Patterns in Fruit Fly Brains Could Soon Power Your Netflix Recommendations

Researchers have identified an incredibly smart method used by fruit flies to categorise odours – and it's so clever it could be applied to powering recommendation algorithms for the likes of Netflix or Spotify. In the same way that YouTube might want to flag up videos similar to the one you've just watched, fruit flies – like many other animals – need to know which smells are similar, for finding food and avoiding poisonous substances. The team from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California has found that fruit flies have an especially clever way of categorising odours which lets them recognise differences with a very fine level of accuracy. "In the natural world, you're not going to encounter exactly the same odour every time; there's going to be some noise and fluctuation," says one of the researchers, Saket Navlakha from Salk. "But if you smell something that you've previously associated with a behaviour, you need to be able to identify that similarity and recall that behaviour."