexity that you can see in these actual neurons and the hundreds of millions of connections between them". Scientists review neuron reconstructions for the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks project in December 2024, in Seattle, Washington. Jenny Burns/AP How we think, feel, see, talk, and move are due to neurons, or nerve cells, in the brain – how they're activated and send messages to each other. Scientists have long known those signals move from one neuron along fibres called axons and dendrites, using synapses to jump to the next neuron. But there's less known about the networks of neurons that perform certain tasks and how disruptions of that wiring could play a role in Alzheimer's , autism, or other disorders. With the new project, a global team of more than 150 researchers mapped neural connections that Collman compares to tangled pieces of spaghetti winding through part of the mouse brain responsible for vision. Related Scientists produce first and largest brain map of a dead fruit fly How scientists mapped the brain The first step: show a mouse video snippets of sci-fi movies, sports, animation, and nature. A team at Baylor College of Medicine in the US did just that, using a mouse engineered with a gene that makes its neurons glow when they're active. The researchers used a laser-powered microscope to record how individual cells in the animal's visual cortex lit up as they processed the images flashing by. Next, scientists at the Allen Institute analysed that small piece of brain tissue, using a special tool to shave it into more than 25,000 layers and take nearly 100 million high-resolution images using electron microscopes. They then painstakingly reassembled the data in 3D. Finally, scientists from Princeton University in the US used artificial intelligence (AI) to trace all that wiring and "paint each of the individual wires a different colour so that we can identify them individually," Collman said. ADVERTISEMENT They estimated that microscopic wiring, if laid out, would measure more than 5 km. Related An experimental brain-computer implant is helping a stroke survivor speak again Implications for human health Could this kind of mapping help scientists eventually find treatments for brain diseases? The researchers call it a foundational step, like how the Human Genome Project that provided the first gene mapping eventually led to gene-based treatments. Mapping a full mouse brain is one next goal. ADVERTISEMENT "The technologies developed by this project will give us our first chance to really identify some kind of abnormal pattern of connectivity that gives rise to a disorder," said Sebastian Seung, Princeton neuroscientist and computer scientist and another of the project's leading researchers. The work "marks a major leap forwards and offers an invaluable community resource for future discoveries," wrote Harvard neuroscientists Mariela Petkova and Gregor Schuhknecht, who weren't involved in the project. The huge and publicly shared data "will help to unravel the complex neural networks underlying cognition and behaviour," they added.
New York Times
09-04-2025
- Science
- New York Times
Scientists Map Miles of Wiring in a Speck of Mouse Brain
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. Dr. Bock said that the advances that made it possible to chart a cubic millimeter of brain boded well for a new goal: mapping the wiring of the entire brain of a mouse. 'It's totally doable, and I think it's worth doing,' he said. More than 130 years have passed since the Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal first spied individual neurons under a microscope, making out their peculiar branched shapes. Later generations of scientists worked out many of the details of how a neuron sends a spike of voltage down a long arm, called an axon. Each axon makes contact with tiny branches, or dendrites, of neighboring neurons. Some neurons excite their neighbors into firing voltage spikes of their own. Some quiet other neurons. Human thought somehow emerges from this mix of excitation and inhibition. But how that happens has remained a tremendous mystery, largely because scientists have been able to study only a few neurons at a time. In recent decades, technological advances have allowed scientists to start mapping brains in their entirety. In 1986, British researchers published the circuitry of a tiny worm, made up of 302 neurons. In subsequent years, researchers charted bigger brains, such as the 140,000 neurons in the brain of a fly. Could Dr. Crick's impossible dream be possible after all? In 2016, the American government began a $100 million effort to scan a cubic millimeter of a mouse brain. The project — called Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks, or MICrONS — was led by scientists at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Princeton University and Baylor College of Medicine. The researchers zeroed in on a portion of the mouse brain that receives signals from the eyes and reconstructs what the animal sees. In the first stage of the research, the team recorded the activity of neurons in that region as it showed a mouse videos of different landscapes. The researchers then dissected the mouse brain and doused the cubic millimeter with hardening chemicals. Then they shaved off 28,000 slices from the block of tissue, capturing an image of each one. Computers were trained to recognize the outlines of cells in each slice and link the slices together into three-dimensional shapes. All told, the team charted 200,000 neurons and other types of brain cells, along with 523 million neural connections. For Nuno da Costa, a biologist at the Allen Institute and one of the leaders of the project, just watching the cells take shape on his computer screen was breathtaking. 'These neurons are absolutely stunning — it gives me pleasure,' he said. To understand how this mesh of neurons functioned, Dr. da Costa and his colleagues mapped the activity that had been recorded when the mouse looked at videos. 'Imagine that you come to a party that has 80,000 people, and you can be aware of every conversation, but you don't know who is talking to whom,' Dr. da Costa said. 'And now imagine that you have a way to know who is talking to whom, but you have no idea what they're saying. If you have these two things, you can tell a better story about what's happening at the party.' Analyzing the data, the researchers discovered patterns in the wiring of the brain that had escaped notice until now. They identified distinct kinds of inhibitory neurons, for instance, that link only to certain other types of neurons. 'When you go into studying the brain, it seems kind of hopeless — there are just so many connections and so much complexity,' said Mariela Petkova, a biophysicist at Harvard who was not involved in the MICrONS project. 'Finding wiring rules is a win. The brain is a lot less messy than people thought,' she said. Many of the MICrONS researchers are now pitching in on a bigger project: mapping an entire mouse's brain. With a volume of 500 cubic millimeters, a full brain would take decades or centuries to chart with current methods. The scientists will have to find additional tricks in order to finish the project in a decade. 'What they've already had to do to get here is heroic,' said Gregory Jefferis, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the MICrONS project. 'But we've still got a mountain to climb.' Forrest Collman, a member of the MICrONS project at the Allen Institute, is optimistic. He and his colleagues recently discovered how to make microscopically thin sections from an entire mouse brain. 'Some of these barriers are starting to fall,' Dr. Collman said. But our own brain, which is about a thousand times bigger than a mouse's, presents a much bigger challenge, he added. 'The human brain right now feels like outside the range of what is possible,' he said. 'We are not going there anytime soon.' But Sebastian Seung, a neuroscientist at Princeton and a member of the MICrONS project, noted that mouse brains and human brains are similar enough that researchers might glean clues that could help them find medications to effectively treat psychological disorders without causing harmful side effects. 'Our current methods of manipulating the nervous system are incredibly blunt instruments,' Dr. Seung said. 'You put in a drug, and it goes everywhere,' he added. 'But being able to actually reach in and manipulate a cell type — that's precision.' The efforts to map a whole mouse brain are supported by funding from a long-running National Institutes of Health program called the BRAIN initiative. But the future of the endeavor is uncertain. Last year, Congress cut funding to the BRAIN initiative by 40 percent, and last month President Trump signed a bill cutting support by another 20 percent. Dr. Bock noted that brain-mapping efforts like MICrONS take years, partly because they require the invention of new technologies and software along the way. 'We need consistency and predictability of science funding to realize these long-term goals,' Dr. Bock said.
