Inside the Nanofactory

Winkler bags are being hung to dry leaf litter. On this trip, bags were hung for 72 hours to dry. 

This diagram shows correlation between connectivity and distance of neurons in the human cortex. There are approximately 100,000 neurons in a square millimeter of cortex, as illustrated in the center box. The red gradation shows neuronal connectivity, with dark red indicating denser connectivity through synapses. While half of the synapses connect to neurons close to them, the other half connect with distant neurons, as so illustrated in the boxed area on the far left of this diagram. The differences in connectivity and distance between neurons require whole brain simulation in order to understand brain function.

Professor Shintake plans to station 300 huge propellers 100 meters underneath the ocean’s surface in the Kuroshio current. The propellers should generate one million kilowatts of energy in total – equivalent to the power of one nuclear reactor. 

A skilled artist, Shintake’s often works the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper, in the initial stages of a project’s design. This is one of his first drawings of the his eletron microscope design. 

On the same day as the Coast Guard buoy deployment, Koichi Toda connects one of 18 OIST buoys with temperature sensors to a dock in Ishigaki Island.