Recent Advances in Mapping the Brain Activity

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This is What a Fish Thought Looks Like

For the first time, researchers have been able to see a thought 'swim' through the brain of a living fish. The new technology is a useful tool for studies of perception. It might even find use in psychiatric drug discovery.

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3D Image Shows Brain's Circuitry in Highest Resolution Ever

In this image, green bulbs represent neurons in a mouse brain, and the multicolored dots represent individual synapses. There are about one billion synapses per cubic millimeter of tissue. This new method, which involves taking nano-thin slices of a mouse’s cortex, lets scientists count the synapses and catalog them according to their type. Called array tomography, it uses high-resolution photography, fluorescent proteins and a supercomputer to put everything together.

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Microscope that can peer at living brain cells

Thanks to work by physicist Stefan Hell and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, scientists are able to get high resolution microscopic views of actual living brain cells as they function inside of a living animal.The new microscope provides clear resolution down to 70 nanometers, which is four times that ever achieved before and is enough to allow scientists to see the actual movement of dendritic spines, which may help researches understand why they do so.