[Tyler]

Dicing Arthur Dent's Brain
     

Fans of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will no doubt remember
Arthur Dent's shock when the mice tell him they need to remove and dice
his brain in order to retrieve from it the question that will make sense
of the ultimate answer of life, the universe, and everything. According
to a Wired
article, Harvard Scientists
appear to be following the same line of research. They're using a new
machine, called the ATLUM,
that slices and dices brains into ultrathin sections from which the
physical neural connections can be transcribed. ATLUM
stands for Automatic Tape-collecting Lathe UltraMicrotome, in case you
were wondering. You may recall our
earlier article on MIT scientists working on a similar computational neuroanatomy
project in the
new field of connectomics. The goal is to create a "connectome", a
complete network diagram of the neurons in the brain. The human brain
connectome would contain "hundreds of petabytes of information, or
about the total amount of storage in Google's data centers".
   

http://robots.net/article/2459.html