A scenario like Planet of the Apes might not be as unrealistic
as we think, but fortunately—or at least for right now—it seems
like our future overlords will be far less threatening than
Caesar and co.. That's because scientists have discovered that
injecting mice with human brain cells can actually make them
smarter. All hail our hyper-intelligent, beady-eyed kings. The
research team led by Steven Goldman and neurobiologist Maiken
Nedergaard wanted to the test the importance of supporting, non-
neural brain cells called "glia" in information processing. So
they injected human progenitor glial cells into newborn mice,
naturally. These progenitor cells are able to form all sorts of
glial cells, but for this case, the most important glial cell
made by progenitors were cells called "astrocytes." All animals
have them, but the astrocytes in human brains are vastly more
complex than in other animals. And it's these astrocytes that
put the human brain in a completely different league than that
of, oh—a mouse, for in