A bridge of roiling gas stretches like taffy between two galaxies as they pull apart after a dramatic hit-and-run collision.

Twenty-five million years ago and 180 light years away, two spiral galaxies plowed into each other head-on and kept on going. A team of astronomers, led by Analia Smith of Argentina’s Instituto de Astrofisica de La Plata, recently captured this stunning image of the aftermath.

Since the mid-20th century, people have touted the similarities — and considered the possibility of combining — brains and computers. Sci-fi author Isaac Asimov helped to devise the idea of a “positronic brain” that could bestow robots with the intelligence and self-awareness of a human in 1950.

Computer scientists still dwell on the shared features between minds and machines. Artificial neural networks, which power many of today’s AI, mimic the organization of neurons in the human brain. Other researchers are trying to make computer hardware more brain-like, for instance, by replicating the electrical activity of a neuron on a chip.

There are also researchers like Thomas Hartung, a biochemist and physician at Johns Hopkins University. Hartung and his colleagues are growing “brain organoids,” collections of human skin cells coaxed into resembling brain cells, in the lab. They want to connect the organoids to sensors and other devices and train them to process and store information with the help of machine learning.