Website review: Technology Review: The Technicolor ...
laodan discovered this in Science/Tech
•2 reviews since Nov 1, 2007
science
•technologyreview.com/Biotech/19652/
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laodan discovered 6 months ago- The Technicolor Brain via KurzweilAI.net in MIT Technology Review by Emily Zinger
Genetically engineered "brainbow" mice express random combinations of cyan, yellow, and red fluorescent proteins in nerve cells. The ability to paint individual brain cells with such a broad palette will allow neuroscientists to explore neural circuits like never before. Jean Livet, Jeff Lichtman, and their collaborators at Harvard genetically engineered mice to carry numerous copies of genes that code for fluorescent proteins of three different colors--yellow, red, and cyan--as well as an enzyme that can randomly block any subset of these genes from producing their fluorescent tag. When the mice are fed a compound that activates the enzyme, each cell undergoes a random molecular process in which subsets of the color-coding genes are knocked out. The remaining genes produce the three colored fluorescent compounds in different amounts, which combine to form a unique new hue. The Technicolor Brain
This is a follow-up of a post on the same subject yesterday. Those visualizations are meant to help neuro-scientists have a better grasp of what's going on in the brain. They are first and foremost scientific tools. But how beautiful they are and how sensical! Those images are challenging the visual artists. Meaning is indeed always beautiful. It reproduces what evolution retained as the best of all possibilities that were present at any "bifurcation" on the road of change towards the future... I believe that the challenge of scientific visualizations to the visual arts first and foremost relates to sense. I mean visual images can no longer be stuck in the realm of the absurd or the irrational. I don't mean to say that visual arts have to illustrate science. Let that be done by scientific visualizations. But artists have to come up with images that integrate scientific knowledge with philosophic knowledge in order to give visual signs of the meaning of life of the meaning of us being in the universe and so on... The visual arts are at a turning point. Or visual artists succeed to produce such signs of us being stuck as micro particles in the whole and the meaning of it all or scientific visualizations will simply become the visual arts of the future. Humanity is no longer going to accept much further "artistic" non-sense. The time is approaching fast when art sense shall again impose itself as the essence of the visual arts.
- The Technicolor Brain via KurzweilAI.net in MIT Technology Review by Emily Zinger
- ms-katalyzt rated 6 months ago
- "Researchers at Harvard University have developed a new method for setting the brain aglow in a rainbow of colors. The technology will allow scientists to generate maps of one of the brain's last frontiers: the complex tangle of neural circuits that collect, process, and archive information. Such maps could ultimately shed light on the early development of the human brain and on diseases such as autism and schizophrenia, which have been linked to connectivity problems. For years, scientists have used fluorescent proteins derived from jellyfish to mark specific cells in genetically engineered animals. But the limited number of available colors wasn't enough to create a detailed picture of the millions of neurons in the brain. Jean Livet, Jeff Lichtman, and their collaborators at Harvard genetically engineered mice to carry numerous copies of genes that code for fluorescent proteins of three different colors--yellow, red, and cyan." Gene tically engineered "brainbow" mice express random combinations of cyan, yellow, and red fluorescent proteins in nerve cells. As a result, neurons and their projections are labeled with a multitude of distinct hues. In this image from a portion of the cerebellum, a brain area involved in movement and balance, the multicolor labeling reveals the intricate meshwork created by long neural projections that connect to cerebellar neurons. (These connections, also called synapses, are seen here as large spots.) In this image from a portion of the hippocampus, a brain structure involved in memory, neurons (distinguishable by their distinct round cell bodies) and astrocytes (distinguishable by their diffuse star shape), a support cell in the brain, are labeled with multiple colors. This image shows neurons in a particular part of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus, which is thought to contribute to new memories and is one of the few areas of the adult brain where new neurons are born. This image shows motor-neuron axons from a portion of the oculomotor nerve, which controls eye movement.
