Dr. Vivek Jayaraman and colleagues at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Research Campus discovered that the ellipsoid body located in the middle of a fly's brain acts like a compass to help navigate flight even in darkness. By placing the flies into a small virtual reality arena and having the flies walk on a rotating ball, they could study the activity of neurons within the ellipsoid body while the animal was moving.
These videos show how the fly experiment was done:
Check out the news release for more information about this neat study.
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“The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.” -Arthur Koestler
By Dr. Franck Marchis
This session is all about pattern formation, focusing on those earliest, simplest decisions. How doe a mass of identical cells distinguish themselves inti regions with different patterns of gene expression.
The AIP news feed features a story about a paper suggesting that the universe is ellipsoidal. Or at least, that it was, back in the early days.
And how did the flies get their navigation system?
The same way the "birds got their beaks".
See article nearby.