Like cartographers charting new lands on paper, bats sketch mental maps of spaces they fly through. But unlike cartographers — or rats, which researchers have studied walking across flat ...

The paper, by Michael Yartsev at Princeton University in Princeton, NJ, was titled, "Space Bats: Multidimensional Spatial Representation in the Bat." ...

These head-direction cells track bats in three dimensions as they manoeuvre. The researchers think a similar 3D internal navigation system is likely to be found throughout the animal kingdom.

Tom Kunz, a bat biologist at BU, is using LIDAR and 3D thermal imaging to monitor bats ... to expand this research and hopes to present a paper on it at the American Association for the ...

Recordings from the brains of bats as they flew in a lab have revealed that the animals have a "neural compass" which lets them keep track of exactly where, and even which way up they are.

The team has discovered that bats have specialized cells inside their body that allow them to navigate in 3D. According to the researchers, the bat's have something akin to a metal compass inside ...