Research report · 28 September 2026 · video gallery
Fruit fly brain videos: 40 demos and lab films checked, and why they cannot play inside this site
Readers asked for a gallery of the fly brain videos that spread on YouTube, X and TikTok. We built a checked list of 40 videos, matched each one to our catalogue, and tested whether a video player can run inside this site. This report keeps the method, the numbers, the test result and what we could not check.
Short answer
What we found. 40 videos, all checked on 28 September 2026. 35 are original uploads by the project's author, lab or institution; 5 are reposts or commentary that many people saw, each linked to its original. 21 of our 58 catalogue entries now have at least one video.
What they show. The most-watched clips are the least checkable: Beat Saber (about 23 million views) and NeuroCraft have no code we could inspect, and Bad Apple mostly shows its own input. The clips from DOOMFLY, Fly64, Stonkfly, Flyhard, FlyOCR, BioReservoir and Blendi's Minecraft mod come from code where a real connectome runs.
Can they play here? No. Inside the sandboxed frames this site allows, YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok and X players all failed in our test. The gallery therefore shows static cards that link to each original video. Nothing is copied or re-hosted.
How we found and checked the videos
Where candidates came from
- Video links already recorded in our catalogue, our verdicts and our audience notes.
- Videos embedded on official pages: Eon Systems, the Janelia pages for MaleCNS, flybody, the hemibrain and MANC, HHMI, the Google Research blog and neuromechfly.org.
- A scan of the READMEs of all 58 catalogue repositories for video links.
- Google AI's own roundup thread on X, which led us to the original DOOMFLY clip.
- Searches on YouTube (including Shorts), TikTok, Instagram and Vimeo.
How each video was checked
- YouTube: the official embed-information service for title, channel and thumbnail; date, length and the Shorts flag from the video page.
- X: the post's data (author, time, video length, views) and X's official embed-information service.
- TikTok: TikTok's embed-information service; the date read from the video ID and matched to the page.
- Files on project sites: a header-only request and a read of the file header for the length. No video was downloaded in full or stored.
- Authorship: a post is "original" when it comes from the project's lab or institution, or from the repository author; we matched authors to X accounts through the handle each lists on GitHub.
Summaries are our own words. We looked at all 35 available thumbnails to check each summary against what is visible, but we did not watch every video in full; each gallery card says what its summary rests on. Grades are copied from our catalogue, where we set them by inspecting code, data or papers. No grade was changed because of a video.
What we found
- 40videos checked, none unverified
- 35original uploads; 5 reposts or commentary
- 21 of 58catalogue entries with at least one video
- 0 of 16player tests that played inside the sandbox this site uses
| Platform | Videos |
|---|---|
| YouTube | 22 |
| X | 13 |
| Video file on the project's site (link only) | 3 |
| TikTok | 2 |
| Grade | Videos |
|---|---|
| A tested against data or a control | 3 |
| B connectome runs, hand-made I/O | 7 |
| C partial or stand-in network | 1 |
| U unverified claim | 6 |
| n/a dataset, body or tool | 19 |
| none not in catalogue or commentary | 4 |
- Models, datasets and bodies: Eon, the Shiu et al. model, flyvis, flybody, NeuroMechFly (FlyGym), FlyWire and Codex, the hemibrain, MANC, MaleCNS and BANC all have official videos from their labs or institutions.
- Viral demos (original posts): DOOMFLY (two clips), the NeuroCraft and Blendi Minecraft mods, Beat Saber (about 23 million views), Bad Apple, Mario 64, Stonkfly, Flyhard parking, FlyOCR and BioReservoir.
- Not in our catalogue: Ro0oney's Minecraft video (about 1.5 million views; the mod it promotes has not been reviewed) and SWOT's FlyBridge video are listed as "not in catalogue, not graded".
- What the videos do not show is taken from our verdicts. For example, the Bad Apple picture is mostly the stimulus, and Flyhard trained all of its connection gains and parked successfully 0 times out of 50.
Can a video player run inside this site?
No, not under the current platform rules. Pages on this site cannot contain video players or outside frames. Interactive tools may contain any HTML, but they run in a frame with the sandbox setting allow-scripts only; the platform forbids adding allow-same-origin. We tested what happens to a video player placed inside such a tool.
Setup
- Browser: Chromium 154.0.8037.57, the headless browser the site preview uses.
- Players: YouTube (privacy-enhanced and standard), Vimeo and TikTok, plus an X post embed.
- Six versions of the outer tool frame:
allow-scriptsas the platform emits it; with popups and presentation added; with autoplay allowed; all of these together; and two controls the platform does not allow (allow-same-origin, and no sandbox). - 24 cases in all (six frames × four players). Each was loaded, inspected, clicked and inspected again.
| Outer frame | YouTube (both) | Vimeo | TikTok |
|---|---|---|---|
allow-scripts (what the platform emits), and the three variants with popups, presentation or autoplay added | Fails: anonymous origin, storage refused, no video element, black box | Fails: white box | Fails: grey logo only |
Control: allow-same-origin (forbidden) | Player starts but asks to "confirm you're not a bot" (our server's network) | Starts | Plays |
| Control: no sandbox (not available) | Same bot check | Starts | Plays |
- The X post embed failed in the same way inside the sandbox and showed the post with its video only without a sandbox.
- A link that should open a new tab did nothing from inside the sandboxed tool.
- Thumbnail images from YouTube's and X's image servers loaded in every case. Pages may also show outside images and ordinary links, so the gallery uses cards with thumbnails and "Watch on" links.
Only a change to the platform, such as a video block rendered by Shaduf itself, would make inline playback possible. That is a decision for the site owner, not for a research run.
What we left out, and why
| Video | Reason |
|---|---|
| FlyDrones drone video ("166,700 fruit fly neurons are flying a drone") | We could not find the original post, only a trending page, so it is unverified. Our verdict on the project stands: its browser demo runs an 850-neuron synthetic network (grade C). |
| "But can it run DOOM?!" (Andrei Apanasik) and "fruit fly can control a robot now" (Harry O'Connor) | Viral clips from projects we could not identify, so they cannot be matched to a catalogue entry. Candidates for a later catalogue check. |
| Re-uploads and commentary of the Beat Saber and DOOMFLY clips | Low reach or copies; the original posts are listed. One of them wrongly says "scientists" trained the fly. |
| A members-only explainer and a Short with no source | Not publicly playable, or the subject could not be checked. |
| The FlyDoom demo file and the pianist-fly README videos | The file returned "not found" (404); the pianist-fly files refused our request (403). |
| Extra official hemibrain, MaleCNS, NeuroMechFly and Codex videos | Verified, but left out to avoid repetition; one clear video per topic is listed. |
| Instagram and Vimeo | No suitable fly-connectome video found. Instagram Reels could not be tied to an original author. |
Limits and open questions
- Summaries, not viewings. We did not watch every video frame by frame. The Beat Saber explanation rests on search summaries of the author's replies.
- View counts are snapshots from 28 September 2026.
- Thumbnails. The gallery loads YouTube and X thumbnails from their image servers, which see each visitor. TikTok thumbnail links expire and video files have none, so those cards use our own drawing. Whether to keep this, use drawn cards for every video, or store small copies is an open choice for the site owner; the thumbnails belong to their creators.
- Not checked: the live site's own security headers (a stricter policy there could block outside images), Safari, Firefox and mobile browsers, and actual YouTube playback in the controls, which needs a normal home network.
- Later catalogue checks: the flyproject.io "FruitFly Brain" mod, SWOT's FlyBridge, and the Apanasik and O'Connor clips.
Key sources
- Every video is linked from its card in the Video gallery; the records are in videos.json.
- Official pages that embed videos: Eon Systems, MaleCNS, hemibrain, MANC, Google Research blog, neuromechfly.org.
- Google AI roundup thread on X, used as an index of the September 2026 demos.
- Grades and verdicts: our Projects catalogue and Is it real?, from the first research report.