science
In 2024, scientists published the first complete wiring diagram of an adult animal's brain, mapping every neuron and connection.
The adult fruit fly's brain was first fully mapped, cataloging roughly 140,000 neurons and around 50 million connections. Researchers sliced the tiny brain into extremely thin sections, imaged each with powerful microscopes, then used computation to reconstruct every neuron and connection into one complete map.
The blue whale wasn't the subject, and mapping such a huge brain would be even more extreme a challenge. The adult human brain, roughly 86 billion neurons, remains vastly beyond current mapping technology, though often cited as a distant goal.
The gap between the fly's 140,000 neurons and the human brain's 86 billion shows how enormous a leap remains between mapping even a complex insect brain and one day mapping a human brain similarly completely.
science
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