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Sorry for the vanity; (and also sorry for the length of this). But I’ve gotten good advice from people here about household problems in the past; and now I have a couple more. 1. For the first time that I can remember, I have had an infestation of fruit flies. We think it may have come from a bag of potatoes, which is something we’ve never bought before – we usually just buy the few single potatoes that we are going to use immediately. We got rid of that bag, and every fresh thing – onions, tomatoes, whatever - that...

A probe of the brain’s reward system looks at Drosophila sex (or lack thereof) and drinking. Moody red lighting in a lab is helping researchers figure out what fruit flies like best about sex. The question has arisen as scientists try to tease out the neurobiological steps in how the brain’s natural reward system can get hijacked in alcoholism, says neuroscientist Galit Shohat-Ophir of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. Male fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) were genetically engineered to ejaculate when exposed to a red light. Ejaculation increased signs in the insects’ brains of a rewarding experience and decreased the...

What do fruit flies and fighter jets have in common? More than you would probably think. Researchers at the University of Washington have found that fruit flies are able to react like little aircraft when they are under attack from predators. Biology professor Michael Dickinson says slow-motion cameras were used to capture the flies' movements as part of the study. "The animals do these very very rapid banked turns, where they're flying and then they roll very quickly over, so they can move quickly away from the direction of the looming threat," he said. Professor Dickinson says while it is...

Sexually deprived male fruit flies exhibit a pattern of behavior that seems ripped from the pages of a sad-sack Raymond Carver story: when female fruit flies reject their sexual advances, the males are driven to excessive alcohol consumption, drinking far more than comparable, sexually satisfied male flies. Now a group of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has discovered that a tiny molecule in the fly's brain called neuropeptide F governs this behavior—as the levels of the molecule change in their brains, the flies' behavior changes as well. The new work may help shed light on the...

Amid the hoopla about Sarah Palin's very un-hockey mom $150,000 campaign wardrobe, the Republican veep candidate managed to drop another flammable tidbit that set off the science community, not to mention the blogosphere. (Continued at Link)

Secret Of Scottish Sheep Evolution Discovered ScienceDaily (Jan. 20, 2008) — Researchers from the University of Sheffield, as part of an international team, have discovered the secret of why dark sheep on a remote Scottish Island are mysteriously declining, seemingly contradicting Darwin's evolutionary theory. Dr Jacob Gratten and Dr Jon Slate, from the University's Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, led the team, which found that the gene responsible for dark coat colour is linked to other genes that reduce an animal's fitness. The researchers looked at coat colour in a feral population of Soay sheep on Hirta in the...

While several studies find homosexuality in humans and other animals is biological rather than learned, a question remains over whether it's a hard-wired phenomenon or one that can be altered. A new study finds that both drugs and genetic manipulation can turn the homosexual behavior of fruit flies on and off within a matter of hours.

Oriental fruit flies have been found near the Los Angeles Harbor, prompting county crews to set traps to kill the pest. The Los Angeles County Department of Agriculture found a fly Tuesday in Harbor City. Three additional flies were found there and in Rolling Hills later in the week. County workers are preparing to spread insecticide-laden bait in the area. No spraying is planned, but sticky globs of poisoned bait will be stuck to power poles and high in trees. The flies usually arrive in Southern California when contraband food, fruit or plants are brought in from Asia. The pest...

Evolution Is Practically Useless, Admits Darwinist    08/30/2006   Supporters of evolution often tout its many benefits.  They claim it helps research in agriculture, conservation and medicine (e.g., 01/13/2003, 06/25/2003).  A new book by David Mindell, The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life (Harvard, 2006) emphasizes these practical benefits in hopes of making evolution more palatable to a skeptical society.  Jerry Coyne, a staunch evolutionist and anti-creationist, enjoyed the book in his review in Nature,1 but thought that Mindell went overboard on “Selling Darwin” with appeals to pragmatics: To some extent these excesses are not Mindell’s fault, for, if...

A Conversation With Michael R. Rose In the 1970's, Michael R. Rose made scientific history with experiments manipulating the life spans of fruit flies. Through selective breeding, Dr. Rose was able to create a long-lived line of creatures he called Methuselah flies. He then put his research into reverse and developed flies with much shortened life spans. All this was accomplished within 12 generations by accelerating the evolutionary processes in a laboratory setting. These days Dr. Rose, who is 50, breeds fruit flies at the University of California, Irvine, where he is a professor of evolutionary biology. From there, he...

Finding in fruit flies may yield new treatmentsHard-drinking fruit flies have helped U.S. and German scientists uncover a gene that may shed light on humans' tolerance to alcohol. The gene -- named hangover by its discoverers -- is part of a genetic pathway that enables the flies to deal with increasing amounts of alcohol, according to researchers. They also believe this mechanism can lead to alcohol dependence and addiction. The finding may be important because "identifying the genes you inherit that relate to your tolerance to alcohol helps us understand how genes set you up for a vulnerability to alcoholism,"...

Few e-mails have ever stopped me as cold as the one I am about to describe. In it, the author, a former university professor who wishes to remain anonymous, claims to know the actual mechanism behind intelligent design. That is the mechanism by which God created the universe, our world and all biological life within it. This is especially intriguing as Darwin's theory of evolution is now hotly contested by arguments of intelligent design. One weakness of ID is its failure to offer a mechanism to counter evolution's bogus explanation of diversity through macro-mutation. As a result, ID has failed...