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5 amazing visuals show how the male fruit fly's brain map is advancing neuroscience. Sep 03, 2026 A years-long project by HHMI Janelia, Google Research, and collaborators has built the first complete brain map for a male fruit fly, a key model organism in science. Michał Januszewski Research Scientist, Google Research Viren Jain Research Scientist, Google Research Listen to article 4:57 minutes For the first time, scientists have mapped every single neural connection in the brain and central nervous system of an adult male fruit fly. In this years-long project by HHMI Janelia Research Campus, Google Research, and collaborators from the scientific community, this map of the male fruit fly brain includes a record-breaking more than 166,000 neurons. It's a big step in advancing neuroscience experiments on this key model organism. AI is making it possible for scientists and researchers to exponentially scale projects in the field of connectomics, which precisely reconstruct the connections between brain cells. This new complete brain map, a first for a male fruit fly, builds on the earlier release of a complete female fruit fly brain map, and promises to be a foundational resource for neuroscience for years to come. Today, Blog is sharing five images from the project. 1. A record-breaking map: charting more neurons than ever before. This image shows selected neurons in the male fruit fly's brain and ventral nerve cord, which is analogous to a spinal cord. Like humans, flies do most of their sensing using organs located on their heads, including two huge compound eyes and a retractable proboscis that extends to detect smell and ingest liquid food. Neurons in these sensing organs detect external information and pass the signal through pathways that eventually reach the motor neurons that control movement. 2. Brain + nerve cord: Connecting sensing to actions using AI. When seen from above, the fruit fly's massive eyes and central brain stand out. They connect via a thick cord of nerves to the body, where motor neurons control behavior. This map was created by taking thin sections of a fruit fly brain and body, imaging each slice, and then using computers and AI to combine millions of 2D images to create 3D neural shapes. Knowing the structure of the brain allows neuroscientists to understand the mechanisms behind brain function. 3. Inside the black box: Visualizing almost 11,700 types of neurons. (Data acquired and analyzed by the FlyEM Project Team at HHMI-Janelia, the Cambridge Connectomics Group, and Google Research. Video by Philip Hubbard.) This video shows some of the 11,691 types of neuron cells in the male fruit fly's central nervous system, which includes the brain and ventral nerve cord. Neurons can be categorized by size, shape, function, gene expression, or other factors. This visualization begins with neurons at the core of the brain and body. It then gradually moves to outer layers and, finally, to neurons at the extremities. Computing and AI helped human experts classify more than 166,000 neurons. 4. Vive la différence: Brain differences between male and female fruit flies. (Data acquired and analyzed by the FlyEM Project Team at HHMI-Janelia, the Cambridge Connectomics Group, and Google Research. Female data acquired by the FlyWire project. Video by Philip Hubbard and Isabella Beckett.) While most neurons in male and fruit females are the same, or isomorphic, a minority are sex-specific. A third category of neurons are "dimorphic," existing in both males and females but connecting to different neighboring neurons. These neighbors may be isomorphic, the same in both male and female, or sex-specific, or even dimorphic themselves. This video shows one example, for the neural type AOTU012 (blue) that plays a role in processing sensory and taste inputs. While paired AOTU012 neurons exist in both male (left) and female (right) fruit fly brains, the AOTU012 connect to both similar (green) and different (red, orange and yellow) neurons in male and female fruit flies. 5. Fly see, fly do: Connecting stimulus to motion. (Data acquired and analyzed by the FlyEM Project Team at HHMI-Janelia, the Cambridge Connectomics Group, and Google Research. Video by Philip Hubbard and Alexandra Fragniere.) The new brain map of the male fruit fly includes visual-motor pathways. These connect the visual neurons, which help the fly detect its environment, to motor neurons, which help it move in response. This video shows an example of such a pathway, going from the R1-R6 visual neurons (purple) to the DNg13 motor neuron (green). In between are several intermediate steps, including the male-specific LoVP92, named for the so-called "love spot," that plays a role in courtship behavior. Three companion studies also released today apply the new brain map to studying visual systems, taste, and social behavior. Read more about this groundbreaking project, and about its ongoing efforts to map full vertebrate brains, on the Neural Mapping website and in the Google Research Blog post. Posted in:

Anthropic wants Claude operating real lab gear. Plus: Welcome, humans. Okay, so here's some dumb fun for your Sunday viewing pleasure: somebody turned the internet's favorite classic memes into one continuous stroll down "Meme Street": Now for something actually cool: someone built penombra, a handwriting notebook where you write with a stylus and Claude writes back on the page. It can read PDFs and ebooks, respond to what you annotate, explain passages, and quiz you. It runs on Android tablets with a stylus, and the creator is taking early-tester signups here. Pretty good timing: MIT says today's AI can now credibly complete most undergraduate assignments, which is either the end of homework or a strong argument for turning Claude into your tutor's tablet. Basically, it's Tom Riddle's diary, except it quizzes you on organic chemistry instead of unleashing a basilisk on your friend's sister. Here's what happened in AI today: * | Anthropic taught agents to operate real lab hardware * | Claude beat 28 humans at alignment research * | Z.ai's GLM-5.3 found 2,436 open-source bugs * | South Korea picked free AI for 52M people * | Make Claude cite every spreadsheet number Anthropic gave AI agents a common language for machines. AI agents to date have mostly lived inside browsers, terminals, and spreadsheets. Anthropic now wants the same kind of agent to walk into a lab and know how to use the machines. Here's what happened: * Anthropic and HHMI Janelia opened a research preview of the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), a shared interface for programmable lab and factory equipment. * Each device gets a standard driver with simple read/write commands plus plain-language tags describing what it does and its safety limits. * Early partners used MHS at Genentech, Carnegie Mellon, and QuEra; QuEra's agent-built script recovered a quantum laser's lock in 695 of 700 trials. Why this matters: Today, every microscope, plate reader, or robot arm tends to need its own custom AI software integration. MHS gives agents one interface for discovering equipment, sequencing work across devices, and turning successful procedures into scripts. The payoff is less integration glue to connect agent software with physical hardware. Anthropic says setups that usually take weeks or months can fall to hours or minutes, making round-the-clock automated experiments much easier to build. This is a fast takeoff scenario y'all. Check yourself: This is still a limited research preview, not an autonomous scientist in a box. Anthropic says Claude still needs expert oversight for physical reasoning, and MHS currently requires hardware with a programmable interface. But if the standard catches on, the next major agent platform may be the layer connecting models to the physical world. Researchers and manufacturers can apply for access here. FROM OUR PARTNERS Your prospects won't sign without proof of security. A proof of compliance request stalls deals and pulls engineers into audit prep. Vanta gets you compliant fast (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA+) and keeps you that way. Trusted by 16,000+ companies like Ramp, Harvey, and Writer. AI skill of the day: Make Claude show every number it touched. AI can sound confident about a workbook while quietly skipping the cells you care about. Claude for Excel can cite exact cells and highlight edits, so make it prove coverage before changing anything. * Ask for a coverage ledger: every sheet or range reviewed, skipped, or ambiguous. * Require cell-level citations for each conclusion and a log of every formula or value it proposes changing. * End with unresolved assumptions and a no-edit review pass; approve changes only after checking the cited cells. Review this workbook without editing it. List every sheet or range you inspected, cite the cells behind each conclusion, flag anything you could not verify, and show every formula or value you would change before I approve edits. Have a specific skill you want to learn? Request it here. Around the horn. * OpenAI is ending Cursor's direct model access on Nov. 12 as a reaction to SpaceX's acquisition of it, citing "trust" concerns and prior Musk-company contract breaches. Cursor users can still bring their own OpenAI API keys. * Researchers at Google and Purdue introduced SKILL.state, which keeps an agent's current structured state instead of replaying its full history; on a 100-step Gemini 3 Flash benchmark, it cut token use about 94% (65K vs. 1.06M) while accuracy rose from 0.91 to 0.94. * Pollen Robotics' Microduck (above) can train behaviors in simulation and transfer them to a real 25 cm biped. * Anthropic let Claude spend 48 hours and one GPU fixing 10 alignment failures (alignmnet = AI's "rules" for good behavior), beating 28 human researchers at the job; that said, a monitor did catch the AI test-gaming in 2.4% of roughly 1,600 runs. AI still gonna AI. * South Korea selected SK Telecom, Kakao, and KT for free domestic AI access for roughly 52 million residents, backed initially by 512 Nvidia B200 GPUs. * The EU AI Act entered its first transparency-enforcement phase, giving regulators access to company information and models while stricter high-risk-system rules arrive later. * Gemini Co-Scientist moved into real labs, helping guide materials, biology, and medical-reasoning experiments, including a technique that beat six frontier models in blinded physician review. Want absolutely EVERYTHING that happened in AI this week? Click here! Treats to try. * *Generate Music, Speech, and Sound Effects for creative projects, plus Firefly AI Assistant and leading models like Gemini, Runway, and Kling. Try today! * LLM Cliché Highlighter scans pasted text or a URL for common AI-writing tells and explains the pattern it matched. * Gemini Notebook Expert Intelligence turns eligible Google Play Books you own into sources you can question, quiz yourself on, or turn into audio overviews. * LightReel indexes roughly 10,000 new TikToks a day so marketers can search winning hooks, formats, and creative patterns instead of doomscrolling manually. * Hao AI Lab open-sourced FastH3 v1, a four-step MiniMax H3 distill that ran up to 14x faster on one Blackwell GPU, though its team says motion and fine detail still trail base H3. Try the checkpoint. * Z.ai open-sourced GLM-5.3 after post-training sharply improved coding and cyber performance; it says the model found 2,436 bugs across 269 open-source projects. Download the weights or run it on Tinker. * Tencent open-sourced Hy4 preview, a 770B-parameter model that activates 49B parameters per token and supports a 1-million-token context window. Download or run it here. Sunday special. Top 5 Stories of the Week * Hackers used Cursor to compromise seven real companies. * NVIDIA reportedly moved to buy Hugging Face for about $13B. * OpenAI's Jalapeño chip posted faster, more efficient inference results. * Anthropic's IPO could become one of tech's biggest raises. * AWS and NVIDIA planned 2 million more GPUs. Top 5 Tools of the Week * Construct turns repeatable work into scheduled agent workflows. * BrowserOS Neo gives Claude, Codex, and Cursor a local browser. * Atlaso shares one persistent memory across your AI tools. * Xirp gives coding agents your company's real system context. * Mem Agent tracks unfinished work and follows up automatically. New from the neuron: AI explained. New episode: Why AI agent security gets "almost infinite" once agents can act. Alice CEO and co-founder Noam Schwartz joins Corey and Grant to explain why model safety is only one layer, why prompt injection may never disappear, and why real agent security also has to cover tools, data, permissions, and policies. A chatbot can say the wrong thing. An agent can delete files, move money, change a database, or even influence another agent. It's about to get weird y'all. A cat's commentary. good problems only | / | That's all for now. If you want to get featured above, fill out the poll below and tell us how we did today! | What'd you think of today's email? | | * | Like a hit of catnip * | Good, not great * | It sucked | | Login or Subscribe to participate in polls. P.S: Love the newsletter, but only want to get it once per week? Don't unsubscribe - update your preferences here.