3-D compass

Not everyone gets their research written about by this week’s Nobel Prize winners: All mammals face the challenge of navigating in complex, three-dimensional (3D) environments, whether they are swinging from branch-to-branch in forests or burrowing underground tunnels. How does the brain maintain a sense of place and direction in 3D? In a beautiful study published on Nature's website today, Finkelstein et al. report that bats have an internal neural compass that tracks direction in 3D during both surface locomotion and flight. That’s from Prof. May-Britt Moser in Nature’s “News and Views.”…