• Neurokernel, an open-source platform for emulating the entire fruit-fly brain, was highlighted—complete with GitHub repo (neurokernel/neurokernel), RFC-style docs, a Jupyter notebook demo of the antennal-lobe olfaction circuit, and a Columbia mailing list for developers.

• A 2015 paper on “Connectomics-based analysis of information flow in the Drosophila brain” was shared, along with the FlyCircuit.tw database and its high-resolution female wiring diagram, underscoring ongoing efforts to map and simulate insect neural architectures.

• The BigNeuron initiative (2015-present) and the earlier DIADEM Challenge (2010) were discussed as major open competitions for automated neuron-tracing algorithms; kanzure posted links to the GitHub organization, algorithm wiki, 2011 Nature Neuroscience benchmark paper, and a 19 GB Dropbox dataset of 79 traced neurons.

• Vaa3D, a widely used scientific visualization suite, was examined—kanzure dug into its C++ tracing plugins (global_neuron_feature, neuron_stitch, NeuTu/NeuTube) and noted the absence of unit tests across the codebase, while also locating Janelia-sourced forks and hackathon branches.

• Lighthearted but conceptually rich banter explored the literal idea of “putting the Internet in your brain,” touching on distributed cognition, latency trade-offs, and the metaphor of each human as a neuron in a global brain.