Blog

For generations, sailors around the globe have reported a mysterious phenomenon: Vast areas of the ocean glow steadily at night, sometimes for months on end. The light is bright enough to read by and is oddly similar to the green and white aura cast by glow-in-the-dark stars that have decorated children’s rooms. Stretching over ocean space as broad as 100,000 square kilometers, the light can, at times, even be seen from space.

This rare bioluminescent display was coined by sailors as “milky seas.” Despite being encountered for centuries, scientists still know very little about what causes this glowing effect because they are quite rare—they usually occur in the remote regions of the Indian Ocean, far from human eyes. A likely theory is that the glow comes from activity by a luminous microscopic bacteria called Vibrio harveyi.

To better predict when milky seas will occur, researchers at Colorado State University have compiled a database of sightings over the last 400 years.

Thanks to a mouse watching clips from “The Matrix,” scientists have created the largest functional map of a brain to date—a diagram of the wiring connecting 84,000 neurons as they fire off messages.

Using a piece of that mouse’s brain about the size of a poppy seed, the researchers identified those neurons and traced how they communicated via branch-like fibers through a surprising 500 million junctions called synapses.

The massive dataset, published Wednesday by the journal Nature, marks a step toward unraveling the mystery of how our brains work. The data, assembled in a 3D reconstruction colored to delineate different brain circuitry, is open to scientists worldwide for additional research—and for the simply curious to take a peek.