CUBIC-X technology maps the brains of mice and makes tissue transparent.

Countless times have imagined what would happen if the human organs and brain were transparent.
if all hope will know, there will be no small illness into the tragedy of a major illness, there will be no hard to explore the secret of the brain and not the hardships.
when humans struggle with disease, it is finally no longer "I am the enemy of the dark", but can be more precise attack.
now, the brains of mice are "transparent" and can be increased tenfold in size using CUBIC-X technology, paving the way for further research by researchers.
present, brain! Such technology illuminates not only the brain or organs, but also the future of human life medicine.
Japanese scientists used a technique called CUBIC-X to map the brains of mice, which not only makes tissue as transparent and clear as glass, but also expands it ten times its original size, according to a study published in the British journal Nature.
this new achievement offers unprecedented opportunities for humans to spy on the inner workings of biological systems.
neuroscience has a high appeal to tissue removal techniques because in real studies, it is often impossible to track the meandering paths of axons and dendris in the brain.
, the conventional practice has been for scientists to continuously image marked brain tissue slices and then reconstruct them in three dimensions through a computer.
but its shortcomings are also striking - the process is too slow.
generally speaking, it takes weeks to image the circuits in the brains of mice with a microscope, and the quality of the map built depends on the quality of the input data.
in recent years, it has been an ideal way to "transparent" tissue and then fully image it, but this is achieved with advances in molecular reagents, genetic strategies, and imaging techniques, and therefore it is not easy to "light up the inside of the brain."
, the team led by Japan's RIKEN Center for Biosystemdynamics, Leda, chemically tagged each cell in the brain, "transparent" the brain and at the same time expanded its size by 10 times.
team also used sophisticated imaging to reconstruct neurons in three dimensions, totalling about 72 million cells.
the map they've got, narrowing the brain down into a simple database of cell locations that can study specific changes in different brain regions. cubic-X is one of the
researchers say the use of such methods is expanding.
such techniques can remove biological tissue, make otherwise opaque tissue transparent, and zoom in on organs while removing tissue, exposing more detail to traditional microscopes.
it uses ready-made chemicals to open the door for scientists to see not only the brain, but also any other organ.
Related: A new Study of Women's Brains Is 3 Years Younger Than Men --A New Study of the United States ( Reporter Zhou Zhou ) The brains of adult women will be about three years younger than those of men of the same age .
this may help explain why older women tend to think more sharper than older men.
the human brain's metabolism slows down with age, and the aging process may also be gender-specific.
to find out, researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine scanned the brains of 121 women and 84 men to obtain metabolic data from their brains.
the ages of these persons ranged from 20 to 82 years.
after entering data on the age and brain metabolism of men into the computer, the researchers used machine learning algorithms to find the relationship between age and brain metabolism, and then entered the metabolic data of the female brain to calculate the corresponding brain age.
results show that women's brains are 3.8 years younger than the actual age on average.
reverse operation, the researchers used female data to make machine learning before entering metabolic data from the male brain.
results showed that men's brains were 2.4 years older than the actual age.
researchers say this suggests that the female brain is younger than that of men of the same age, and that this difference begins to show in the 20s.
, however, this does not mean that the male brain ages faster, but rather suggests that the male brain enters maturity three years earlier than the female, and that the condition will persist for a long time.
papers have been published in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Manu Goyal, an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine and one of the authors of the
paper, argues that older women tend to do better than men of the same age in logic, memory and problem solving, which may be related to their relatively young brains.
of course this is only speculation, but still needs further study.
Source: Xinhua News Agency, Science and Technology Daily.