4 ms·
A fragment of human cerebral cortex reconstructed at nanoscale resolution
- z3t4 2y agoHow can a cubic millimeter contain 230 millimeters of blood vessels?
- cnity 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-filling_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-filling_curve
- throwaway11460 2y agoThe same way your <2 meters body can contain 6 meters of intestines.
- Brian_K_White 2y agoHow can a cubic foot contain 230 feet of string?
- badcppdev 2y agoSome excellent sibling replies but I think you've nailed it in terms of something that's easy to visualise
- pfdietz 2y agoThe same way each of your cells contains 2 meters of DNA.
- easeout 2y agoThey're thin.
- lab14 2y agoSame way your lungs have the surface area of a tennis court
- hwillis 2y agoCapillaries are around the same width as the central bodies (soma) of neurons
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- xnx 2y ago74 comments. 15 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40313193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40313193
- wiz21c 2y ago1.4 petabytes for 1mm3. There are about 1100000mm3 of them in the brain. So we're talking about 1_540_000 petabytes. The web is about 175 zeta bytes, so about 17500 petabytes. So the brain would be 1_540_000 / 17500 = 88 times the size of internet. Now that's big.
- epgui 2y agoI mean that's true, but at the risk of stating the obvious, people should not be mistaken to think that this represents the "information content" of the brain (except perhaps in a very narrow and technical sense). If you did such 3D scans at similar resolution of all the hardware comprising the internet, for example, it would be vastly bigger than a human brain. It might even be bigger than all the human brains combined, although I'm not sure. It's not very clear whether such comparisons really mean anything (other than "wow that research team really pulled off something impressive" or "wow there are a lot of very small things in a given volume of matter"). A similar volume of toenails would contain a similar amount of 3D scan data.
- wiz21c 2y agomy comparison was just based on the size of the data set, not the brain or whatever. I thought about it in the sense that: if we'd ever had to map a complete brain, that would be the size required to store everything. I have no idea how the brain actually encodes information :-)
- jmakov 2y agoSo about 1 NSA datacenter.
- hwillis 2y agoThere are 10^18 voxels in that cubic mm, so a petabyte (10^15 bytes) is not too bad. Must be a lot of empty space in there. Put another way: this is pretty close to a football-field-sized cube, filled with sand. Each grain of sand is a voxel. The central bodies (soma) of neurons are about a yard wide at that scale.
- Fricken 2y agoThe internet is getting too full so unfortunately there was only room for one image in the article.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- not_your_mentat 2y agoI'm curious. Why store this in voxels? Why not use data structures that that represent the network and that lend themselves to computation?
- oersted 2y agoThey are just recording the raw imaging data to enable that type of analysis, which is hard enough. I imagine it must be quite complex to interpret the biological structure as a logical network, tissues are messy and there are many types of neurons and communication modes. I'm not sure if it's even possible to infer how electric signals will propagate just from a static picture, however detailed it is, do we know how each specific neuron and synapse will behave? We have a general mathematical model, but do we know how the morphology of each element affects its behaviour? This is probably is a whole other massive research project after this.
- Cacti 2y agohealth scans from eg MRIs are often given in voxels