Slashdot Mirror
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 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!
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.
We do have that sort of system. If you touch a hot pan with your hand, the response time is shorter than the time needed for the signal to reach the brain, be processed, and generate a command to move the hand/arm away from the pain. Same with stepping on a sharp rock.
However the signal path is still much longer than the fruit fly's total possible signal path. Looking at this page of nerve impulse speed, it seems nerves send their signal from less than 1 meter per second, to over 120 meters per second. It is hard to say how long a signal/response event will take (I'm not going to experiment on my family today), but it isn't surprising that a small insect has a quicker response than a much larger human, or even than a moderate sized bird.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
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
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.