Tag: Paul Allen

Paul Allen’s institute maps a mouse brain

The Allen Institute for Brain Science has published a paper in Nature describing how they have posted a comprehensive data set on the wiring of a mouse brain.  The data is freely available at the Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas, in case you want to see for yourself. A mouse brain has 75 million neurons, far fewer than the 100 or so billion in a human brain.  The only species for which we so far have a complete wiring diagram (or "connectome") is the C. Elegans worm, with only 302 neurons. The researchers used genetically engineered viruses to illuminate and trace individual...

The EU and the USA to build a brain together

The world's two biggest brain mapping projects are to join forces.  The EU's €1bn Human Brain Project (HBP) and the United States’ $1bn BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) will start to collaborate later this year. Details are yet to be provided, but the effort will start this summer and will include all of the BRAIN Initiative's government partners — the NIH (National Institutes of Health), the NSF (National Science Foundation) and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Henry Markram, who directs the HBP at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), says that Israel's brain...