Still not much of a news, but the first complete scan of a brain, a mouse brain, has been published. Its 500 terabytes heavy. Previous scans were too crude to show the interconnectedness of the brain. To quote an old lecture, "neurons are so small and numerous that you cannot go back to visit one in particular with a microscope". Also, thin biological samples are transparent. Some chemical must be added to taint the tissue. (Further, optical microscopes cannot reach much deeper into the cell, because the wavelength of visible light is to great for optics.)

 http://brainarchitecture.org/mouse/about 



"Each sampled brain is represented in about 500 images, each image showing an optical section through a 20 micron-thick slice of brain tissue. A multi-resolution viewer permits users to journey through each brain from "front" to "back," and thus enables them to follow the pathways taken through three-dimensional brain space by tracer-labeled neuronal pathways. The tracers were picked to follow neuronal inputs and outputs of given brain regions."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120601093711.htm


Back to the past!
Thanks to Wildcat, visit these fine lectures about the brain...
“Holiday Lectures on Science” by Eric Kandel and Thomas Jessell

 http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/neuroscience/lectures.html