We all need a break from the news these days
Mapping the brain of a fruit fly, like this one, is an important step on the road to mapping a human brain. Credit: Getty Images/De Agostini
The news, as it often is wont to be, has been loud or gloomy of late. Sometimes both.
The presidential election steamrolls forward in all its cacophony as pollsters and pundits slice and dice the electorate to try to figure out which demographic sliver of which state which candidate needs to impress to garner which group of electoral votes to gild which path to victory. Insults are hurled, lies spoken, gobs of money raised and spent on misleading and distorted ads. It's exhausting.
Also demanding attention: Conflict in the Mideast expands, with full-scale war seeming ever closer and misery and casualties growing. The battle between Russia and Ukraine grinds on with ever-mounting deaths and devastation. New images arrive daily revealing the almost incomprehensible destruction wreaked by Hurricane Helene in the mountain areas of North Carolina. The mayhem on our roads continues unabated, plunging more families into grief.
We need a break.
So let's talk about something more positive. The fruit fly.
Why the fruit fly?
Because we got quiet news this past week that hundreds of scientists worldwide — full-time investigators as well as citizen scientists — have successfully mapped the brain of a fruit fly. Now before you respond with a flat "so what" — another echo of the week's louder news — consider the significance of this feat.
A fruit fly brain is tiny, about three-quarters of a millimeter by one-quarter of a millimeter — roughly the size of a poppy seed. Inside that ridiculously small space, connecting the 140,000 neurons in the fruit fly brain, are nearly 500 feet of wiring. Those wires are about one one-thousandth the width of human hair. The scientists used diamond knives to slice the brain into more than 7,000 ultrathin sections — astonishingly ultrathin, when you do the math. Then they used an electron microscope to take some 21 million images of those sections, all of which allowed them to produce a map — called a connectome — of more than 50 million connections in the fruit fly brain.
The logistics are incredible. But that's not why this matters.
It matters because mapping a fruit fly brain is an important step on the road to mapping a human brain. And mapping a human brain will help us understand and treat a whole bunch of health conditions: Parkinson's disease, depression, substance abuse, binge eating and more.
The endeavor was part of the BRAIN project, a $3.5 billion federally funded campaign to boost our understanding of the nervous system and help discover cures for the more than 40% of humans who suffer from nervous system disorders like stroke, epilepsy, cerebral palsy and multiple sclerosis.
Now, a fruit fly might not seem like a species humans would study to gain insight into their own condition. But as it turns out, this map will help scientists understand how genes are related to brain function — and fruit flies contain nearly 75% of the genes involved in human diseases.
If fruit flies aren't your thing, how about solar panels?
The Gila River Indian Community in Arizona is erecting solar panels on top of a half-mile stretch of an irrigation canal on its reservation. It's a double-winner. The pilot project will produce about 1.3 megawatts of electricity while reducing evaporation from the canal, critical for arid parts of the country where many of these canals are located.
As with the fruit fly brain map, it has impressive implications. Covering with solar panels all 8,000 miles of canals and waterways managed by the federal Bureau of Reclamation — never mind all the other canals in the country — could generate 25 gigawatts of electricity and reduce evaporation by tens of billions of gallons, two terrific developments in these climate-addled times.
Fruit fly brains and solar panels atop canals — ballast for the day's chaos and carnage and, maybe just maybe, future cures for some of what ails us.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
