Map Your Brain = Peel an Onion

Apparently, some really smart folks at Harvard are going to use a really neat gadget to slice up a mouse's brain and try to map the synapses of the mind. As reported on Wired today, the mapping of the brain's circuitry is no easy task. In fact, it's been tried before and it took 10 long years (by hand) to map the rather-simple brain of a roundworm.

The hope is that this new ATLUM gadget will do it more quickly and with more precision than previous attempts. Here's how the ATLUM is described on Wired:

It's a neuroscience gadget called the automatic tape-collecting lathe ultramicrotome (ATLUM), and the name says it all. An ultramicrotome is a piece of laboratory equipment that cuts samples of flesh into very thin slices. The lathe allows the machine to cut continuously, which makes the process faster. Already, the prototype has collected more than a hundred half-centimeter-long sections of mouse brain.

Aside: I'm not sure how this relates to the topic of Entrepreneurship, but it certainly fits the bill as an "Innovation".