Brains, Worms and Computer Chips Have Striking Similarities

ScienceDaily (Apr. 23, 2010) —

An international team of scientists has discovered striking similarities between the human brain, the nervous system of a worm, and a computer chip. The finding is reported in the journal PLoS Computational Biology.

They found that all three shared two basic properties. First, the human brain, the nematode's nervous system, and the computer chip all have a Russian doll-like architecture, with the same patterns repeating over and over again at different scales.

Second, all three showed what is known as Rent's scaling, a rule used to describe the relationship between the number of elements in a given area and the number of links between them. [read more]

Interesting but weird. That self-similar repeating pattern the article mentioned is also known as a fractal. A lot of objects in nature has that pattern.