this post was submitted on 10 May 2024
139 points (100.0% liked)

Science

13018 readers
79 users here now

Studies, research findings, and interesting tidbits from the ever-expanding scientific world.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


Be sure to also check out these other Fediverse science communities:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Google scientists have modelled a fragment of the human brain at nanoscale resolution, revealing cells with previously undiscovered features.

top 24 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 35 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Brain cable management be like

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

It's all just cables now. Someone took the server out years ago and it just kept working out of habit.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

Electricians will deny this is true but then just make up a new word for it (inductance)

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago

if I cleaned it up I wouldn't know where anything is

[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Upon seeing this model Johan Medici, who had spent the past decade attempting to develop computer simulations that replicate the way a human mind works, yelled,"FUUUUUUUCK!" before throwing himself out a window.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

..classic Johan.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago (1 children)

This is one of the most incredible things I've ever seen. The complexity of life just continues to astound me.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Yes! That this thing could evolve into existence is practically a miracle

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Where can I go download this cubic mm?

[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 months ago (2 children)

you wouldn't download a brain

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago

Only a cubic millimetre of it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Sadly, you can't download the hardware to run models that size.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

I imagined it would be big but that's mad. Is that full 3d model or just connection cos of its just connections it really shows how far our ai is from replacing us.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

then built artificial-intelligence models that were able to stitch the microscope images together to reconstruct the whole sample in 3D.

Why AI for that?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

ML is pretty common when working with a ton of data, from another article:

To make a map this finely detailed, the team had to cut the tissue sample into 5,000 slices and scan them with a high-speed electron microscope. Then they used a machine-learning model to help electronically stitch the slices back together and label the features. The raw data set alone took up 1.4 petabytes. “It’s probably the most computer-intensive work in all of neuroscience,” says Michael Hawrylycz, a computational neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, who was not involved in the research. “There is a Herculean amount of work involved.”

Unfortunately techbros have poisoned the term AI 🥲

Source: Google helped make an exquisitely detailed map of a tiny piece of the human brain

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Jain’s team then built artificial-intelligence models that were able to stitch the microscope images together to reconstruct the whole sample in 3D.

The map is so large that most of it has yet to be manually checked, and it could still contain errors created by the process of stitching so many images together. “Hundreds of cells have been ‘proofread’, but that’s obviously a few per cent of the 50,000 cells in there,” says Jain.

Ah so it's not a real model, just an AI approximation.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

It still seems like a real model to me. Just because they used a fancy computer to turn a sequence of 2d slices into a 3d representation doesn't mean it's not real.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

That is amazing.

[–] blarth 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Google can do this, but can’t maintain Google assistant features we’ve had for years?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

Fortunately the people working on brain research aren’t the same people programming assistant

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Why is Google doing this research?!?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Harvard has been partnering with their research labs for the last decade to gain access to hardware and algos they wouldn’t have themselves