GOVERNMENT

Experts at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, will spend the next two years creating a 3D simulation of the neocortex. This is the part of the brain thought to be responsible for language, learning, memory and complex thought. The researchers believe the project will give them fresh insights into the most remarkable organ in the body, said BBC News. "Modelling the brain at the cellular level is a massive undertaking because of the hundreds of thousands of parameters that need to be taken into account," said Henry Markram, the EPFL professor leading the project. The Swiss scientist and his colleagues will have at their disposal an IBM's eServer Blue Gene supercomputer. The system to be installed at their EPFL lab will take up the floor space of about four refrigerators, and will have a peak processing speed of at least 22.8 trillion floating-point operations per second (22.8 teraflops), making it one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.