Scientists Build Microscope Onto The Head Of A Rat

mindpixel writes: "Unisci is reporting: 'The ability to see individual neurons in detail in the brains of conscious, behaving animals seems like the stuff of science fiction. But in the current issue of Neuron, Professor Winfried Denk and colleagues report that they have done just that. In a stunning technical achievement, they have built a tiny, powerful microscope onto the head of a rat.'" This might be technically stunning, but I wonder how much the rat likes it.

Re:Science gone awry

[scanman857]

> this is a disgusting use of science. I honestly feel it furthers science relatively little to do this.

Don't get your panties in a knot. This research may eventually lead to such things as complete computer simulations of human brains. (or at least animal brains.) Besides, the rat probably doesn't feel all that much pain anyway. The brain has no sense of pain or even touch.

Probing the visual cortex

[zardor]

There is an interesting article here [sciencedaily.com] that describes recent work in analysing electrical patterns in the brains of people to determine what they are looking at. Success rates were very good, at least in being able to tell what type of object the subjects were looking at.

Why MRI won't help much for this.

[Christopher Thomas]

Why cant they just use Magnetic Resonance Imaging instead, then they doesnt even have to put stuff in the poor little rats head. Using nuclear magnetic resonance seems to me to be the only way to se things in 3D because you can scan out "slices" and put them together and so to speak get a 3D-picture of the stuff in the brain.

Actually, PET (Positron Emission Tomography) and CAT (Computed Axial Tomography [via x-ray absorption scanning]) and even old-fashioned ultrasound give you 3D pictures too.

None of these are anywhere close to the resolution you'd get looking through a microscope. Great for finding tumours or looking at large-scale brain activity, and useless for looking at function on the level of individual neurons.

Even if you're looking only at surface neurons, watching neurons while they're operating in a brain will teach you one heck of a lot (especially if you hook a spectrophotometer up to the microscope and get chemical composition readouts - neurochemistry is only partly understood).