Zack Lynch is author of The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World (St. Martin's Press, July 2009).
IBM Researchers have made a radical breakthrough in imaging sensitivity. The method is called magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM) and improves MRI sensitivity by some 10 million times compared to the medical MRI devices used to visualize organs in the human body. It is so sensitive that it can detect the faint magnetic signal from a single electron buried inside a solid sample. While applications on live human tissues, like the brain, are still speculative, this imaging breakthrough is an important step in non-invasive single neuron brain imaging. (read about other brain imaging breakthroughs, like those at MIT.