I am a neuroscientist by heart. This is often reflected in my art as well. This piece was  a former contribution to a #plotparty in 2024 with the topic “bugs”. Not exactly a bug per definition, but among insects one of the best studied organism on many levels: the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. We are currently living in the era of high-throughput Connectomics, in which whole brains can be sliced into ultra thin sections, scanned, and put together in a 3D volume. This way, an amazing team of scientists from all over the globe reconstructed over 130.000 neurons and 34 million chemical synapses (Dorkenwald et al., 2023; Schlegel et al., 2023). With this, nearly the complete “wiring diagram” of the brain can be analyzed. From all animas, the fruit fly is currently the only “higher” species in which both the brain and ventral nerve cord (the analogue to the vertebrate spinal cord) have been reconstructed to a large extend revealing stunning insights into neuroscience every day!
 
Image shows a random subset of neurons conveying visual information to the brain. Their total length is under 150 micrometer. Their outputs in 3D looked like a hand reaching out for more central brain neurons. The actual hand of course has been added here.
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Neurons are visualised in Codex ( http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.35928.67844 ), exported in 3D and vectorised in Illustrator.