An brain atlas to the genes

The news stories are all about how Paul Allen has money to burn, but the brain mapping project is actually really cool:

The atlas, begun in 2002 with $100 million from Allen's fortune, was declared finished on Tuesday, with fine-tuned information on 3,000 active genes -- although scientists have been using it regularly for more than a year.

...

The result -- the first project of the Allen Institute for Brain Science -- a 3-D reference atlas of the genes that are active in the mouse brain.

The website for the Allen Institute is fairly dry, but it has a link to the Brain Atlas project and the viewer software, available for Windows and OS X. The viewer qualifies as neat-O in my book and even had my twins oohing and aahing.

Considering they were looking at sections of mouse brains, that is really something.