The aim was to get a high resolution view of this most mysterious piece of biology that each of us carries around on our shoulders, said Jeff Lichtman, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard. The reason we haven't done it before is that it is damn challenging. It really was enormously hard to do this.
Having sliced the tissue into wafers less than 1,000 times thinner than the width of a human hair, the researchers took electron microscope images of each to capture details of brain structure down to the nanoscale, or thousandths of a millimetre. A machine-learning algorithm then traced the paths of neurons and other cells through the individual sections, a painstaking process that would have taken humans years.
The images comprised 1.4 petabytes of data, equivalent to 14,000 full length, 4k resolution movies. We found many things in this dataset that are not in the textbooks, said Lichtman. We don't understand those things, but I can tell you they suggest there's a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.
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