Tara Maya's Tales

    If you've ever wondered (as one does), "Why don't I have a map of all the neurons in my brain?"  ...Well, now you can. If, that is, like me, you have a brain the size of a fruit fly. That's right.  All of the nerve cells and connections between them in a larval fruit fly brain have been fully mapped out by scientists. Granted, a fruit fly brain (like my brain) is not that large, but this it IS larger than the "brains" of sea squirts and worms. Before this, scientists had only been able to fully diagram the brain circuitry of three organisms - a sea squirt and two types of worm. Those buggers have only have a few hundred neurons, while fruit flies have--as we now know--t hree thousand. They used a fancy microscope to capture pictures of the brain, and then pieced them all together like a puzzle. They even traced each individual nerve cell to create a 3D model of the brain. "Fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) share a wide range of behaviors wi...

Did you know that scientists devised a devise to enable dolphins echolocate in the air?   A method to enable a bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) to echolocate while out of water In theory, this would allow them to use their “click” language to “speak” to humans standing outside the water.   That’s not what it was developed for, exactly. The immediate goals of the scientist were much more modest. It’s hard to study dolphin echolocation precisely in their natural environment, so the team wanted to be able to measure echolocation clicks out of the water.        They set up a Death Star for the dolphins to target with their clicks. Because of course they did.    What they found is that there was a regular corellation between the aerial “echos” of the clicks that they measured and the clicks underwater, making this system viable for measuring dolphin echolocation.   Does this bring us one step closer to a Startide Rising scenario, as in Dav...