Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 208 posts

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#121

Post by j6m8 »

taneq wrote: post #113
rkp8000 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Connectome-adjacent neuroscientist here. Definitely not a dead end! But also definitely not the whole picture. One of the main open questions in neuroscience right now is how network structure, dynamics, and function are related in the brain. Connectomes provide tremendous insight into structure, but as mentioned this does not generically solve either the dynamics or function problem. For example, for many of these n…

Thanks for your insight! How repeatable are these structures between individual animals? Are they very similar or is it more like “here’s a feed forward kinda bit, here’s a toroidal bit, and over here it’s just a mess”?

preprint coming out soon about this specifically :)

in the meantime, here's a simple tool paper we wrote explaining how you can treat this like a cool graph database challenge [1] and a preprint showing how you could approach that question when your number of samples per animal is close to N=1 [2]. basically..... it's hard! but also.... it's cool!

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91025-5 [2]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.16.562590v1....

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#122

Post by j6m8 »

tonetegeatinst wrote: post #2

Datahoarder question but can I download the map of the fly?

raw data is O(petabytes) (single-digit); synapse-neuron graph will be probably order 100GB. But you also want morphology and locations, since it's not enough to just say "X connects to Y" if you want to know about dynamics!

i'm not hosting this dataset specifically, but check out https://bossdb.org/. my disclaimer and also my brag is that this is my job and research area :) if you're looking for a copy, let's talk! there are easy ways and hard ways :)

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#123

Post by rmorey »

andbberger wrote: post #95
tonetegeatinst wrote: post #2

Datahoarder question but can I download the map of the fly?

the raw data will be on the order of PBs

the EM dataset for this connectome, FAFB, is only a few hundred TB. as a rule of thumb volume electron microscopy datasets are on the order of 1 PB / cubic millimeter, and the fly brain is much smaller than 1 mm3

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#125

Post by pugworthy »

They are currently active in my kitchen. I think those thinking that AI and ML need massive compute power and electricity should take note that these little bastards can be annoying and pervasive as hell with just 100k neurons in that little head. And run off ripe bananas.

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#126

Post by bboygravity »

cafebeen wrote: post #102
xandrius wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like everything in science: we don't know until we know. No need to treat research like a business.

Budgets are finite, and most science funding involves some decision making about how to allocate resources.

And you can't know where to allocate resources best until after the science is done (unless a field/group is known to scam).

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#127

Post by xandrius »

cafebeen wrote: post #102
xandrius wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like everything in science: we don't know until we know. No need to treat research like a business.

Budgets are finite, and most science funding involves some decision making about how to allocate resources.

Although for what we know now, we definitely can't understand the territory without a map.

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#128

Post by londons_explore »

If this could be done for a human, I think there is a realistic prospect of perhaps being the first human "brought back to life inside a computer".

Sure, the connectome isn't the whole story, but I think it possible that a few hundred years from now we might understand the brain sufficiently to simulate it, and then by inputting this connectome, together with guesses/approximations for the information not captured, that person is effectively time-travelled.

Could be amazing for archaeologists - rather than looking at broken bits of pottery and guessing what they're used for, you could literally just ask someone (a brain) from that time.

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#129

Post by beefnugs »

xandrius wrote: post #88
Animats wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's Open Worm coming along? The connectome of C. Elegans has been known for years, and Open Worm tries to simulate it. [1] Not with enormous success. [1] https://openworm.org/assets/OpenWormPoster_Celegans_Glasgow_...

Like everything in science: we don't know until we know. No need to treat research like a business.

You know you would have thought all the years and years of "donations" to "cancer research" there would be constant news stories about how we accidentally cured a bunch of ancillary medical problems, and wow its all free to everyone because it was from donations!

Never heard a single story like this

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#130

Post by dangsux »

pvg wrote: post #101
mrguyorama wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out there question: Do you have a hand crafted database of these setup or some sort of macro to take the output of the search api and form it like this, or are you hand editing these lists?

That question is so in there, there is also a list of many of the answers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35668525

[dead]
Post reply on HN