Science cannot be only a remunerative recreation or adult lifelong medium-high income for turning up but must be purposed at the outset and reviewed all the way through to serve human and environmental health and wellbeing. As a neurolinguistics, communications, 2 – 5 Set Logic and philosophy of science student and ‘notable’ (let me put it this way: it would not reward any old-era authority in those fields or atmospheric science to ignore my work now) scholar I came across ‘Livescience’ in pursuit of the nano scale enhanced representation of neurons/ axons/ dendrites/ (telomeres, and yes?) article which appears in full below. – And terrific thanks to Sneha Khedkar for that and I’m sure retrospective permission to use your photograph.
So why run this obviously very large cash turnover organisation’s entire webpage including sketches of other articles?
..because we need a big picture to even begin to get to grips with the political culture of VAST global science funding the outsider might be completely forgiven (by me certainly) for thinking was only for counting and monitoring stuff then videoing it in optical terms no human naked eye may ever draw meaningful inferences or conclusions from but will be ‘fun’ or amusing to look at.
So here is a new beginning on the greatest and most important debate since the European nobleman and bloodthirsty racist young white-skinned warrior princeling out to prove himself Hernan Cortes stood (nobly of course) upon a peak in Darien and peered forth.
Of course it will be useful and contributory – i dont write chat or splatt
- Space
- Health
- Planet Earth
- Animals
- Archaeology
- Physics & Math
- Human Behavior
- Moreย
..as we address not only the multi-trillion dollar public relations and purportedly educational investment in fields of study found to be congenial to vast corporate financiers, supposedly charitable and religious NON TAX PAYING foundations and now, outrageously in my opinion, the governments of peak neoliberal free (but wildly oversubsidised) marketism managed for maximum, not optimal, corporate profit essentially by the frankly bastardised Keynesianism of manipulating inflation and interest rates for large investors and attendant suppression of real net wages with fewer & fewer hours of work over two or even three jobs exactly because those corporations – and criminal cartels, derivatives (futures) and cryptocurrency markets traders – hold, out of some now bizarre 1900s, 1920s or 1950s ideological slant that it is the right and duty of political parties of capital owners ever to combat and defeat the parties supported by people who earn their livings by the work of their hands & backs (labour) (not screens or playing markets white, grey or black) don’t want public controversy let alone public protest and disruption of their VAST carbon costly, emissions costly Alpha-profits infrastructure projects – including as ONLY ONE example in the array of fiscally profligate or largely non-productive costly, belated and lethally inefficient nuclear power as against the now unavoidable new era of micro- or community-scale electricity generation, STORAGE – production, distribution & exchange – how’s that you philosophical Marxists: nah, they go, we want great big centralised power stations hundreds of kilometres from the cities just like LB Johnson’s rural Alabama, Sir Thomas Playford’s South Australia and Iusuf Dzhugashvili’s Electrogorsk in the USSR – distribution and buyback within that vibrant and no doubt also economically reviving 100 square km geo-community. Nah, they go, we will milk all the fossil fuels markets onto 2060 now. – Oil, coal-seam gas AND coal. And the #Science backs us. Look what we can do when we got the most prestigious Australian science professor of the last 30 years to endorse our fraudulently managed AND technically nonsciencical carbon dioxide derivatives market credits scheme for us. You hippie clowns. We’ll lock you up..
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New 3D map charted with Google AI reveals ‘mysterious but beautiful’ slice of human brain
publishedย 10 hours ago
Harvard and Google researchers have collaborated to map a tiny fragment of an adult human brain in unprecedented detail.
Researchers built a 3D image of nearly every neuron and its connections within a small piece of human brain tissue. This version shows excitatory neurons colored by their depth from the surface of the brain. Blue neurons are those closest to the surface, and fuschia marks the innermost layer. The sample is approximately 3 millimeters wide. (Image credit: Google Research & Lichtman Lab (Harvard University). Renderings by D. Berger (Harvard University))
Researchers have mapped a tiny sliver of the human brain on an unprecedented scale, vividly detailing each brain cell, or neuron, and the intricate networks they form with other cells.
The groundbreaking brain map, which was constructed by Harvard and Google researchers, reveals roughly 57,000 neurons, 9 inches (230 millimeters) of blood vessels and 150 million synapses, or the connection points between neurons.
Dr. Jeff Lichtman, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University who co-led the 10-year-long project, said he couldn’t believe the detailed map when he first saw it. “I had never seen anything like this before,” he told Live Science.
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The human brain is a vastly complex organ with about 170 billion cells, including 86 billion neurons. Researchers have previously peeked into the brain at the scale of millimeters using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). And more recently, advanced microscopy techniques have revealed details at a much smaller scale, improving our understanding of the brain’s inner workings.
Related: Most detailed human brain map ever contains 3,300 cell types
Now, using these microscopy methods and an artificial intelligence (AI) system called machine learning, Lichtman and his colleagues have created a 3D map from a piece of brain at the scale of a nanometer, or 1-millionth of a millimeter. This presents a picture of the organ at the highest resolution scientists have ever achieved.
The resulting cell atlas, described in the journal Science on May 9, is also available for scientists to peruse online.
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This map charts a tiny piece of brain with a volume of about 1 cubic millimeter โ smaller than a grain of rice. A whole adult brain is a million times larger.
The brain fragment was sampled from a 45-year-old woman who had undergone brain surgery to treat epilepsy. Doctors removed the piece from the cerebral cortex, the outermost portion of her brain. After fixing the sample in preservatives, the researchers stained it with heavy metals to help them see the cells. They then embedded the tissue in resin and cut it into more than 5,000 slices, each measuring about 30 nanometers in thickness.
Image 1 of 2
“That’s about a thousandth the thickness of a hair strand,” Lichtman said.The team scanned each of the slices with a high-speed electron microscope, which uses multiple beams of electrons to illuminate cells in the sample. They then sent the microscopy data to Google for further analysis using AI.
Google’s researchers used machine-learning models to identify the same object in different microscopic images and then create a 3D rendering of every object in all the images. They then electronically stitched the renderings together to reconstruct the whole sample in three dimensions. The final 3D map contains a mammoth 1.4 petabytes, or 1 million gigabytes, of data.
“The amount and complexity of the data generated in this project required Google’s ability to develop state of the art machine learning and AI algorithms to reconstruct the 3D connectome,” Viren Jain, a senior staff scientist at Google who co-led the project, told Live Science in an email.
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The scientists’ detailed map contains several surprises. For instance, they found that some of the neurons’ outgoing wires, or axons, wrapped themselves into knots, forming whorls that Jain described as “mysterious but beautiful.” The team also found rare connections between neurons, in which singular axons were linked to up to 50 synapses.
“We’re still investigating the function of these connections, but they could explain how very fast responses, or very important memories are encoded,” Jain told Live Science.
It remains to be seen whether the whorls and super-strong synapses have anything to do with the tissue donorโs epilepsy, or if they’d be seen in brains of people without the condition, Lichtman noted. He added that the team is now examining brain tissue from a person with Parkinson’s, so that may start to address the question.
He added it’s unlikely that brain tissue samples from any two people will look exactly the same, in part because the way the brain wires itself depends on an individual’s experiences.
The team next aims to map the entire brain of a mouse, which would be 500 times the size of this human brain sample. They’re starting with the hippocampus, a key region for learning and memory.
“We have already begun the ambitious task,” Lichtman said.
Ever wonder why some people build muscle more easily than others or why freckles come out in the sun? Send us your questions about how the human body works to community@livescience.com with the subject line “Health Desk Q,” and you may see your question answered on the website!
Live Science Contributor
Sneha Khedkar is a biologist-turned-freelance-science-journalist from India. She holds a master’s degree in biochemistry and a bachelor’s degree in microbiology and biochemistry. After her master’s, she worked as a research fellow for four years, studying stem cell biology. Her articles have been published in Scientific American, Knowable Magazine, and Undark, as well as several Indian platforms such as The Hindu and The Wire Science, among others. Besides writing, she enjoys a good cup of tea, reading novels and practicing yoga.
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