Fruit flies have brain cells that sense the way the wind blows

摘要

SPECIFIC neurons in fruit flies fire according to wind direction, helping them form a neural map of their surroundings. Algorithms inspired by this may be able to help robots navigate their environment. Tatsuo Okubo at Harvard Medical School and his colleagues wanted to determine how wind direction was characterised by a fruit fly's brain. While it is well known that wind direction affects the behaviour of insects, no one had yet developed a map of the neurons involved in this phenomenon for any animal. The researchers initially looked for neurons that corresponded to antennae because they thought these would be the ones affected by wind. "We then found these beautiful ring-shaped neurons that were next to neurons that affect the head direction," says Okubo.