Heads up: Mouse-ALM-08 is closing tomorrow (Wednesday) at 12PM Pacific time. At that time we are aiming to release a new challenge.
Additionally, we have a new survey about challenges. Please complete this survey within the next week, as it is scheduled to close on Tuesday, March 21. Completing this survey will help us fine tune our challenges and provide necessary input to our developers and scientists.

We’re back (thank you for your patience) and with a bunch of new features for you to explore. We want you to weigh in with your thoughts on all of these over in our forums.

A new, brighter color scheme up top.
The read more news button, which should help you find your old news (which is still good news).
An updated leaders display for our challenge section, along with the ability to run more than three challenges at a time.
We have new information pages for each neuron - click on the gray scale image next to the challenge name to get more details.
Image volume for each neuron is listed in microns, and is designed to give a reference to how big the neuron sample is.
The Web site is now fully SSL-enabled. We'll keep the HTTP access around for a while longer, but eventually we'll remove it completely.

Here's a big change we know you'll want to discuss further.
Note: We've disabled the new consensus feature because we saw a bug in it on the production site that we weren't seeing in testing. We've identified a workaround for the bug and we'll fix it as soon as possible tomorrow morning (Pacific time). Any related outages should be minimal (think a few seconds or a minute), and solved by hitting refresh.

We've redesigned the way the consensus process works. Before, every time we'd compute the consensus between your reconstruction and others', we'd save it aside and not show any of it to you, except to figure out which parts of the image to gray out because we didn't think the neuron was present in them. Now, once a day, we run a special version of the consensus algorithm which merges your reconstructions together, then changes each of your individual reconstructions to reflect this consensus, so you can build off of other players' work.

Keep track of these and more in our developer posted changelog. We look forward to helping you out with any issues you find, and discussing your feedback.

Hi everybody. The team here has been quietly working on a huge feature release and good news, we think it is ready for you to try out.
This is going to require some very brief (we hope) downtime starting during the window of 2:30-3:00PM, March 13. (Monday). Please note all times are in Pacific time.
This downtime should only last approximately 10 minutes.

Mouse-ALM-09 is ready and posted. Please note our partners at the Allen Institute of Brain Science have not already reconstructed the gold standard for this neuron. Have fun!