Jen Paton:

In this limitless Web, there is always someone who will agree with us, supply the arguments and evidence we need to support what we thought anyway, playing on our emotions in a way that may or may not be honest. This may not necessarily lead us closer to truth.

Prachi Patel:

Magnetic hard disks will soon be able to store one terabit (a trillion bits) per square inch. The technology, called heat-assisted magnetic recording, involves heating the magnetic regions on a disk that hold individual data bits, allowing those regions to be made tinier. Seagate says the method promises to keep increasing storage density, and it could lead to 60-terabyte hard drives. The company is targeting 2015 for its first commercial product featuring the technology.

Carl Zimmer:

Shaving a cubic millimeter of brain tissue would yield a petabyte of data.

But better technology alone won't get Seung to his connectome. "The challenge is analyzing them," he says. Toward that end, he'll need a lot more eyeballs. The more people who can proofread his connectomes, the faster his maps will grow. As a result, he and his colleagues have set up a website where the public can pitch in.

"We're trying to gamify it," Seung says.

Mary Meeker, Scott Devitt, and Liang Wu:

Do humans want everything to be like a game?

An exchange:

Someone once accused Craig Venter of playing God.

His reply was, "We're not playing."