GoKawiil
Tech News
Researchers studying dietary restriction in fruit flies report identifying a specific protein that appears to mediate the link between reduced food intake and extended lifespan. The finding, described in a new study, points to a molecular mechanism that may help explain how caloric restriction slows aging in this model organism.
Researchers using Drosophila melanogaster generated a new fly line, Lsp2-muGFP, via CRISPR-Cas9 to track the storage protein Lsp2, alongside RNAi knockdown lines targeting Lsp2 and related genes. The experiments used tissue-specific and stage-specific gene drivers to study how larval nutrition influences protein translation and lifespan in adult flies.
Researchers studying Drosophila found that mutating the Lsp2 gene altered translation of TOP mRNAs, particularly those encoding ribosomal proteins, and changed ribosomal subunit ratios and lifespan compared to control flies. They further showed that removing the translational repressor 4E-BP (Thor) shifted how dietary protein levels affect lifespan, without changing mTORC1 activity or overall protein synthesis rates, indicating a specific rather than general translational effect.
A WIRED writer created a project called PitchFly using an open-source connectome mapping 165,112 neurons and 125 million synapses from a male fruit fly's brain. By feeding it hundreds of the outlet's top-performing headlines converted into numerical representations, the simulated neural circuitry began remixing patterns into new, often absurd story pitches. The system doesn't understand language—it's simply replicating firing patterns from real biological data to produce novel combinations.
A Show HN project called Fly.exe runs a Drosophila brain simulator built from the released male central nervous system connectome — 165,122 neurons and over 25 million synaptic connections — driving a physical fly body model in real time on a single GPU. The demo scales this to twelve independent fly bodies sharing one MuJoCo physics scene, each executing its own copy of the full neural network and interacting through a simplified, analytic form of vision rather than rendered images.
Researchers from Google and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus have finished mapping every neuron and synaptic connection in the brain of a male fruit fly. This male connectome joins a female Drosophila map completed earlier this year, giving scientists two complete wiring diagrams of the same species' brain for comparison. The project combined Janelia's imaging expertise with Google's computational tools to process hundreds of millions of synapses.
Researchers Kevin Max and Yang Shen at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology have developed an algorithm called Spi-Fly that mimics how fruit fly brains process and remember smells. Published in Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering, the work targets a key weakness of existing electronic noses: their tendency to forget previously learned odors when trained on new ones.