Author: Sara Habibipour
Fairly recently, Google created a 3D map of a fruit fly's brain, and it's the most detailed representation of a brain to date.
The map captures around 25,000 of the fruit fly’s neurons and traces 20 million synapses connecting the different parts of the brain, including the olfactory, visual, higher-order, and central complex regions. Scientists have also noted that while fruit flies have brains the size of a poppy seed, they behave in intelligent ways ranging from complex courtship dances to a tendency to investigate for hazards like toxic chemicals before choosing to move to new locations.
To accomplish this feat, researchers cut the fruit fly’s brain into thin, cross-sectional pieces a third the width of a human hair. They then bombarded the slices with streams of electrons and measured how the electrons moved as they collided with the surface of the brain slice. This data took 200,000 hours to analyze and put together! And that's just a quarter of the brain!
So what does this mean for the field of neuroscience? Well, it might not lead way to any immediate breaking research. But, it definitely will definitely allow scientists to further explore the brain and perform research that may eventually answer questions about the human brain.
Source/For More: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7927259/Researchers-Google-create-detailed-3D-map-fruit-fly-brain.html
Stock Image: https://www.needpix.com/photo/1648913/fly-insect-robber-fly-nature-bug-eyes-portrait-inflorescence-head