Science & technology | Neuro-philately

Scientists have published an atlas of the brain

Cataloguing its components may help understand how it works

A Fluorescent light micrograph of cells in the cerebellum of the brain.
Image: Science Photo Library

Lord Rutherford, the discoverer of the atomic nucleus, divided science into physics and stamp collecting. (He was, after all, a physicist.) But he had a point. Other sciences, such as astronomy, chemistry, geology and, most notably, biology, rely a lot on collecting things (not literally, in the case of astronomy) and classifying them in various ways that would delight philatelists. Physics, by contrast, relies on analysing phenomena.

This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “More stamps for the album”

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