I just read a release on Science Daily about a group of researchers from Caltech who have successfully recorded brain cell activity in a fruit fly while the little guy was buzzing around. They call it “flying”, but to me it sounds more like “being stimulated in a flying-esque fashion”, since they’ve got the thing tethered and confuse him into thinking he’s flying:

“Researchers have recorded the neural-cell activity of fruit flies before, but only in restrained preparations — animals that had been stuck or glued down,” Dickinson explains. “Gaby was able to develop a preparation where the animal is tethered” — its head clamped into place — “but free to flap its wings.” By slicing off a patch of the hard cuticle covering the brain, “we were able to target our electrodes onto genetically marked neurons,” he says.

A puff of air was used to spur the flies into flapping their wings, while electrodes measured the activity of the marked neurons and high-speed digital cameras simultaneously recorded the flies’ behavior.

Yeah, that’s not really how I envision flying either. Nobody had to puff on Superman. But obviously this is some pretty amazing news that stands to teach us an endless amount of really cool stuff about how state impacts brain chemistry.

Jim