The human brain is truly awesome. A typical, healthy one houses
some 200 billion nerve cells, which are connected to one another
via hundreds of trillions of synapses. Each synapse functions
like a microprocessor, and tens of thousands of them can connect
a single neuron to other nerve cells. In the cerebral cortex
alone, there are roughly 125 trillion synapses, which is about
how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies. These synapses
are, of course, so tiny (less than a thousandth of a millimeter
in diameter) that humans haven't been able to see with great
clarity what exactly they do and how, beyond knowing that their
numbers vary over time. That is until now. Researchers at the
Stanford University School of Medicine have spent the past few
years engineering a new imaging model, which they call array
tomography, in conjunction with novel computational software, to
stitch together image slices into a three-dimensional image that
can be rotated, penetrated and navigated. Their work appears in
the journal Ne