Word: fruitness
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...first study, Paul Shaw at Washington University in St. Louis monitored the relationship between brain activity and sleep patterns in a group of fruit flies and isolated three key genes responsible for dictating how much sleep flies got in certain situations and when. Under normal conditions, flies doze off, even during the day, after engaging in intense social activities, including courtship, acclimating to a new environment and fighting over mates and territory. But Shaw found that when flies were genetically bred to be missing the three genes - colorfully named rutabaga, period and blistered - that, among other functions, help regulate sleep...
...Such alertness may not seem like a bad thing, except that in a second paper in the same issue of Science, Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin found that sleep appears to function as a critical shutoff valve for the fruit-fly brain. After a period of sleep, the volume of connections between nerve cells in the brain decreased, a condition that Tononi theorizes offsets the wakeful brain's activity. During waking hours, the brain keeps adding new information about its environment, forming new circuits and new connections in an ever thickening neural network. But even the fruit...
...That makes sense for a human. But exactly how much new information does a fruit fly acquire in a day? How complex could Drosophila's world be that it actually needs shut-eye to recharge its brain? You'd be surprised. For a fly, its brief, two-month life can only be about mating and eating - or eating and mating, depending on whether mates or food are in shorter supply - but these activities involve complex social interactions that, frankly, can be exhausting...
...Kravitz and his research team have been documenting, on video, exactly how far fruit flies are willing to go for their prize. In this fight club, the arena is a small dish, in the center of which is either a patch of food or the head of a female. (If she weren't decapitated, she wouldn't stay put, says Kravitz; and the males, being male, don't seem to care that she's not that lively.) Based on hours of footage, Kravitz says that male flies tend to use specific combat skills such as rearing up on their hind...
...next step, obviously, would be to see if these same genes appear in mammals' or even the human genome. Chances are good: the fruit-fly genome is made up of 14,000 genes, while the human genome contains 20,000. Much of the molecular machinery underlying species as varied as flies and humans might therefore be conserved, which is why the lowly fruit fly makes a worthy model for understanding human beings, even for such complex behaviors as aggression...