Tyler Sloan and Amy Sterling for FlyWire, Princeton University, (Dorkenwald et al., Nature, 2024) Thanks to a fly, scientists are closer to solving one of the world’s greatest mysteries: how our brains work. In a Nature paper, researchers revealed a complete map of the connections within a fruit fly’s brain for the first time, in the most detailed analysis of an adult animal’s brain yet. Humans have about a million times as many brain cells as a fly, but with 130,000 neurons and 50 million connections, a fly’s brain can perform complex and powerful tasks that no computer of the same size could. It will likely take decades until scientists map a human brain with such precision, but these “Google Maps but for brains” could eventually shed light on how we think, a scientist told the BBC. |