Male fruit flies don’t just sing to their mates; they also use sound-cancelling wing-flicks to jockey with rivals. This new understanding of how male flies compete for female partners could shed light on how the brain balances cooperation and competition.
Researchers have identified how the architecture of brain circuits helps different species flexibly adapt to new mating signals across evolutionary timeframes.
With a new microscope that's as light as a penny, researchers can now observe broad swaths of the brain in action as mice move about and interact with their environments.
They identified a brain signal that guides one type of decision-making—findings that could build a foundation for understanding how humans make educated and strategic decisions.
The research demonstrates the distributed nature of memory processing in the brain, and reveals a dedicated pathway for memory recall, which is less understood than memory formation.
New research reveals how neurons in a fly's brain signal the direction in which the body is traveling. The cells appear to literally perform vector math in order to act as a biological compass.
Using light beads microscopy, researchers can now capture images of a vast number of cells across different depths in the brain at high speed, with unprecedented clarity.
If COVID-19 lockdowns scrambled your sleep schedule and stretched your waistline, you're not alone. Fruit flies quarantined in test tubes sleep too little and eat too much after only one week of social isolation.
In Drosophila’s neural circuitry for courtship, researchers discover a configuration that enables a male fruit fly to be persistent, yet flexible in his pursuit of a female.
Our brains have sensory cells, which process the faces that we see, and memory cells dedicated to storing data from person encounters. But until now, a hybrid neuron capable of linking vision to memory—and explaining how we recall familiar faces—remained elusive.
Scientists have launched an ambitious effort to produce high-quality reference genomes for all vertebrate species, from mammals to birds and reptiles. The result could be discoveries with implications for animal conservation as well as human health and disease.
Scientists call it oxytocin in humans, isotocin in fish, mesotocin in birds, and valitocin in sharks. But according to a new study, it’s all the same hormone—and high time we settled on just one name.
Unlike their female counterparts, male mosquitoes have no desire to bite us. But the hardware for host-seeking is hidden in the male mosquito brain, locked behind a simple genetic switch.
COVID-19 causes a host of diverse complications, from lung inflammation to blood clots, heart failure, and brain fog. A team of scientists believes these attributes may have a single culprit—and that findings from research on Alzheimer’s disease might give them a leg up in finding it.
Unlike most humans, bats are naturally resistant to coronavirus infection. Researchers are now searching their genomes for clues that might explain why SARS-CoV-2 can cause devastating disease in our own species.