And some are made to look directly into the sun. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It's not uncommon to wonder how animals see the world around them--a dog as he sticks his head out the car window, or a horse sailing over a jump . But what about insects like bees, that can travel miles away from their hive? How do they know where they're going, and then navigate back home?

Cameras inspired by the compound eyes of insects enable an extremely wide field of view without expensive lenses, potentially offering cheap, simple and lightweight visual sensors for navigation or tracking in robots and driverless cars. Insects like dragonflies have eyes that, in pairs, provide an almost 360-degree field of vision and help them to deftly evade predators. Their eyes are composed of many ommatidia, which are essentially tubes with a simple lens at one end and a basic photoreceptor at the other. Their vision is made up of pixel-like inputs from large bundles of these ommatidia. Creating cameras that can affordably achieve the same thing, either by covering a hemisphere with image sensors or by creating multiple lenses to direct light onto a central sensor, has proved challenging.