Physical science concepts and principles

Science

New imaging technology enables an "unprecedented" glimpse into the brain, notes Rebecca Boyle (2010). In an article for Popular Science magazine, Boyle (2010) offers a brief video clip of a mouse's cortex to show what the new brain imaging technoloy can do. Called array tomography, the imaging technology has the potential to dramatically increase understanding of how electrical signals are sent throughout the brain of any organism, including humans. Array tomography presents "a map of every synapse's position in the cortex, with colors corresponding to different synaptic types," (Boyle 2010). The technology is relatively straightforward in principle: high-resolution photographs of nano-thin layers of the brain are strung together to create a three-dimensional image. To obtain the color differentiation, stains are used. The stains are antibodies that "match 17 synapse-related proteins," (Boyle 2010). The resulting glow provides the stunning visual imagery that can help neuroscientists better understand the inner landscape of the human brain. Array tomography combines the best principles of high-resolution digital photography with the fundamental principles of neuroscience. Therefore, array tomography represents the interface between physical and biological science.

Neuroscience is itself the bridge between the purely physical and the life sciences. The brain carriers electrical impulses and can be viewed as a series of switches and networks, not dissimilar from the Internet. An individual synapse is "like a microprocessor" that has "both memory-storage" and "information-processing elements," according to one neuroscientist (cited by Boyle 2010). Synapses are not simply "on/off" switches that either send or do not send signals, usually in the form of chemicals or hormones. Any one synapse may be capable of making up to a thousand different decisions, making the brain far more complex for traditional imaging technology. The brain is more like outer space than it is alike to any other organ of the body. Discovering how the brain works is the final frontier of inner space. Technologies like array tomography also show how the human brain may be best understood as a computer that operates on both electricity and on chemicals. One section of the brain, the cerebral cortex, contains more than 125 trillion synapses. Boyle's (2010) source material from the Stanford School of Medicine notes that the number of synapses in the brain is "roughly equal to the number of stars in 1,500 Milky Way galaxies," (Goldman 2010).