Scientists create the world's first high-definition 3D model of a HUMAN BRAIN

Scientists have created the world's first high-definition 3D model of a complete human brain dubbed BigBrain.
BigBrain shows the anatomy of a brain in microscopic detail for the first time ever - at a spatial resolution of 20 microns. This is smaller than the size of one fine strand of hair and 250,000 times more detailed than current MRI brain scans.
Researchers from Germany and Canada took 7,400 individual slices from the brain of a deceased 65-year-old woman and plotted 80 billion neurons during the 10-year project.
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Scientists from German and Canadian neuroscience teams have created the first high-resolution 3D human brain. BigBrain is 250,000 times more detailed than a current MRI scan and the digital images were taken from individual slices of a deceased 65-year-old female's brain

THE BIGBRAIN IN NUMBERS

The BigBrain is 250,000 times more detailed than a regular brain scan.
7,400 individual slices from the brain of a deceased 65-year-old woman were used to create BigBrain.
80 billion neurons were captured in the project.
Scientists from Canada and Germany spent 1,000 years collecting the data.
The total brain reconstruction has taken 10 years to complete.
Each individual slice is half the width of a human hair.
The brain can be seen in microscopic detail at a spatial resolution of 20 microns.

And they have now made the brain available online for free to help other scientists develop the field of neuroscience. 
Until recently, reference brains did not scan further than the macroscopic, or visible, parts of the brain.

BigBrain provides a resolution much finer than the typical 1mm resolution from MRI studies.
Senior author Dr. Alan Evans, a professor at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University in Montreal, Canada said the project 'has been a tour-de-force to assemble images of over 7,400 individual histological sections, each with its own distortions, rips and tears, into a coherent 3-D volume.'
'This dataset allows - for the first time - a 3D exploration of human cytoarchitectural anatomy.'
The sophisticated modern image processing methods reveal an unprecedented look at the very fine details of the human brain's microstructure, or cellular level.
The online tool will allow for 3D cytoarchitectonic mapping of the human brain and can be used as a map for plotting small cellular circuit data. 

Thin sections of the 65-year-old human female brain were embedded in paraffin wax and cut by the scientists from Research Centre Julich in Germany using a special large-scale tool called a microtome

The 20-micrometer thick histological sections were then mounted on slides and digitised using a high-resolution flatbed scanner. It took the scientists approximately 1,000 hours to collect the data

It can also map single layers or sublayers of the cerebral cortex, explained the researchers.
Thin sections of a 65-year-old human female brain, which was embedded in paraffin wax, were cut with a special large-scale tool called a microtome.
The 20-micrometer thick histological sections were then mounted on slides, stained to detect cell structures and finally digitised using a high-resolution flatbed scanner.
This made it possible for the researchers to build a high-resolution 3D brain model.
It took approximately 1,000 hours to collect the data.
Researchers claim that the new reference brain, which is part of the European Human Brain Project, serves as a 'powerful tool to facilitate neuroscience research' and 'redefines traditional maps from the beginning of the 20th century.'

An online animation rotates the BigBrain, left, so researchers can look at it from all angles. Individual slices are then removed, right, to explain the process the German and Canadian researchers used during the project

Author Dr. Katrin Amunts from the Research Centre Jülich and director of the Cecile and Oskar Vogt Institute for Brain Research at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in Germany said: 'The famous cytoarchitectural atlases of the early 1900's were simplified drawings of a brain and were based on pure visual analysis of cellular organization patterns.'
Because of the sheer volume of this dataset, the researchers say that there will be a 'push by those who want to use it to develop new and valuable tools for visualization, data management and analysis.'
'We plan to repeat this process in a sample of brains so that we can quantify cytoarchitectural variability,' said Dr. Evans.
'We will also integrate this dataset with high-resolution maps of white matter connectivity in post-mortem brains.
'This will allow us to explore the relationship between cortical microanatomy and fiber connectivity,' said Dr. Amunts.

The researchers have put the BigBrain data online and this digital portal will provide other neuroscientists with 3D cytoarchitectonic mapping of the human brain. It can be used as a map for plotting small cellular circuit data as well as map single layers or sublayers of the cerebral cortex, explained the researchers

Each of the 7,400 brain slices were stained with potassium dichromate and silver nitrate to highlight the different cell structures

'We are planning to integrate our receptor data of the human brain in the reference frame provided by the BigBrain,' continued senior co-author Dr. Karl Zilles, senior professor of the Jülich Aachen Research Alliance and former director of the Cecile and Oskar Vogt Institute for Brain Research at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in Germany.
'We will also transfer high-resolution maps of quantitative data on the regional and laminar distribution of native receptor complexes to the BigBrain.
'This will allow us to explore the relationship between cortical microanatomy and key molecules of neurotransmission.'
The fine-grained anatomical resolution will also allow scientists to gain insights into the neurobiological basis of cognition, language, emotions and other processes, according to the study.
The researchers plan to extract measurements of cortical thickness to gain insights into understanding aging and neurodegenerative disorders; create cortical thickness maps to compare data from in vivo imaging; integrate gene expression data from the Allen Institute; and generate a brain model with a resolution of 1 micron to capture details of single cell morphology.
Public access of the BigBrain dataset is available through the CBRAIN Portal.
The researchers have presented their work in the current issue of the journal Science.

Science's senior editor Peter Stern said: 'The authors pushed the limits of current technology.
'Such spatial resolution exceeds that of presently available reference brains by a factor of 50 in each of the three spatial dimensions.'

How fossils of fish that lived 380 million years ago help explain how the modern-day 'six pack' evolved

The 380-million-year-old fossils of pre-historic fish could help scientists explain how the modern-day 'six pack’ evolved.
Swedish researchers found that the 'miraculously preserved’ placoderm fish from north west Australia had well-developed powerful abdominal muscles 'not unlike the human equivalents displayed on the beaches of the world every summer'.
And this gives scientist a rare opportunity to understand how modern-day abs have developed.

Rare soft tissue samples have been found by Swedish scientists in the fossils of fish from the Gogo Formation of north western Australia. They show that the jawed fishes had strong neck and abdominal muscles

WHAT ARE PLACODERMS?

Placodermi comes from the Greek for 'plate-skinned'
They are an extinct class of prehistoric fish which lived around 400 million years ago - from the late Silurian to the end of the Devonian Period.
Their head and thorax were covered by articulated armoured plates and the rest of the body was scaled or naked, depending on the species.
Placoderms were among the first jawed fish and their jaws are thought to have evolved from their gill arches.
A 380-million-year-old fossil of one species represents the oldest known example of live birth.

The fish were found in the Gogo Formation, a sedimentary rock formation in the Kimberley region of north-western Australia.

The area is renowned for being a trove of preserved fossil fishes including the placoderms - an extinct group that includes some of the earliest jawed fishes.
Researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden made this latest discovery and found that the muscle and soft tissue were well preserved.

The strong abdominal muscles that Swedish scientists believe would have featured in the jawed fish of the Australian Gogo Formation are 'not unlike' those seen in modern-day human six-packs, such as Daniel Craig's in Bond film Casino Royale, pictured

Bones and teeth fossilise far more easily than soft tissues and are usually the only traces of the animal that remain.
This makes the rare fossil localities that preserve soft tissues - such as the one discovered by the Swedish university - all the more valuable.
The team, led by Professor Per Ahlberg noticed that the fish would have had a well-developed neck musculature as well as powerful abdominal muscles.
Living fish, by contrast, usually have a rather simple body musculature without such specialisations.
Ahlberg said: 'This [discovery] shows that vertebrates developed a sophisticated musculature much earlier than we had thought.
'It also cautions against thinking that we can interpret fossil organisms simply by metaphorically draping their skeletons in the soft tissues of living relatives.'
Australian researchers had previously discovered that these fossils contained soft tissue.
Now with the help of Ahlberg's team and the ESRF synchrotron in Grenoble, France, they have managed to resconstruct the musulcature of the fish.

An artist's impression of what the placoderm fish that the Australian fossils came from would have looked like. Placoderms were among the first jawed fish and their jaws are thought to have evolved from their gill arches. Their name comes from the Greek for 'plate-skinned'

The fascinating and unpredictable world of 'alien' creepy crawlies as you've never seen them before, unveiled by Sir David Attenborough

From ferocious scorpions with paralysing stings, beetles shooting boiling chemicals and assassin bugs that clothe themselves in their victims’ corpses, there is a whole world few of us know anything about.
Now, in a stunning new television series,Sir David Attenborough delves into the mysterious kingdom of bugs, revealing their astonishing beauty, amazing variety and bizarre adaptations.  
Over the course of six weekly episodes - for the first time in stereoscopic 3D – Sir David, 87, will transport the audience across the plains of Africa and through the Australian Outback to film these fascinating creepy crawlies in never-before-seen detail.
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In a stunning new television series naturalist Sir David Attenborough, pictured, delves into the mysterious kingdom of bugs, revealing their astonishing beauty, amazing variety and bizarre adaptations. The insects that star in Sky's Micro Monsters 3D, including the Leaf Cutter Ants pictured, were filmed using high-resolution macrophotography

One of the stars of Micro Monsters 3D is the African Goliath Beetle. One of the heaviest insects on the planet, males Goliaths fight it out in fierce battles for the right to mate with females. They have tough horns that act as pry bars to flip their opponents on their backs and once the battle is won, the victorious male is free to mate with his prize

Speaking about the new series, Sir David said: 'Insects are so interesting because they’re unlike us.
'They’re on different scales, both in dimension and anatomy. There are alien worlds that we don’t bother to consider; we don’t have the sensory apparatus to move into their world.'
To film the arthropods, which were sometimes less than a millimetre long, the team used macrophotography that can film tiny animals to make them appear larger than life.
Sir David added: 'That’s what 3D can do. 3D macro can take you into their world and suddenly you’ve got all kinds of different factors that control the drama.'
In Micro Monsters 3D, viewers are introduced to a range of extraordinary creatures, from the lethal Praying Mantis to one of the largest insects on Earth - the Goliath Beetle.
With a unique point-of-view, the audience is transported to their realm and immersed in it as if they were actually there. 
As Sir David added: 'In 3D, these creatures are simply miraculous.'

A number of spiders from across Africa and Australia were filmed for the Micro Monsters series. This Ogre-Faced Spider combines acute vision and cunning to trap prey in a unique way. The team recorded it spinning a stretchy square net, holding it by the corners and hanging above insect highways. This spider would then keep an eye out for any unsuspecting prey walking underneath and once in its sights, the spider would strike in a split second, catching the bug the stretchy tangled net

The cast of the show included the Goliath Beetle - one of the heaviest insects on the planet.
The males fight it out in a fierce battle for the right to mate with females. They have tough horns that act as pry bars to flip their opponents on their backs and once the battle is won, the victorious male is free to mate with his female prize.
The Bombardier Beetle, on the other hand, spends its life scuttling around deliberately in view of dangerous predators. When one approaches, the Bombardier sprays boiling chemicals out of its 'anal gun' at high pressures to shock and irritate these would-be predators.

The Portia Jumping Spider uses its skills to hunt other spiders. It plucks the webs of unsuspecting prey to fool them into thinking it is a leaf blowing in the breeze, or even a trapped fly. It then lures the targeted spider to its death.
Another episode in the Micro Monsters series features the Burrowing Cockroach from western Australia. It is the heaviest cockroach in the world and the females risk death to forage in the open in order to find dry eucalyptus leaves that can be used to feed her young for up a year.
During filming the team also discovered that scorpions have a surprisingly delicate night-time mating ritual.
The male grasps the female’s pincers and 'kisses' her. Once he has found a suitable place, he deposits a sperm ball and carries the female over it. 

Inside 'alien' world of creepy crawlies. Unveiled by Sir David...

Damselflies, like the one pictured from Micro Monsters show, are similar to dragonflies but the adults can be distinguished by the fact that the wings of most damselflies are held parallel to the body when they're resting. The adults eat flies, mosquitoes, and other small insects

Elsewhere, the Ogre-Faced Spider combined acute vision and cunning to trap prey in a completely unique way. The team recorded it spinning a stretchy square net, holding it by the corners and hanging above insect highways.
This spider would then keep an eye out for any unsuspecting prey walking underneath and once in its sights, the spider would strike in a split second, catching the bug in its stretchy tangled net.
Another spider the film managed to capture in 3D was the Stegodyphus. While most spiders hunt alone, these bugs from India build huge nests in trees.
They can take down a mantis, for example, many times their own size, like a pack of wolves.
The Nassonia Jewel Wasp is just 1 mm big and has a complex courtship ritual. The male will rub pheromones onto the female’s antennae to persuade her to mate.
Once mated, the male will perform another ritual that stops her from wanting to mate again. With competition high, this male wants to ensure that his are the only genes that are passed on.
Then there is the Emerald Cockroach Wasp. The female wasp goes out in search of a female cockroach and stings it twice; first to disable it, then to turn it into a servant.
She then leads the zombie cockroach down a dark hole and lays a single egg on it. The larvae hatch and slowly eat the living tissue of the cockroach before emerging as fully-grown adults.

The Paper Wasp, pictured, is mainly found in North America. The wasp and the other insects that star in Micro Monsters were filmed using revolutionary high-resolution 3D macrophotography cameras attached to a CubeRig. The production team could place the rig inside bug nests and capture detailed, never-before-seen footage of the fast-moving insects

The Paper Wasps observed by Sir David were less outwardly violent than the Emerald Cockroach Wasp but their nests are full of females fighting it out to be the dominant queen.
Because of the revolutionary technology being used, the production team were also able to film a number of different ant colonies and species during the new series.
One of these species was the Tramp Ant. The first tiny male Tramp Ant to be born from a clutch will attempt to kill his rival males as they emerge.
His jaws aren’t strong enough to do this so he recruits female workers to finish the job, smearing a pheromone that causes the females to slaughter them. The male is then able to mate with all the queens he wants.
Adult Australian Green Ants pick up their colony’s larvae and will use them as living glue guns to stick the leaves of their new nest together.
Other creepy crawlies captured include the Spiny Flower Mantis, the Malachite Butterfly, the Damselfly and more.

Sir David Attenborough with a Malachite Butterfly. Speaking about Micro Monsters, the 87-year-old naturalist said: 'Insects are so interesting because they're unlike us. There are alien worlds that we don't bother to consider; we don't have the sensory apparatus to move into their world. Every damn drama you see is with people on TV, and you know what the conflicts are, what the stories are, what the limitations are. Making a film about insects: all the stories are bizarre and unpredictable'

To capture these images in high-quality 3D the team developed the CubeRig system.
The CubeRig is an optical system that feeds light into two Red Epic ultra-high-definition cameras through a single lens. This means the intraocular distance - between the two cameras - can be reduced to almost zero. As a result, micrometre-long insects can be fully captured in perfect 3D.

The hardware delivers the highest quality 3D at 5K resolution, with magnification and depths of field not previously seen in macrophotography.
Using the CubeRig the team captured the behaviour of over 150 different arthropods: from the enormous ten-centimetre Goliath Beetle locked in ferocious combat for a mate, right down to the tiny male Nassonia Jewel Wasp desperate to convince its prospective partner to copulate by caressing her antennae.
They were also able to record the incredible detail of a mosquito sucking blood from a human and to a spider casting a silken net to ensnare its prey.
The team additionally experimented with high speed micro 3D filming, running two Phantom high speed cameras through the CubeRig, allowing them to film up to 1600 frames a second. 
To keep the bugs alive in intense conditions they used high-powered LED panels that are not in mass production yet.
While filming the Leafcutter Ants the team built a natural assault course suspended by very fine fishing wire. The researchers used this wire because its too thin for the ants to climb on in a bid to stop them escaping.

Pseudocreobotra wahlbergi, or Spiny Flower Mantis, is a small Mantis - around 1.5 inches - native to southern and eastern Africa. The adult has spiny structures on the underside of its abdomen, giving it its name. The hind wings are orange on the inner part and transparent on the outer part. The female lays eggs almost three times its size and is able to kill prey several times larger than itself

However, the ants - which can harvest foliage up to 20 times its body weight - bit through the cord and destroyed the course.
Another filming sequence required the Emerald Cockroach Wasp to sting a cockroach mid-flight. This short sequence took 10 hours to capture.
Mid-way through production, the team also realised they could push the technology in and around the bug world to see bugs in never-before-seen detail and behaviour.
One episode shows the inner-workings of an ant colony, while ultraviolet night was used to simulate night time meaning the team were able to capture the performance of scorpion mating rituals.
Another episode features the Periplaneta Americana cockroach, also known as the common American cockroach.
It is one of the fastest cockroaches on Earth and the team struggled to keep up with the bugs because the 3D camera rigs were too slow. Instead of speeding the cameras up they decided to slow the insects down by cooling them in a fridge.
And it wasn’t just cockroaches that needed to be kept cool.
The Goliath Beetle males are very strong fliers but they can only operate their wing muscles once they get to a certain body temperature; if they’re cool they can’t.

The Desert Centipede is found throughout the southern United States and into Mexico. They can be identified by their flattened body made of many segments. There is one pair of legs for each segment except for the first and last segments. One pair of antennae are located on the head. They eat other insects as well as lizards, frogs, and rodents

The team cooled them down in the fridge, and, because the temperature on set was quite high, it didn’t take long for them to reach the point where their muscles would work and they could fly.
With Micro Monsters 3D, Sir David and producer Anthony Geffen redefined macroscopic techniques to meet the unprecedented challenges of filming some of the smallest creatures on Earth in extraordinary detail.
Mr Geffen said: 'What we’ve never been able to do is get in close on insects and actually have depth of field, without which the image is just squashed up on screen.
'Now we can get this incredible focal range, which may not seem important, but, when you’re watching 3D movies, it’s what makes them magical.'
Sir David was also impressed with the results: 'I’ve been amazed at how much we’ve been able to do with this very demanding filming technique. Filming in 3D is a very different matter from just peeping about with one little camera.
You might legitimately worry that the technique would be an obstacle to capturing the true behaviour of the animals, but it’s proved not to be the case, and we’ve managed to film everything that we’ve set out to capture.'

Ultraviolet light was used by the production team to simulate night time. This meant the team were able to capture the performance of scorpion mating rituals. Director Tim Usborne was stung by a scorpion during filming

The team took a novel approach to capturing the kaleidoscope of creatures and their behaviours, preferring, where possible, to work with the bugs in a controlled environment.
There were, however, some creatures, either too large or too dangerous to transport, that had to be travelled to.
For example, Sir David, Geffen and his team flew to Kenya to film the 20 million-strong Driver Ant colony.
Not only did they have to deal with the unpredictable weather that threatened to drench the equipment at any time, but they had to be particularly wary of the ants.
Director Tim Usborne said: 'Ants are the most savage creatures I’ve ever seen in my life! They’re the most vicious brutal thing on this planet.'
When preparing to film with them, the expert entomologist immediately got attacked.
'We’ve looked at how they attack en masse, we’ve looked at a swarm, we’ve seen their behaviour as they cross huge areas eating everything in their path, and we’ve filmed them eating a slug alive, which was disgusting.'
It was the first time that these ant colonies had been filmed in ultra-high definition and in 3D.
The crew also donned protective suits so that they could get face-to-face with bees performing their honey dance.
They then travelled to the Outback in Australia to capture the deadly Redback Spider. The Redback weaves vertical strands and when a bug becomes attached to it, the spider can hoist the prey up like a bungee.
Sir David also filmed the Australian Sydney Funnel Web spider as well as the Great Raft Spider, which escaped from the set-up during filming.
These giant spiders live and hunt near and on the water and use their ferocious powerful jaws to catch anything up to the size of small fish. The crew managed to recapture the fugitive, eventually.

During filming in a studio temperatures had to be controlled so that they mimicked real-life environments. The Spiny Flower Mantis, pictured, lives in an ideal temperature of around 26°. At night the temperature had to be at least 18°. Too much moisture is deadly to them because of infections so they need to be sprayed with clean water, which the creatures would then drink

Other species were filmed in controlled environments. Although this controlled situation was optimum for the camera,  the team had to make sure the conditions were right for the creatures to display their natural behaviour: from ant assault courses and cockroach rat runs to creating a romantic milieu for mating mantises and bean beetles. And despite this controlled environment director Usborne still got stung by a scorpion.
Geffen said: 'Having insects in studios means you can control the whole situation, which in turn means you can achieve things literally in a few days or a few weeks that would take many, many months or even a year to get in the field.
'Not only that, but of course you can film an insect in so many different ways.
'We did manage to build sort of micro sets on location in Africa or in Australia, but certainly the best way to film great behaviour is in controlled environments with the CubeRig.'
The resident bug expert, Martin French added: 'As with all animals, you just need time and patience; you can’t force a creature to do something it doesn’t want to.
'You can do your best to create the right conditions, but they’ll still only do it in their own time.'

The common American cockroach was so fast during filming that the Micro Monster production team had to keep them in a fridge beforehand. The cool temperatures calmed the cockroaches down so they could be accurately observed. Other animals that needed to have their temperature regulated included the Goliath Beetle that can't fly unless its body is at the optimum temperature