Strange particles in the sky for the first time

The EyeWire Project: Creating an Interactive Game-like Platform to Completion the Most Complete Visual Pathway Diagram of the Fruit Flies Brain

Researchers have published the most complete wiring diagram, or ‘connectome’ of the fruit fly’s brain, which includes nearly 140,000 neurons and 54.5 million connections between nerve cells.

The team was surprised by some of the ways in which the various cells connect to one another, too. The visual pathway is a sensory wiring circuit that consists of one or more nerve cells. Murthy says that the brain is very connected.

Fact-checking millions of data points is time-consuming. Instead, project co-leader Sebastian Seung, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, and his team built an interactive game-like platform called EyeWire, in which volunteers were asked to assemble 3D models of neurons in a mouse retina and zebrafish hindbrain. If there had been more neuroscientists available to complete the project, it would have required at least 33 work full time for at least a year.

Brain mapping is one of the most delicate and complex tasks in neuroscience, and even the smallest error can markedly affect the results. The achievement is all the more remarkable because the people working on it were not full time researchers but volunteers from all over the world. They collaborated to make sure the results are legit. A lot of neuroscientists who study fruit flies volunteered to support the project. They have been credited with being authors. Amateur science is as old as science itself, but this project adds yet another way to involve more brain power in what is increasingly data-hungry research.

Clay had worked with one of the team members who was in the project, but he was not involved in it. “It’s something that the world has been anxiously waiting for, for a long time.”

Nature Podcasts – Discovery and Analysis of Ancient Arrowheads and Clues to the Origin of Kiloparsec-Scale Drifting

Never miss an episode. The Nature Podcasts is available on Apple, as well as on other music streaming and podcasting services. It is possible to subscribe to an RSS feed for the Nature Podcast.

Ancient arrowheads reveal that Europe’s oldest battle likely featured warriors from far afield, and why the dwarf planet Ceres’s frozen ocean has deep impurities.

The researchers hope that understanding more about these mysterious phenomena could help explain what initiates lightning, which often follows these γ-ray events.

New forms of -ray radiation created in thunderclouds are being identified by physicists, who have shown that levels of -ray production are higher than thought.

Researchers piece together a complete circuit-diagram of the fruit fly brain, thanks to high-altitude observations.

Murthy says they thought the study would be years in the making. As the technology grew, and as the community stepped in and were excited to participate, it became a reality. And we completed it, in what I would consider record time.”

Scientists and volunteers are getting more involved in other areas. Earlier this month, researchers at the United Nations Statistics Division in New York City and Open Data Watch, a non-profit organization based in Washington DC, described how citizen scientists are helping to fill in data gaps for the UN Sustainable Develop-ment Goals, especially for marginalized communities5.

How Asteroid Dimorphos Became Brighter and Redder by Taking the Flight-Brain Off Amateur Astronomers

Last year, a study6 in Nature described how the asteroid Dimorphos became temporarily brighter and redder when NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft deliberately hit it. The finding was confirmed by a small group of amateur astronomers who were able to share their observational data with professional scientists through an app.

It is the professionals who check the work of the amateur. What’s different about the fly-brain work is that the volunteers are helping the full-time scientists to authenticate their findings — something that could have a much wider application in our data-rich world.