psyq321

Yes, starting from Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2 it is possible to support more than 64 CPUs within a single process by using new Win32 APIs supporting processor groups. You'd need to manually set the affinities for the threads, but after that you are all set.

Unfortunately, unaware (legacy) software is still limited to 64 processors.

I think the article title is somewhat misleading. What they might found is not "part of the brain responsible for free will" but, rather, parts responsible for perception of volition will and agency.

Those are rather different things. The "free will" thing being a whole tougher nut to crack and, frankly, maybe even pointless to pursue at this stage of neuroscience development.

However, quest for neural correlates of volition and agency is extremely useful and better understanding could help managing catastrophic injuries.

7T is the Nottingham University scanner. Cardiff is 3T Connectom A. These are different sites / scans in the article.

In fact, 3T Connectom A is actually more optimized for Diffusion MRI / white matter tract tracing compared to the available 7T scanners due to its enormous 300 mT/m gradient.

In theory, the best of both worlds would be a 7T+ scanner with ultra strong gradient system such as the one developed by the HCP team, but such device does not exist yet AFAIK.

Just to clarify, MRI scanner at Cardiff is Siemens Connectom A, a specialized research 3T MRI scanner for which the main designs were part of Human Connectome Project.

It is not exactly "hot news", as it is already in research use for several years already (in the US, at MGH). It is, still, however, pretty unique in a way that it was optimized for human in-vivo diffusion MRI (tracing of white matter pathways in alive human subjects :-).

Diffusion MRI scans which can be obtained by this scanner are of exceptionally high quality and resolution (spatial and angular), and contain lots of data that can be fed to mathematical models to infer fiber crossings, etc.

However, despite the high spatial and angular resolution it is still at least an order of magnitude short of what is necessary to capture local axonal connections and this type of imaging certainly does not tell you the direction the signal is flowing.

Still an important progress IMO.