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Researchers report that they have created a diagram of a mouse’s brain
A year after President Obama announced a $100 million “BRAIN Initiative” to accelerate discoveries in how gray matter thinks, feels, remembers and sometimes succumbs to devastating diseases, scientists last week said they had achieved a key milestone toward that goal.
Writing in the journal Nature, they unveiled the mouse “connectome,” a map showing the sinuous connections that neurons make throughout the mouse brain as they form functional circuits.
The connectome “provides the most detailed analysis of brain circuitry currently available for any mammalian brain,” said neuroscientist David Van Essen of Washington University in St. Louis, co-leader of the Human Connectome Project. “It is truly a landmark study.”
A connectome is essentially a wiring diagram. It shows how each of the millions or billions of neurons (gray matter) in a brain connect to thousands of other neurons through projections called axons (white matter) and thereby allow brain regions to communicate to produce behavior, intelligence and personality.
Such a diagram might reveal, say, how neurons that register the taste of a cookie fan out to circuits that store memories and unleash a torrent of remembrances of things past. And it might reveal what causes those circuits to malfunction in diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Before the mouse, the only species for which scientists had created an essentially complete connectome was the roundworm C. elegans. It has 302 neurons.
The human brain has some 86 billion, each making as many as 10,000 connections.
For the mouse connectome, scientists led by Hongkui Zeng of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle used some of the 21st-century techniques that are required to create a human connectome. For the mouse, the key was to make neuronal connections literally shine.
To do that, Zeng’s team injected viruses into precise spots in the brains of living mice. The viruses produce a special protein that fluoresces green. When the glowing protein diffuses throughout the neurons and their axons, the circuits show up under a microscope after the mouse is killed and its brain is sliced.
Out of 295 distinct structures in the mouse brain, the technique revealed the neuronal highways into and out of all but 18. Many of the missing ones are tiny structures close to the bottom of the brain that are hard to hit with the virus.
The map revealed several surprises about brain wiring. Connections that stay on one side of the brain “seem to be always stronger” than those that cross hemispheres, Zeng said.
The mouse’s neuronal connections also vary widely in strength. That “must be contributing to brain network computation,” she said. “We think a small number of strong connections and a large number of weak connections may be a fundamental network organization property to allow greater capacity of information processing.”
The mouse connectome is a medium-scale map, showing long-range and local connections. It does not have the resolution to reveal the precise neuron-to-
neuron connections, or synapses, as a “microscale” connectome would, though that is a goal.
A large-scale map is the goal of the Human Connectome Project, which the National Institutes of Health announced in 2010 and which Van Essen calls “one of the great scientific challenges of the 21st century.” It is being produced using a special technique called diffusion tensor imaging in living brains.
Van Essen’s project will resemble the Human Genome Project in a key way. Just as the genome project discovered the precise sequence of 3 billion molecules common to the vast majority of humans’ DNA, serving as a reference book against which to measure individual genetic differences, so the connectome will first reveal neuro-commonalities and, eventually, the uniqueness of each individual brain.
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/researchers-report-that-they-have-created-a-diagram-of-a-mouses-brain/2014/04/07/8755ec82-ba8c-11e3-9a05-c739f29ccb08_story.html
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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