Yet it required 2,000 slices to produce and about a terabyte of data to store, and it contains parts of thousands of nerve cells (only a few dozen of which are shown, in order to avoid confusion).
But instead of cobbling a terabyte of data together in the laboratory from millions of meaningless megabyte files, the Microsoft researchers sensibly went looking for a terabyte of real data that would be interesting to people all over the world and easily understood by someone of any age, education and language.
The proposed Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, an even more ambitious automated survey, will carry out the equivalent of a "Sloan a week" for a decade, producing a terabyte of data per week and enabling astronomers with powerful enough computers to examine several months' worth of observations, so as to investigate phenomena that change over time.
The company's researchers simply wanted to see whether they could handle the terabyte chunks of data that would one day be commonplace.
For $70 a month it promises both downloads and uploads at a gigabit per second, fast enough to send a high-definition feature-length film in a few blinks, and a terabyte (ie, a shedload) of cloud storage.
By 2009, a typical PC will have a 160-gigabyte hardisksk, and the biggest disk drives will have a capacity of 1,000 gigabytes, or one terabyte, says Dave Reinsel, director of storage research at IDC, market-research firm.
Yahoo! is said to be buying new storage at the rate of one terabyte (trillion bytes) a week; industry tales tell of a constant stream of 18-wheeler trucks delivering new storage units to AOL.
Mining the resulting terabyte or so of data will allow astronomers to investigate the evolution of galaxies, for example, since the SDSS will provide an enormous sample of them.And even the SDSS will represent only a single snapshot of the sky.
The soldiers also found several Nintendo Game Boys and one-terabyte hard drives containing valuable intelligence, such as a detailed chart of Al Qaeda's main leadership in Iraq.
There is also a new Airport Extreme base station that comes with a wider range, and it comes with a built-in two- or three-terabyte hard drive.
There's also two-terabyte option, doubling your space, for a mystifyingly steep $500 a year.
