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Carl Malamud is on a crusade to liberate information locked up behind paywalls — and his campaigns have scored many victories. He has spent decades publishing copyrighted legal documents, from building codes to court records, and then arguing that such texts represent public-domain law that ought to be available to any citizen online. Sometimes, he has won those arguments in court. Now, the 60-year-old American technologist is turning his sights on a new objective: freeing paywalled scientific literature. And he thinks he has a legal way to do it.


A giant data store quietly being built in India could free vast swathes of science for computer analysis — but is it legal?

Scientists have produced what looks to be the most detailed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan ever taken of the human brain anatomy, and are sharing their data with the public.

Thanks to an anonymous deceased patient whose brain was donated to science – and a gargantuan 100 hours of scanning with one of the most advanced MRI machines – the world now has an unprecedented view of the structures that make thought itself possible.

In a new study led by neuroimaging scientist Brian L. Edlow from Massachusetts General Hospital, researchers describe how they recorded their ultra-high resolution MRI dataset of the ex vivo specimen, offering a never-before-seen view of the “three-dimensional neuroanatomy of the human brain”.