Complex Living Brain Simulation Replicates Sensory Rat Behaviour (cell.com)

New submitter physick writes: The Blue Brain project at EPFL, Switzerland today published the results of more than 10 years work in reconstructing a cellular model of a piece of the somatosensory cortex of a juvenile rat. The paper in Cell describes the process of painstakingly assembling tens of thousands of digital neurons, establishing the location of their synapses, and simulating the resulting neocortical microcircuit on an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. “This is a first draft reconstruction of a piece of neocortex and it’s beautiful,” said Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. “It’s like a fundamental building block of the brain.”

Comments

WHOOSHHH!!!!

[Giant Electronic Bra]

I think you should read up on the Human Brain Project. Markram has been doing this rat brain thing for 10 years now, and he's launched a billion Euro super project based on it, yet this is the FIRST time he's ever published any results. The HBP is also crashing and burning right now, bigtime. In fact it looks like Markram is pretty much been kicked off it.