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aliks [soylentnews.org] writes:

Nature has the article: "Functional connectomics spanning multiple areas of mouse visual cortex"

Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08790-w

But this is heavy going, so I suggest the medicalexpress.com summary:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-04-scientists-billion-mice.html [medicalxpress.com]

"Writing in Scientific American in 1979, the leading biologist of his era, Francis Crick, suggested that technological innovators in neuroscience should focus on achieving attainable goals. "It is no use asking for the impossible, such as, say, the exact wiring diagram for a cubic millimeter of brain tissue and the way all its neurons are firing."

However . . . . .

"After nine years of painstaking work, an international team of researchers at Princeton have this week published a precise map of the vision centers of a mouse brain, revealing the exquisite structures and functional systems of mammalian perception.

To date, it is the largest and most detailed such rendering of neural circuits in a mammalian brain."

"In making the map, the researchers digitally disentangled tens of thousands of individual tree-like neurons, traced each neuron's distinct system of branches, and then reconstructed them one by one into a vast network of circuitry—what scientists call a "connectome."

"Princeton University's H. Sebastian Seung, the Evnin Professor in Neuroscience compared the broader impacts of a future project mapping the human connectome to the Human Genome Project's transformation of genomics.

"Of course, there are key differences between the genome and the connectome. Namely, whereas the genome can be written on a single line using sequences of a four-letter alphabet, the brain is a morass of tangled fibers that process information in real time on an extremely small energy budget. But the potential for transformation of brain science could prove to be even more breathtaking than that of genomics."

Original Submission