Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Tel Aviv University and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have published their findings on this topic in the Jan. 14 issue of the journal Science in an article titled: .

As outlined by CMU, it is the fruit fly’s nerve cells and the tiny bristles with which they communicate with to feel and hear that offer a model for improved networks. The nerve cells have a way of organizing themselves for communication that does not involve every cell having to connect directly with ever other one or know its whereabouts.MORE RESEARCH:

“It is such a simple and intuitive solution, I can’t believe we did not think of this 25 years ago,” said co-author Noga Alon, a mathematician and computer scientist at Tel Aviv University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., according to a statement on the .  Ziv Bar-Joseph, Yehuda Afek, Naama Barkai, Eran Hornstein and Omer Barad are the other researchers, whose work on a new distributed computing algorithm was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Many researchers are hot on the trail of solutions to the puzzling challenges presented by distributed networks, especially wireless sensor networks. on efforts by researchers at MIT and in Israel into finding ways around network bottlenecks caused by random packet distribution in ad hoc systems.

For more on network research, fly over to Bob Brown’s accounts on , and