Groucho Marx famously said, “Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.” As insulting as it is, researchers often use fruit flies for research because they have similar behavior and genetics to humans. For example, the flies exhibit signs of anxiety, stress, and many common diseases. Researchers at Imperial College London built an inexpensive and customizable research platform for fruit flies — the ethoscope — that uses a 3D printed enclosure and a Raspberry Pi to study our winged counterparts. You can see a video about the ethoscope, below.
By using a camera, the Pi can watch the flies, something researchers used to do by hand. The software is easy to customize. For example, while studying sleep deprivation, the ethoscope could detect when a fly didn’t move for 20 seconds and rotate its tube to wake it up.
In addition to 3D printing, the ethoscope can also be made with folded paper or construction bricks. Regardless, you are still going to have a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino. The specifications are online and are the result of seven years of refinement, according to the team.
The platform uses a web interface and has facilities for doing data analysis on results from research. You can also find their paper detailing the ethoscope, if you would like to learn more.
We’ll be honest. Although the team makes ethoscope sound like a new idea, we couldn’t help but remember FlyPi, but we aren’t smart enough about labwork with flies to know if they are really similar or not. Speaking of things we’ve seen in the past, we looked at some genetic hacking on fruit flies.
Why “and an Arduino?” Well, I can probably guess ….
Before I set off a comment storm, I will admit that while the opening quote is commonly attributed to Groucho, it apparently probably wasn’t from him after all: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/04/time-flies-arrow/
I wonder why they didn’t double check their spelling? They have an inventive alternative to the word “throughput” in the title.
What do you mean? What’s wrong with the title? The final version of the paper is here, btw, and it’s open access http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2003026
if you have fruitflys wash your fruit when you get it esp the bananas
PROTIP leave out a cup of apple cider vinegar with a single drop of dish washing liquid it will kill the majority of the fruit flys.
Yup! They can walk on water surface tension and know it, but soap breaks the surface tension so touching the surface get sucked in and sink quickly. A small saucer with soapy water soap works great with a SMALL island of bait in the middle. Bait may be potato, strawberry, banana, just apple cider vinegar in the water. Lotta fruit and nuts this house. DOH!
So you can condition behaviour and response of fruit flies, hmmmm…
Okay, so I think I have all I need to design and build an AI made from massively parallel simple neural networks, i.e. the flies, and achieve world domination…
… no reason really other than I want to prove xkcd wrong about entomology presenting a low risk of abuse by supervillains.
Yeah, that struck me as wierd as well. It would be comparatively simple for one versed in the entomological arts to create a literal “superbug” that could devistate crops.
An “evil Weevil”, if you will.
Use cockroaches!
Fruit flies can’t draw bananas, but bananas draw fruit flies. Their artistic ability is nil.
Cool video, can it be wrapped and made like a course or program in a learning distribution system? I will subscribe to it right away.