Researchers at EPFL’s Blue Brain Project, a Swiss brain research Initiativehave combined two high profile, large-scale datasets to produce something completely new –a first draft model of the rules guiding neuron-to-neuron connectivity of a whole mouse neocortex. Based on these rules, they were able to generate statistical instances of the micro-connectome of 10 million neurons, a model spanning five orders of magnitude and containing 88 billion synaptic connections that will serve as the basis of the world’s largest-scale simulations of detailed neural circuits.