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By Root 439 0

They’re extending the internet to the ocean floor, with the eventual plan being to lay 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) of cable, from the shores of Oregon all the way up to British Columbia. This underwater internet will range more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) offshore. When it’s complete, all manner of devices will be plugged into the network, from cameras to robot vehicles to genome-sequencing equipment. Imagine a volcano erupting underwater, and nearby genome-sequencing equipment switching on to take genetic snapshots of never-before-seen microbes vented during the eruption. Or imagine a network of thermometers and other sensors mapping out the underwater climate, much the way the SDSS is mapping out the universe. But the Ocean Observatories Initiative is going even further than the SDSS, making their data openly available right from the start, so anyone in the world can immediately download the data, looking for new patterns and asking new questions. What new discoveries will be made with this unprecedented knowledge of the ocean floor?

It’s not just the oceans and the universe that are being mapped out. Efforts are now underway to build a map of the human brain. For example, scientists at the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Brain Science are building the Allen Brain Atlas, mapping out the brain down near the level of single cells, and determining which genes are turned on in which regions of the brain. It’s an important step along the way to understanding how genes make a mind, and has the potential to be tremendously useful in understanding how our minds work. Scientists at the Allen Institute have sliced up 15 brains into hundreds of thousands of slices, each slice just a few microns thick. They then analyze each slice, determining which genes are turned on, and where. It’s all done by a team of five robots that work around the clock, each robot analyzing 192 brain slices per day, every day. The Allen Institute scientists expect to complete their map of the brain by 2012, when the results will be made available as open data, for anyone in the world to download and analyze. An earlier effort by the Allen Institute, completed in 2007, has already given us an openly accessible map of how genes are expressed in the mouse brain. Furthermore, this work by the Allen Institute is part of a larger movement in neuroscience, toward an even more ambitious goal, mapping out the entire human connectome—the position of every neuron, every dendrite, every axon, and every synapse in the brain. It’s possible that, one dayo anyonot-too-distant future, we’ll have a detailed, publicly accessible model of the entire human brain.

What we see in examples such as the SDSS, the Ocean Observatories Initiative, and the Allen Brain Atlas is the emergence of a new pattern of discovery. The SDSS is mapping out the entire universe. The Ocean Observatories Initiative will make broad-ranging observations of the ocean floor. The Allen Brain Atlas is mapping out the human brain. Still other projects aim to build detailed maps of the Earth’s atmosphere, of the Earth’s surface, of the Earth’s climate, of human language, of the genetic makeup of all species. For just about any complex phenomenon in nature, chances are there’s a project afoot to map out that phenomenon in detail. In many cases, it’s not just a single project, but a whole pipeline of projects providing increasingly more detailed knowledge. We’ve seen this with human genetics, where the Human Genome Project mapped out the basic human genetic template; it was followed by the haplotype map, which mapped out the variations in human genetics; today, follow-up projects are getting still more detailed information about genetic variations in specific human groups. In astronomy, the SDSS will soon be succeeded by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which will carry out a survey superior to the SDSS in nearly every way. The LSST, which is being built in the Andes of Chile, will be one of the world’s largest telescopes, with an effective mirror diameter of 6.68 meters, much larger than the