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 to better 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 …