When Amos Abolaji returned to Nigeria from a year abroad, he brought home a strange souvenir — two jars full of fruit flies. The biochemist had been conducting postdoctoral research at the Federal ...

For years, scientists have struggled to understand why some cells die off when exposed to radiation while others not only survive, but come back stronger than before. Now, Weizmann Institute of ...

Entomologist Thomas Werner has studied fruit flies from coast to coast. But his rarest discovery to date was close to home. Armed with a banana-baited live trap and a strong desire to disprove a gap ...

While Alzheimer's disease is mostly considered a disorder of the brain, emerging evidence suggests that the condition also affects other organs of the body. Working with the laboratory fruit fly, ...

Scientists have created a virtual brain network that can predict the behavior of individual neurons in a living brain. The model is based on a fruit fly’s visual system, and it offers scientists a way ...

A new study conducted on fruit flies reports the first evidence that oocytes -- the cells that become eggs -- regularly rejuvenate the critical protein linkages that bind chromosomes together. The ...

How the brain gets wired up matters. Consider the neurons involved in the sense of smell. Hook them up wrong, and suddenly turpentine might smell like a lovely chianti. Yet how our developing brains ...

Scientists with the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Research Institute in La Jolla have been preparing for months to send fruit flies to the International Space Station. “When I was a kid I wanted to ...

A new UC Davis study reveals previously unknown cell types in the female reproductive tract of Drosophila fruit flies. The knowledge could help in studies of fertility in general, and in managing ...

When a fruit fly is navigating straight forward at high speed, why does it know that it’s not straying off course? Because as long as the fly moves directly forward, the visual scene shifts from front ...

Male fruit flies of the Drosophila genus fight over mates and food when they encounter each other – with the exception of Drosophila santomea males, which court each other with mating songs instead.