Nozu Credits

Nozu

Nozu the Fruit Fly is made by ITSNOBODY.NET, the registered business name of Yakov Ganam, 16 Yitzhak Ben Zvi St., Petah Tikva, Israel.

Neural wiring data: MaleCNS v1.0

Nozu uses modified data from MaleCNS v1.0, a connectome (wiring map) of the central nervous system of a male fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. MaleCNS was created by a collaboration between FlyEM (HHMI Janelia), the University of Cambridge (Department of Zoology), the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Google Research, and version 1.0 was released on 8 June 2026. Source: male-cns.janelia.org/. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Publication: Berg, S., Beckett, I. R., Costa, M., Schlegel, P., Januszewski, M., Marin, E. C., Nern, A., et al. (2026). Sexual dimorphism in the complete Drosophila male central nervous system connectome. Cell 189(18), 5504–5526.e15. doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2026.08.015

The licensors provide the data as-is and make no warranties about it, as stated in the licence.

How Nozu changes the data

To run on a phone, the data was changed. We:

• kept only the cells annotated as traced (165,122 neurons) and the connections between them;
• gave each connection an estimated sign (exciting, inhibiting or neutral) from its predicted neurotransmitter, and scaled the weights by each neuron's total incoming synapses, leaving about 24.5 million signed connections;
• converted the result into a compact file for a simplified rate simulation;
• added designed links from game events to groups of sensory neurons, and from groups of neurons to Nozu's actions;
• used the dataset's neuron annotations, such as cell types and positions, for the Brain Window and the neuron cards.

These changes are ours. They simplify the original data and do not represent the full biology of the fly.

No endorsement

The creators of MaleCNS, their institutions and Google have not reviewed, sponsored or endorsed Nozu. Their names appear here only to credit their work, as the licence requires.

Related research

Simulating fly behaviour from a connectome has been studied scientifically, for example by Shiu and colleagues in Nature (2024), with a different dataset and model. Nozu does not use their model, and their results do not validate Nozu's simplified simulation.

Fonts

Nozu's text uses two fonts, both licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1:

• Fredoka: Copyright 2016 The Fredoka Project Authors (github.com/hafontia/Fredoka-One)
• Rubik: Copyright 2015 The Rubik Project Authors (github.com/googlefonts/rubik)

The licence texts are included in the app and published at itsnobody.net/NOZU/legal/OFL-Fredoka.txt and itsnobody.net/NOZU/legal/OFL-Rubik.txt.

Software

Purchases use the Google Play Billing Library 8.3.0 by Google LLC, provided under the Android Software Development Kit License Agreement, together with Google Play services, Google's data-transport library and AndroidX libraries (Android Software Development Kit License Agreement and Apache License 2.0). Nozu's native simulation code includes the LLVM C++ runtime (Apache License 2.0 with LLVM Exceptions). The full notices are in the app and at itsnobody.net/NOZU/legal/open-source-notices.txt.

Art, animation and sound

Nozu's character, worlds, animation, music and sound effects are original work created for Nozu, drawn and synthesised by code. No stock art, sampled recordings or third-party melodies are used.

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who maps nervous systems and shares the results openly. Your work makes projects like Nozu possible.