Topic
The study of mapping neural circuits, often using electron microscopy to reconstruct wiring diagrams of individual neurons and their connections.
Caltech neuroscientists traced male fruit flies' threat displays to four major neurons downstream of a cluster of five to seven cells per brain hemisphere. Activating the neurons in pairs reproduced the display's wing and leg movements.
Reality
Fruit flies hold a goal heading in two coupled neuron groups and write it in by lifting inhibition from one of them, a study in Nature reports. It is a real circuit for the gate that working-memory models add by hand, though the switch is shown so far by a model and by well-timed inhibition.
Reality
Optogenetics, the use of light to control neurons millisecond by millisecond, won its developers the 2026 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. A neuroscientist's account places it third, after tools for seeing and measuring the brain, and treats the therapies it may enable as projections.
Reality
Two decades after Janelia proposed the project, the adult fly connectome is finished. The 1,000-fold efficiency gain credited with making it possible is measured against the institute's own 2008 forecast.
Reality
The wiring of a male fruit fly's brain and nerve cord is now public, and the payload for anyone planning a bigger map is a claimed thousandfold gain in connectome efficiency whose denominator nobody has stated.
Reality
A Basel, FMI and Allen Institute team grouped cortical sites by where their axons end, and found primary and secondary motor cortex both reaching the brainstem and spinal cord directly. The 16-module layout is now in the open BrainGlobe atlas.
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In a Nature study from the Allen Institute, the mouse locus coeruleus sorts its output by position, with cells high in the nucleus serving cortex and learning and cells low in it serving the brainstem and spinal cord.
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A modulator credited with both raising and lowering aggression in flies can now be probed one cell type at a time, some types as small as a pair of neurons, moving the story from chemical to cellular resolution.
Reality