The basic setup is a stake on a turntable in the path of an X-ray beam. There is a blower from above to simulate moving through air. Also included are a stereo pair of high speed cameras. The hapless fly is glued to the stake and rotated while he flaps in the air stream. They collect the X-ray data, correlate it to wing position using the stereo cameras and reconstruct the 3d model of the fly's interior at different phases of the wing flapping cycle.

Very nice science. Robert Hooke would be most impressed. There is an elegant mastery of space and time here where they can interchange them freely to come up with a result that makes sense.

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A tangent off in the weeds: There appear to be no legs on the fly in the pictures. I presume some lab technician is tasked with pulling the legs off of flies. Who knew that would be a job skill?

Awesome video clip buried in the paper: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6lBkK3J9wg&feature=youtu.be

PLOS blog post on this paper: http://blogs.plos.org/biologue/2014/03/25/flies-fly/

For the curious: When the HN-posting bookmarklet limited the length of the article title, I lifted the title of the BBC News story.

This isn't quite what I thought it might be. I thought it was going to be a POV video, from inside a flying house fly.

This is really an animated CT scan of a restrained house fly, studying the mechanisms of its ability to propel itself through the air and maneuver during flight.

The video is really cool:

http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/files.figshare.com/1434931...

PETA is probably preparing a statement right now over the inhumane treatment of flies in experiments like this.