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Researchers Make Fruit Flies Perform Aerobatics Like Spitfire Pilots
KentuckyFC (1144503) writes Researchers from Cornell University glued a tiny magnetic bar to the back of fruit flies and allowed them to fly through an electromagnet. Pulsing the magnet then causes the flies to roll in mid-air, like victorious Spitfire pilots. The work isn't entirely frivolous. The team was studying how fruit flies achieve stable flight when they ought to be particularly susceptible to being rolled by tiny gusts of air.
It turns out that fruit flies have incredibly fast reactions. They respond to being rolled within a single wing beat, that's 5 milliseconds, flapping their wings asymmetrically to regain stable flight. That kind of reaction time makes them one of the fastest creatures in the animal world. By comparison, the visual startle response in flies takes 20 milliseconds and the quickest reactions humans can manage is about 100 milliseconds.
It turns out that fruit flies have incredibly fast reactions. They respond to being rolled within a single wing beat, that's 5 milliseconds, flapping their wings asymmetrically to regain stable flight. That kind of reaction time makes them one of the fastest creatures in the animal world. By comparison, the visual startle response in flies takes 20 milliseconds and the quickest reactions humans can manage is about 100 milliseconds.
I love that name!
Why are we teaching these pests to be even HARDER to kill???
smaller animals have less delay in receiving signals to the brain and then sending signals to another part of the body...
its almost like linear distance can affect latency in communications systems
I for one welcome out new, magnetic fruit fly overlords.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
This was posted back in March (in fact, I submitted it myself). Dupe dupe. C'mon, editors.
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
A number of years ago I once clapped trying to kill a fruit fly, and (unintentionally, of course) cleanly severed its abdomen and one wing. As animals sometimes do in the face of mortal calamities, it tried to regain itself. I watched while it took several steps forward on the kitchen counter and then flew upward a few inches in a perfect, conic cork screw before landing squarely again, and then repeat the exact same steps and attempted flight two more times.
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
So you expected to paste something else but instead you copied another tab with WebMD open. Could have been worse I guess.
I misread the title as Restaurant instead of Researchers and was very confused. But way funnier.
I do that every time I turn on the ceiling fan in the kitchen.
attach machine guns to them and replace the F35?
I read fapping their...... nevermind.
You forgot to list your mustache and turtleneck sweaters, but these may be particular to you.
I hope this annoys those little bastards as much as they annoy me.
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
Time flies like an arrow, magnetized fruit flies like a banana.
Isn't the correct term reflex rather than reaction, considering that it's an insect? It's more like a mechanical than biological delay.
A Mantis Shrimp can strike its prey in 8 milliseconds according to the link. Granted, its a little slower, but it's also underwater and that strike has the force of 1500 Newtons. Actually, it's probably a little faster as that time includes strikes from two different appendages and the time it takes for two cavitation bubbles to collapse.
From this link: Peacock mantis shrimp use a hammer-like appendage to smash open snail shells for food. Not only did high speed imaging reveal that peacock mantis shrimp forelimbs reach maximum speeds from 12-23 m/s (in water!), but it also showed that cavitation bubbles were forming between the appendage and snail shell. We found that, as a result of the limb's extraordinary speed, the water cavitates (vaporizes) when the limb strikes the prey. Cavitation is a destructive phenomenon; when these vapor bubbles collapse, they essentially cause a small implosion in the water which produces heat, light and sound. For example, rapidly rotating boat propellers are often badly damaged by cavitation to the point of developing holes in the metal.
By linking high speed imaging with force sensors and acoustic sensors, we were able to show that mantis shrimp wield two types of strike forces â" the first force is due to the appendage physically striking the snail shell and the second is due to the collapse of the cavitation bubble. Thus, for each predatory strike, mantis shrimp work like jack-hammers with a series of four force peaks from the impact of the first appendage, the collapse of the first cavitation bubble and then the impact of the second appendage and the collapse of the second cavitation bubble. All of this happens in less than 800 Âs, with peak forces of 1500 N (over 2500 times the animalâ(TM)s body weight).
That fly over there does look a bit like Robert Shaw.
Have gnu, will travel.
The spec said 18 meters, not 1.8 mm!.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"Carrier bees wait for favourable breezes. If a storm arises, they steady themselves with the weight of a little pebble held in their feet; some authorities say that it is placed on their shoulders ...."
- Pliny the Elder: Naturalis Historia
-kgj
OK, it is a pretty cool project, and the illustrations were good, but is there no video of the flies "rolling like Spitfires". How do they know it happened if there isn't video? How do we know it happened?
Still, even with magnets, I can kill fly with my hands.
Not to trivialize the little buggers' reflexes, but this can't have been entirely unpredicted?
Human quick-fire nerve channels transmit signals at 100m/s, so, considering it's nearly 1m from my fingertip to my brain, that's 20 milliseconds right there from finger to brain back to finger for the reaction. That same distance in a fly is what, perhaps 0.2mm? That means his signal-time is 0.004 milliseconds unless I've misplaced a 0 in there somewhere.
Not to mention, I'd expect that there's something to be said for the efficiency of function in the CPU, as it were. A brain evolved for perhaps 8 'tasks' in total (walk, fly, seek food, eat, seek mate, reproduce, recognize danger, flee danger?) would likely be intrinsically quicker-processing at any of those tasks than one that is (one hopes) substantially more complex?
-Styopa
"The work isn't entirely frivolous."
Sure...
Next the researchers need to figure out if the flies are calculating the necessary wing beats to correct or whether it's just a feedback loop. And whether they see that they're tilted or whether it's a built-in accelerometer. I'm betting on acceleration and calculus since the flies went to Cornell.
that got funded as research. well played!
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
(n/t)