This week WIRED Science kicks off a new feature highlighting great science visualizations. We'll bring you the most awesome scientific graphic, illustration, map, or image we find each week.
The beautiful image above shows nerve fibers crisscrossing the brain of a mouse. It comes from research reported today in the journal Cell. Neuroscientists injected colored fluorescent dyes into different parts of the cerebral cortex, the thin sheet of tissue on the surface of the brain that's responsible for everything from the basics -- making sense of sights and sounds and coordinating movements -- to whatever high-level thought processes an animal has in its repertoire. The long spindly things you can see here are axons, the branches of neurons that convey signals from one part of the brain to another.
By making hundreds of dye injections at different locations, the researchers created an atlas of which parts of the cortex are connected to each other. Many neuroscientists are working on maps like this, which they see as an important foundation for understanding how the brain works. Collecting massive amounts of anatomical data has gotten easier. Making sense of it all is still the hard part.
