EPFL, BLUE BRAIN PROJECT
As part of the Blue Brain Project, a European initiative that aims to eventually map the human brain, an international team of researchers has generated a digital model of a slice of rat brain. The group reported its results last week (October 8) in Cell.
“This is a proof of concept that you can map a piece of the brain with enormous accuracy,” project lead Henry Markram of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland told The Guardian. The mathematical model replicates 31,000 neurons—including 207 cell subtypes with approximately 37 million synapses—but does not include blood vessels or other non-neuronal cells in the brain. It runs on a supercomputer at EPFL and requires a billion calculations every 25 microseconds to mimic the function of ...
