News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Map of an Insect’s Brain by GordonS on Saturday March 11, 2023 @02:31PM (#35111769)
> The connectome of the larval fly, published Friday in the journal Science, took 12 years to complete. Imaging a single neuron required about a day...

> Human brains have an estimated 86 billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synapses...

So, the techniques used for the fly are totally impractical for humans, or presumably any mammal. Anyone know of any developments that may help? Maybe AI could be used to automate processing of the images?

Re:Map of an Insect’s Brain by kuprel on Saturday March 11, 2023 @03:01PM (#35112079)
“If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”

Maybe AI can though

Re:Map of an Insect’s Brain by notfed on Saturday March 11, 2023 @03:21PM (#35112262)
Asking AI to map human brains...what could possibly go wrong?
Re:Map of an Insect’s Brain by dredog on Saturday March 11, 2023 @03:28PM (#35112355)
Yep, this is already happening. I think it’s called ‘automatic segmentation’.
Re:Map of an Insect’s Brain by undersuit on Saturday March 11, 2023 @03:31PM (#35112381)
Do we need to image all 86 billion? A sampling of cells throughout the brain and a simulation of a cell such that we can figure out how 1 fertilized egg can become 86 billion neurons and change. We can throw compute power at that, we don't really have brains to throw at the problem.
Re:Map of an Insect’s Brain by inportb on Saturday March 11, 2023 @04:21PM (#35112837)
More like totally impractical for living specimens that you want to continue living meaningfully.
Re:Map of an Insect’s Brain by moonbreams on Sunday March 12, 2023 @07:36AM (#35118954)
The sell with this kind of research is that doing it will lead to order of magnitude gains in complexity - compare the time it took to sequence the first fruit fly genome with the time it takes today