Category
Articles, reports and reference pages that explain the field.
10 projects
ASCII.jp (G.Raymond)
Japanese coverage devoted to NeuroCraft Fly specifically. It reports the six input types the Minecraft fly responds to (player proximity, surrounding mobs, brushing, attacks, food and light), notes that selected readouts pick predetermined actions rather than simulating natural physiology, and states the release position clearly: the repository holds introductory materials and demo footage, with the Fabric mod source still unpublished.
AUTOMATON (Kosuke Takenaka)
A Japanese games-press account of DOOMFLY, focused on the mechanism rather than the spectacle: Doom's screen becomes signals the fly can receive, activity runs through the MaleCNS v1.0 model, and taking damage sends an aversive stimulus to dopamine cells. Its most useful line is the negative result, that after roughly 3,000 attempts no learning had been confirmed in the form of longer survival.
Dexerto (Zackerie Fairfax)
The article that gave the wave's counter-current a name. It covers Macroblock's announcement of an open-world sim where the simulated fly gets grass, trees and endless fruit instead of Beat Saber, sets it against NeuroCraft Fly and the rhythm-game clip, and notes that the Beat Saber demonstration was later clarified as incomplete, a useful correction given how often that clip's view count is cited.
GIGAZINE
Japanese-language coverage of the wave, published six days after the MaleCNS release. It walks through Alex Wormuth's Doom experiment (including the PPL101 dopamine cells stimulated on damage), Jessica Paquette's Super Mario 64 controller, Evan Smith's NeuroCraft Fly in Minecraft and a Bad Apple!! visualisation, and closes on the point most of the wave elides: the connectome shows structure and connections, not a complete functional replication of the biology.
Google Research (Michał Januszewski, Viren Jain)
The release-day post from the Google Research side of the collaboration, describing the male central nervous system reconstruction as the largest brain map by neuron count to date: over 166,000 neurons and 125 million synaptic connections, led by HHMI Janelia with Google Research and academic collaborators, published in Cell as a study of sexual dimorphism. It points to the Janelia download page and to Neuroglancer for viewing the volume. This is the announcement the entire September 2026 demo wave grew out of.
Gizmodo
News piece by Bruce Gil covering the wave of hobbyist simulations that followed the September 3, 2026 release of the male fruit fly CNS connectome (MaleCNS v1.0) by Google and HHMI Janelia. It profiles Alex Wormuth's Doom-playing fly brain, Jessica Paquette's Super Mario 64 run, a Minecraft port, and posture and animation experiments. The article frames the dataset as the largest brain map by neuron count, at over 166,000 neurons.
HHMI Janelia Research Campus
Janelia's own announcement, dated October 6, 2025, of the first complete wiring diagram of a male fruit fly's brain and nerve cord, covering more than 166,000 neurons. The work was done by HHMI Janelia with the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, the University of Cambridge and Google Research, with Gerry Rubin and Greg Jefferis among the researchers quoted, and was posted as a bioRxiv preprint. Rubin stresses that it enables the first sex-by-sex comparison of a socially complex animal, and the data is free to researchers worldwide.
Know Your Meme (Literally Media)
Know Your Meme entry documenting the viral trend of hooking the MaleCNS v1.0 fruit fly connectome, released September 3, 2026 by Janelia's FlyEM team, the Cambridge Connectomics Group and Google Research, up to games and other environments. As read on September 13 it tracks a YouTube Minecraft video from September 7 with 241,000 views, a Beat Saber clip with 22 million, a Coinbase trading video with 3.4 million and a driving-simulator clip with 1.5 million, plus a talent-manager sim, a Twitch streamer persona and a Deadlock run. Still marked as a submission under review.
Zanichelli, Schons, Freeman, Shiu & Arkhipov (arXiv preprint)
An arXiv preprint (q-bio.NC) by Niccolo Zanichelli, Maximilian Schons, Isaak Freeman, Philip Shiu and Anton Arkhipov that re-evaluates whole-brain emulation progress since the 2008 Sandberg and Bostrom roadmap. The report is organized around three capabilities: recording neural dynamics, mapping structure through connectomics, and emulation with embodiment. First posted October 17, 2025, with a third revision on November 5, 2025, under a CC BY 4.0 license.
Wikipedia (Wikimedia Foundation)
Community-written encyclopedia article that serves as a one-stop overview of fruit fly connectomics, explaining why Drosophila is used as a model and walking through the major datasets from the 3,016-neuron larval brain to the adult hemibrain, FlyWire, the FANC and MANC nerve cords, and the 2025 whole-CNS BANC and male CNS reconstructions. It also touches on how wiring structure relates to behavior. Text is under CC BY-SA 4.0; last edited August 11, 2026.
Fly Brain Hub
