National Geographic has a nice video (as well as a long story by Carl Zimmer) about scientists who are trying to learn more about the way the brain works by slicing mice brains into incredibly thin sections, fore to aft, and then using scans of those slices to create what amounts to a wiring diagram. The goal is to see how all the parts connect and, hopefully, get a better idea of how they all work together.
The video is lovely, with some great shots of lab work and an animated tour of the mouse brain slices. The animation looks, at first, like a time-lapse thing, but it's actually more like driving down a highway and watching buildings on the roadside appearing, becoming larger, and then shrinking in the rearview. Really great stuff! It also underlines a bit why I'm pretty skeptical of Ray Kurzweil's singularity. Or, at least, his estimations of how long it will take for scientists to understand our brains well enough that they could be replicated digitally.
