What is the essence of a person? It's a deep question for a Tuesday. While almost nothing is known about consciousness itself, science has opened some tiny doors into how the brain functions. And ...

Last year, I blogged about a new and very pretty way of displaying the data about the human 'connectome' - the wiring between different parts of the brain. But there are many beautiful ways of ...

A "connectome" denotes the sum total of connections between the neurons in a nervous system and, like "genome," implies completeness. It's a complex fingerprint of identity, revealing the differences ...

That’s the preface Roderic Pettigrew, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, gave to the audience at a symposium on the Human Connectome Project this ...

In the 1970s biologist Sydney Brenner and his colleagues began preserving tiny hermaphroditic roundworms known as Caenorhabditis elegans in agar and osmium fixative, slicing up their bodies like ...

To remember is to conjure the ghosts of places and people that no longer exist. Diving to touch the tiled bottom of the pool as a child and feeling the pressure in your ears. Walking through an ...

The human brain's complex infrastructure, also known as the functional connectome, constantly rearranges itself to make connections across distant brain regions. Illinois researchers found that ...

Particle physicists are used to popping champagne corks when they make discoveries at lilliputian scales, but now it’s neuroscientists’ turn. After 12 years and more than $40 million, an eclectic team ...

When asked what’s so special about Drosophila melanogaster, or the common fruit fly, Gerry Rubin quickly gets on a roll. Rubin has poked and prodded flies for decades, including as a leader of the ...