Scientists have published an atlas of the brain

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.

That said, the philatelist branches of science have been pretty successful, biology especially. And this week sees the addition of a new album to biology’s collection, in the form of 21 papers about the brain and its cells. The work was done under the purview of the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network, which is organised by the National Institutes of Health, in America. The papers are published in various bits of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s empire of journals, Science and its spin-offs. They are intended to help answer three, related questions: what and where are a brain’s cellular components; which cells are involved in neurological and psychiatric illnesses; and what makes the brains of Homo sapiens different from those of other animals?