..a CHARTBOOK BORROW FOR OLIVETTI – BANGIN’ MONKEYS which is followed by the most action-oriented incisive critique of the collapsing Military Industrial Pseudo-scientific ‘Phantasmagarion7′ available.. // Chartbook 285: Cal-Tex – How Bidenomics is shaping America’s multi-speed energy transition.   Dramatic things are happening in power generation around the world. As I laid out in Carbon Note 13, in terms of sheer scale, China leads the world in the push for green electricity. But it is not only in China that the world is changing. Even in presumably hostile geographies, renewable power generation is gaining ground, fast. You might think that nowhere was less likely to see a green energy boom than Texas. But, in the last few years, as John Burn-Murdoch pointed out in a recent piece in the FT, utility-scale clean energy generation in Texas has overtaken that in California, America’s champion of all things green. Of course, energy is not “one thing”. Oil can be burned to generate electricity, but you don’t generally run your air conditioner on oil. The wind blows in Texas and the sun shines and Texans know a bargain when they see one. Since 2019 the build out of utility-scale solar in Texas has overtaken the installed capacity in California.In fairness to California, it still has an overall lead in solar capacity due to its large stock of inefficient, small-scale roof-top installations not captured by this chart.Is this a “Texas story”, or does it tell us something about the acclaimed policy initiatives of the Biden era – the infrastructure act and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)? Is the Texas renewables boom an improbable triumph of the IRA?The question was prompted by the fact that the Burn-Murdoch report did not mention the IRA. When I raised the issue on twitter he generously elaborated that all of the capacity shown in his Texas data had been in the pipeline before the IRA was enacted and the Biden policy measures never came up during his research.So this really peaked my interest. If the Texas solar boom, the biggest in the USA, has little to do with Bidenomics, are we exaggerating the impact of Bidenomics? Rather than the shiny new tax incentives is it more general factors such as the plunging cost of PVs driving the renewable surge in the USA. Or, if policy is indeed the key, are state-level measures in Texas making the difference? Or, is this unfair to the IRA? Are its main effects still to come? Will it pile-on a boom that is already underway?When I posed these questions on twitter they provoked a lively and constructive debate for which I am truly grateful. What did I learn?First, when we compare the US renewable energy trajectory with the global picture, there is little reason to believe that Bidenomics has, so far, produced an exceptional US trajectory. Everywhere, new investment in green energy generation is being propelled by general concern for the climate, shifting corporate and household demand, the plunging prices for solar and batteries triggered by Chinese policy, and a combination of national and regional interventions. As far as Europe is concerned the hoopla around Biden’s IRA has contributed to the bow-wave of urgency. The global data may themselves reflect the way in which expectations have shifted worldwide under the impact of US policy.The source for this is Bentley Allan Johns HopkinsOf course what I am looking for is not just a general comparison of trends but an answer to the nagging counterfactual question: How different would we expect this data to look without the IRA? To get an answer to that question we need models. It is only with their help that we can distinguish the changes attributable to policy interventions as compared to general prevailing conditions and pre-existing trends. The most useful overview of these modeling efforts that I have been able to find is by Bistline et al “Power sector impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” in Environmental Research Letters November 2023. If anyone has a better source, please let me know.Bistline et al use a suite of models to gauge the possible range of futures for the US electricity generating system with and without the IRA. As a benchmark they use the past trajectory of the US electricity system.The top panel shows the historical trajectory of US generating capacity from 1980 to 2021. The second half of the graphic shows how 11 different models predict that the US electricity system might be expected to develop up to 2035, with and without IRA.Clearly, all the models expect the trends of the 2010s to continue through to the 2030s which means that solar, wind and battery storage dominate America’s energy future. Even without the IRA, the low carbon share of electricity generation will likely rise to 50-55% by 2035. Bidenomics bumps that to 70-80 percent.We can, therefore, rephrase our question about America’s trajectory in the last few years. The question is: “How does the renewable surge of 2022-2024, compare to the model-based expectations, with and without the IRA?”The answer is either, “so so”, or, more charitably, it is “too early to tell”. In broad terms the current rate of expansion is slightly above the rate the models predict without the provision of additional Bidenomics incentives. But what is also clear is that the current rate of expansion, is far short of the long-run pace that should be expected from the IRA. Several models predict build-outs under IRA at the rate of 60-80 GW pa through to 2035. That is ambitious. But, as the WRI points out in a useful stock take, that is the pace required if the US is to achieve its climate goals.At this point, defenders of the IRA interject that the IRA has only just come into effect. Cash from the IRA is only beginning to flow. And in an environment of higher costs for renewable energy equipment and higher interest rates, cash matters. So, to judge the impact of the IRA to date, the real question is not what has been built in 2022 and 2023, but what is in the pipeline.On twitter Julia Coronado and Paul E Williams kindly provided many pointers for how the IRA is impacting solar and renewable energy development in Texas. Crucially, promising to extend renewable energy tax credits over a longer time horizon created more stability for investment and may have triggered a surge of new applications for interconnection. As Yakov Feygin put it: “Maybe the pithiest way to put it is that there are pre-IRA trends and outside IRA trends, but IRA has served to rapidly compress the timeframes for installation in a lot of technologies. So five years has turned into two, for example.”Advised by JP Morgan, sophisticated global players like Ørsted are optimizing their use of both the production and investment tax credits offered by the IRA to launch large new renewable schemes. Of course, correlation is not the same as causation. Ørsted is in green energy for the long haul. A tax incentive is nice but investment plans are shaped by many factors. If we read the reports closely they highlight the importance of demand for green energy from large corporations, which is largely independent of IRA incentives and driven by global corporate agendas. Where the IRA is perhaps doing its most important work may be in incentivizing the middle bracket of projects where green momentum is less certain.According to Utility Drive: “The 10 largest U.S. developers plan to build 110,364 MW of new wind and solar projects over the next five years, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, but the majority of these projects remain in early stages of development. Just 15% of planned wind and solar projects are under construction, and 13% are considered to be in advanced stages of development, … ”So there is a lot to get excited about, at, what we are learning to call, the “meso”-level of the economy (more on this in a future post). But how does all of this cash out in terms of the capacity pipeline? Special thanks go to Leonardo Buizza who chipped in with these very useful data on the expected build-out in the US by region.For the uninitiated, the regional designations refer to the patchwork elements of America’s decentralized electricity distribution networks.Along with Texas, the pipelines for the PJM, MISO and Southeast regions (which includes Florida) look particularly healthy. The relatively modest California numbers should not be a surprise. As Yakov Feygin and others pointed out, what is needed in California is not more raw generating capacity, but more battery storage. And that is what we are seeing in the data.The numbers would be even larger if it were not for the truly surreal logjam in California’s system for authorizing interconnections. According to Hamilton/Brookings data the volume of hybrid solar and batter capacity in the queue for approval is 6.5 times the capacity currently operating in the state. In other words there is an entire energy transition waiting to happen when the overloaded managerial processes of the system catch up. Texas’s less bureaucratic system seems to be one of its key advantages in the extremely rapid roll-out of solar.Of course, the interconnection issues are real. As electricity networks accommodate more and more renewables, systems management become the key. Storage and interconnection are vital components of large system management, especially now that California is entering the zone where renewables dominate its electricity supply.Source: PV-magazineAs Kyle Chan helpfully points out, though it may be true that globally speaking the United States as a whole is a laggard in renewable energy development, if we treat the larger American states as the equivalent of European nation states, then the picture looks quite different.If California (with an economy roughly comparable to that of Germany at current exchange rates) and Texas (with an economy roughly the size of Italy’s) were countries, they would be #3 and #5 in the world in solar capacity per capita.So, with dramatic developments happening across many parts of the United States and the IRA powerfully adding to that momentum, the obvious question is, which are the laggards in the US energy system. To get a general overview I used data from Climate Central to rank US states by their importance in terms of overall electricity production (capacity), their current position in the energy transition (proxied by the share of wind and solar in total state-level generating capacity) and their momentum as measured by the growth of solar in 2022-2023. The states that I have highlighted in red stand out either for their unusually low existing level of renewable power capacity or their lack of current momentum. To give one important example, Florida avoids the red mark because of the considerable push in solar.What the state-level data reveal is that there are a significant number of large states in the USA where solar and wind energy have barely made any impact. Pennsylvania, for instance, gets the red marker because of the extraordinarily low level of both wind and solar power. Admittedly, these data do not capture other forms of renewable and low carbon energy, like hydro and nuclear power. But, given the cost curves over the last decade, that is not a good reason for not have been building out solar.What is also striking, is the slow momentum of solar build-out since the boom began in 2020 in many prominent “blue states”. New York – the birth place of the Green New Deal – is a notable laggard in the pace of solar build-out. New Jersey – the “garden state” – has seen virtually no solar expansion in 2022-2023. Massachusetts is barely any better.The relative levels of sunshine between US states is irrelevant. As the global solar atlas shows, the entire United States has far better solar potential than North West Europe. If you can grow corn and tobbaco, you can do utility-scale solar. The fact that Arizona is not a solar giant is mind boggling.So what is the upshot?About 40 percent of America’s electricity system is either already heavily driven by solar and wind or is seeing considerable momentum in the solar build-out. Not much of this is immediately related to the IRA, but there is more in the pipeline. But taking this dynamic segment where the energy transition is under way as representative, results in a skewed picture. Texas is both big and truly remarkable. California already is a world leader in renewable energy. Meanwhile, the majority of the US electricity system presents a very different picture. There is a huge distance to be traveled and the pace of solar build-out is unremarkable.This is where national level incentives like the IRA must prove themselves. Of course, to make a national-regional distinction is unhelpful. What I am arguing for here is an approach that applies the logic of combined and uneven development at the sub-national level. In every single case the argument has to be won on the ground locally, but if Federal incentives can shift the terms of the argument they can unleash huge potential for catch-up investment. Some of that is already in the pipeline. But New York and New England, SPP are laggards in the pipeline data too. That there is not more solar development queued up for the Southwest is a huge missed opportunity.And these local battles in America matter. Given the extremely high per capita energy consumption in the USA, greening state-level energy systems is significant at the global level. It does not compare to the super-sized levels of emissions in China, but it matters.To take one example, Indonesia is the target of a high-level, globally syndicated Just Energy Transition Program. And this is, of course, a worthy objective that should by-rights be helping to define a sustainable development path for a nation of 275 million people. But, Indonesia’s total installed electricity generating capacity is rated at 81 GW. As far as immediate impact on the global carbon balance is concerned, cleaning up the power systems of Pennsylvania and Illinois would make an even bigger impact. A key test of Biden-era climate and industrial policy will be whether it can untie the local political economy of fossil fuels, which, across many regions of the United States still stands in the way of a green energy transition that now has all the force of economics and technological advantage on its side. You’re of course invited to Upgrade to paid / With thanks to @Adam_Tooze Chartbook / Extract ends // – The article relayed in full because although it’s a headfull and a slog it’s essential reading as we now quite desperately try to wrest control of Edward Bernays Father of Public Relations’ and the Manhattan Island king of the real & actual mass-social entire population “not ‘laboratory’/ Korean detention camp/ geopolitical enclave ‘psychology of totalism’ or “brain WASHING” – please urgently compare with our present-day advertising agency $0.7T per annum-spending$ brownwashing Christian Fundamentalist and Zionist inspired, funded, powered and driven quasi-/ crypto-sexual orgy of Robert Park 1957 totally TRASHED SCIENCE 4ROM a ludicrous greenwashing SCREAMING FALSE EQUIVALENCE and therefore literally micro-engineering depressive mental illness in all the world’s low-income young people and psychotic illnesses revolving about narcissism and the performative or ‘showbiz’ presentation of self in everyday life for pecuniary gain FOR THE YOUNG AFFLUENT3 – MENTAL HEALTH ALERT – this is not a some pop psychology socio-cultural play-on-words for the bored angry and hormonally swept-up marketed by any ideologically Machiavellian Racist Sexist Fascist all-round-misanthrope Self-haters’ societal parasite start-up company5 -POLITICAL CLASS climate engineering orgy of carpetbaggers, biznismen, literally half-witted ‘android’ or ‘hubot’ crypto-traders and utterly contemptuous self-obsessed normally two-legged Vanity-projects purveying, and “gorging themselves” on the profits of, feecing, ripping-off, dumbing-down, and figuratively eviscerating and deskilling for the rest of their lives the rising generation of human beings psychically suffocating on – like not “POLLUTED” [oh that archaic United Nations Urban & Remote Air Quality bullshit humanity wastes $1b’s on precisely because the plutocrats love its lack of controversiality and frank meaninglessness with respect to their now inescapable public duty to save the earth’s atmosphere from literal deconstruction and geophysical, diurnal, seasonal cycles-disintegration by carbon gases] but OXYGEN DEPLETED air.. the ideationally bloating, billowing and bloviating fully-automated regenerative ectoplasmic6, onomatomanic,2 infinitely if not of course exponentially expanding like the global political class’s Stephen Hawking deceased and HG Wells fruitloop Time-machine cosmic domain permanently Alpha-profits style ‘parameters’ of their environment-less, history-less, containing-no-families-households-neighbourhoods-geo-communities at all (except as tourism ‘hotspots’ or brothels for gangsters and the wildly-overpaid) futureless European ruling caste 1890s Belle Epoch Nether-world. ..who hold the whole of human society in contempt and sincerely believe that environment in its entirety is a vending machine where Credits or cash need not be inserted, merely Landscape and the vast indeed never-ending story expanding psychical universe of urban property and suburban ‘realty’ investment opportunies for the mental F Scott Fitzgerald Roaring-twenties bored idle rich and in the exact terms of Paul Samuelson, Norman Bourlag and Harvard Stanford Northwestern Notre Dame Princeton UCLA Yale and old Prof Chomsky’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology et-set-era 1950s microeconomics not only was fresh (potable) water in endless ‘inelastic’ supply but electrical energy too. Dah-di-dah you intellectual headbangers: it’s our world and we’re having it back. I hope this read helps you come out fighting effectively – there’s no time now -my honour and my privilege Team. John Blundell Southern Australia Economics, Sociology, Political Therory, Troposheric Science, EWEs and Human Health Philosophy of Science – the twenty-first century human project

¹ Gotham City, or simply Gotham, is a fictional city in the Eastern United States that serves as the primary city appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. It is best known as the home of the superhero, Batman, and his allies and foes. Wikipedia

² Definitions of onomatomania. obsession with a particular word which the person uses repeatedly or which intrudes into consciousness. type of: compulsion, obsession. an irrational motive for performing trivial or repetitive actions, even against your will.

³ The young affluent who are of course [linguistically represented by that utter headful of 20th ‘Sent 2 re’ neoclassical objectivist squeamish euphemistic Episcopalian, Church of England, Wesleyan, Methodist, Uniting Church academic tosh & psychobabble, namely Upwardly-socio-economically-mobile ‘STEM’ Science (Look Mum No Society No Environment.. NOSE?) and virtually confined to paleolithic reptilian brain-stem F, F, F, F, F (or simply paranoid fear assuaged by Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Dame Edna Everage adjurations to be strong & proud, growing your Individual-consumer adaptabilty, resilience, capacity and ‘heart-warming’ respect for the values of your overseas warrior brothers, dads & grandfathers – also the female overseas basically racist venturers – their geopolitical nation’s increasingly raddled, faltering and neurocognitively challenged elders and the federal Department of Immigration fear-lessly uphold and sedulously promulgate to the people per government advertising campaigns costing them – the people – how does that work? – $100s of millions each financial-year -what even is that?] our aspiring political class, tragic though youthful, enthusiastic and dare-we-c’est-it reproductively-primed figures that they cut – but don’t give a rat’s and will behave very nastlly when challenged because the wages they’re on are approximately three-times what i bump along on masha’Allah ! \ ماشاء الله

⁴ ..the utter despicable Permanet-warfare Lords’ and electronic communications mafia chieftains’ waste on what is blindingly obvious to serious scholars as fake, phoney catastrophically 1) deflecting public scrutiny thereby TERMINALLY perverting & corrupting democratic or electoral liberalism, and 2) almost in its entirety USELESS in the short term and catastrophically counter-productive in the medium term and FLATLY apocalyptic in the 5 – 10 year frame advertising & public relations industry nonscience

⁵ – it’s ‘hardcore, mainstream (not ANY fucking Man’s-dream’) twenty-first century sociology established on the basis or Formal Operations or Critical tripartite+-thinking Over 12 year-olds’ ‘mental foundation’ of post Socrates & post Popper philosophy of science

⁶ ectoplasm, in occultism, a mysterious, usually light-coloured, viscous substance that is said to exude from the body of a spiritualist medium in trance and may then take the shape of a face, a hand, or a complete body. It is normally visible only in the darkened atmosphere of a séance (q.v.)

⁷ COMPLEX? Who might you be trying to kid other than your good and earnest self? Ex 19th century ideologically liberal English ruling caste neoclassical academic terminology its own most fervent adherents, proselytisers & promulgators would have to admit to me now in the case of Eisenhower’s (see also Oliver Sacks’ – a junkie sure but funny – The President’s..) 1951 speech was as sophisticated as a 10 – 11 year-old with normal healthy care & upbringing two-step ideational Concrete-operations-stage of maturation or development’s statement – a complex as a bunch of objects not an economic- or social-relations phenomenon. Please don’t talk about Yanks in public life with their ‘calm-plexs’ – these people are the scourge of the earth presently and this calamity will only compound itself unless they basically STFU. – Don’t ever either put aside compassion and ignore the socio-cultural context of anyone’s speech – that’s ever a schoolboy’s helpless or adult’s dog act – almost every survivor of WWII including my own mum and dad suffered loss, grief and psychological trauma, and the last of these three does not make you much of a flaneur, wordsmith or orator; or even reader ! Old impaired people commonly never start healing themselves mentally from the loss of 15 million of their fellows. The temper of the times affects the quality of conversation and dialogue – as in a country where 100,000 households are in poverty, for example – and referring to contextuality as I was you’ll see that all insights of a sympathtic not angry nature generate ever more insights – that’s my now highly-developed Neurolinguistics: after Aristotle the Athenian’s one-word learning theory (Association) mental stimulation, healing, learning & growth

Science cannot be only a remunerative recreation or adult lifelong medium-high income for Turning -up ‘at work’ 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
• More 

..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

News

By Sneha Khedkar

published 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.  

READ MORE

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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 — 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 donor’s 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! 

Sneha Khedkar

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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The above re-presented by

John Blundell

Australia

~ Must Become a Menace to My Enemies June Jordan (1936-2002)

^{Dedicated to the Poet Agostinho Neto, President of The People’s Republic of Angola: 1976}

1
I will no longer lightly walk behind
a one of you who fear me:
                                     Be afraid.
I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits
and facial tics
I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore
and this is dedicated in particular
to those who hear my footsteps
or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery
cart
then turn around
see me
and hurry on
away from this impressive terror I must be:
I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon
surrounded by my comrades singing
terrible revenge in merciless
accelerating
rhythms
But
I have watched a blind man studying his face.
I have set the table in the evening and sat down
to eat the news.
Regularly
I have gone to sleep.
There is no one to forgive me.
The dead do not give a damn.
I live like a lover
who drops her dime into the phone
just as the subway shakes into the station
wasting her message
canceling the question of her call:
fulminating or forgetful but late
and always after the fact that could save or 
condemn me

I must become the action of my fate.

AT: ... there is far more to come here !

Qiu Xiaofei, Trotskyky Mountain, 2021, oil on linen, 150 × 90 cm.

If you have scrolled this far, I am just going to leave this here:

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~ You’re a political journalist and you’re not reading @Adam_Tooze daily?

You’re bullshit.

John Blundell

The post criminalisation, post medicalisation post normalisation of vile narcissistic behaviour, post faux feminisation human project..

Australia

Great Southern Lost Neoclassical Academic Triumphalist Brain-fart Land

Amiriyah Shelter Massacre 408 women children were killed