microcircuitry

"More recent technology allows recording of all layers of cortex simultaneously. This paints a broader perspective of microcircuitry and allowed us to observe this layered pattern," Major says.

In addition to needing to be miniaturized to fit on a lander, Gasda says, both instruments also require more robust housings and microcircuitry to allow them to endure rocket launches, planetfall and the deleterious effects of cosmic radiation.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan said in the 1980s, while rising Asian nations — although not yet China — were flooding the world with microcircuitry, the Soviet Union was “peddling fish eggs and furs, the trading goods of a hunter-gatherer society.”

Instead of etching flat circuits onto the surface of a silicon wafer, build skyscrapers: stack many thin layers of silicon with microcircuitry etched into each.

Kevan Martin, a director at the city's Institute of Neuroinformatics, had to stop mapping the functional microcircuitry of the macaque brain in 2006, when his licence expired.