A Digital Fly Brain Has Taken Over the Internet

404 Media · 4 weeks ago · 44 ● 4 sources

MaleCNS v1.0, a simulated connectome of an adult male fruit fly nervous system, was released earlier this month and quickly spread across social media through mods that had it do tasks like trading bitcoin and playing games. The map contains 166,000+ neurons. This has turned the research tool into a viral platform while researchers stress it is not sentient and aim to use both male and female connectomes for rigorous sex-to-sex neural comparisons and future larger brain maps.