Tag: Fruit flies

  • Nation & World

    ‘The Last of Us,’ fruit fly edition

    Postdoc Carolyn Elya sheds light on how parasitic fungus hijacks the nervous system of flies.

    5 minutes
    Fruit fly with fungal outgrowth.
  • Nation & World

    Where we get our sense of direction

    Using virtual reality experiments, Harvard neuroscientists have decoded how fruit fly brains integrate visual cues for navigation. Study also sheds light on a form of short-term memory known as unsupervised learning.

    7 minutes
    Fruit fly up close.
  • Nation & World

    The love lives of fruit flies

    Harvard study reveals how the neurobiology of fruit fly courtship can help illuminate understanding of human disorders of motivation.

    6 minutes
    fruit flies
  • Nation & World

    Solving a biological mystery

    A team of Harvard researchers has shown that insects like crickets possess a variation of a gene — called oskar — that is critical to the production of germ cells in “higher” insects. That discovery suggests that the oskar gene emerged far earlier in insect evolution than researchers previously believed.

    4 minutes