Janelia-Google Male Fly Connectome Goes Viral on Minecraft Demo

The HHMI Janelia Research Campus, with Google Research, released a digital wiring diagram of an adult male fruit fly's central nervous system on September 3, 2026. Twenty-four hours later, a Georgia Tech computer science graduate student had programmed it to play Minecraft.

The connectome is called MaleCNS v1.0, and covers roughly 166,000 neurons. Its own description, as reported by 404 Media: "We present the first finished connectome of an entire male *Drosophila* central nervous system, encompassing the central brain, optic lobes (analogous to mammalian retina) and the ventral nerve cord (analogous to the spinal cord)."

The Minecraft post went up on September 4 from Evan Sinclair Smith, and pulled in millions of views within a day. "It's just been amazing how big this has gotten, and how many other people are just taking this idea and just making so many different creative projects," Smith told 404 Media. "That's been just really cool to see."

They did. The fly was piped into Doom, Beat Saber, parallel parking, bitcoin trading (nicknamed "stonkfly"), LinkedIn posts, and virtual doner kebab cutting. Nico Christie, an entrepreneur and AI researcher, rewired the fly's mating circuit so it was attracted to males, calling the result "bi fly." Christie emailed 404 Media that he found the trend funny but wanted "the science behind it more rigorous."

The connectome is a wiring diagram, not a living brain: no biochemistry, no sentience. The female *Drosophila* version was released in 2024. This is the first for a male.