Physics Buzz

When you think of fruit flies, many words likely come to mind: buzzing, hovering, annoying...but navigating probably isn’t one of them. As it turns out, these tiny insects are known to travel up to nine miles per evening in search of food. Since they often live in barren deserts, Dr. Ysabel Giraldo reasoned that they must have some way of keeping a straight course—there’s just no way they could survive otherwise. It’s been shown that without the presence of external cues, most insects and animals—humans included—tend to wander in circles, so Giraldo wanted to uncover the secret to the fruit fly’s navigation. “Even though there have been so many studies on Drosophila , surprisingly no one really knew much about how fruit flies navigate,” she says.

Physics is usually associated with frying the brain rather than saving it. Unfortunately, students often leave introductory physics classes wondering more about the relevance of physics than the world of possibilities it opens. Whatever you wonder about, one thing is clear. The part of you that does the wondering is fundamental to who you are.

Like the physics engine in a video game that brings to life car crashes, nosedives, touchdown passes, and other physical events, humans may have a kind of “physics engine” in the brain that helps us survive. After all, even non-physicists quickly swerve to miss an oncoming car, duck to avoid being hit, and reflexively catch falling objects.

Neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have provided evidence opposing the current model for how working memory operates at the cellular level. The current model says the cellular basis for working memory lies in consistent, sustained activity by brain cells, or neurons. Results from the MIT study , published in the March 17 issue of the scientific journal Neuron, shows the story is more complex, that brain cells involved in working-memory tasks are activated discretely and sporadically.

Scientists find the route to listening is more complex than they thought. Originally published: Jun 10 2015 - 8:00am, Inside Science News Service By: Joel N. Shurkin, Contributor ( Inside Science ) -- You are sitting in a concert hall about to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, anticipating, among other things, the famous first four notes. When it comes, it sounds just like you thought it would. Man with headphones credit to Warren Goldswain via shutterstock  | composite image credit Michael Greshko That anticipation may not just be the fact you know intellectually what’s coming, but something quite physiological: your brain is anticipating some essential properties of the sound and may even be adjusting what you will hear toward what you are expecting. According to research in Germany and the United Kingdom, sound perception is often “top-down”--ear to brain and back down to midbrain in the auditory system. Conventional theory has been fundamentally focused on bottom-up,

Scientists have discovered how nerve cells stabilize visual images. Originally published: Jun 2 2015 - 10:45am, Inside Science News Service By: Lisa Marie Potter, Contributor ( Inside Science ) -- Thank goodness for autostabilization, the digital camera feature that compensates for movement to achieve that crystal-clear, spontaneous selfie. But even more importantly in daily life, our eyes have an ancient form of autostabilization that prevents the world from blurring by. Skinny nerve cells called axons connecting the eye and the brain trigger tiny eye movements that stabilize our field of vision. Image credit: See-ming Lee 李思明 SM via flickr | http://bit.ly/1ESzWYr Rights information: http://bit.ly/1dWcOPS For the first time, scientists have identified the molecules that make sure these axons are wired to the exact regions of the brain. The findings could help us understand eye movement disorders and could one day help regenerate damaged nerve cel

Originally published: Mar 25 2015 - 10:00am, Inside Science News Service By: Jyoti Madhusoodanan, Contributor (Inside Science) – "Agua" is water, "pan" is bread, "cerveza" is beer. Exams are done and bags packed for spring break, but vacationing students (and snowbirds, too) are still likely to be reading new words as they travel to clear skies and sunny beaches. As a word is read, it grows increasingly familiar. Eventually, a part of the reader's brain turns the now-familiar string of letters and syllables into a pattern. Rather than process each letter separately, our brains store the spelling of a familiar word as an image or pattern, according to the results of a study published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience . Image credit: schani via flickr | http://bit.ly/1FFHF1V Rights information: http://bit.ly/1dWcOPS The study supports the idea that when we learn a new word visually – by reading it rather than hearing it spoken aloud

There's been a lot of buzz lately about a therapeutic and augmentative procedure called tDCS, with promising results. tDCS may not only aid in the treatment of conditions such as depression and anxiety , but it also may be a quick, non-invasive way to improve focus, learn skills faster, and remember facts more easily while studying . If you're wondering why you haven't heard of this miracle technology yet, it's because of what tDCS stands for: Trans-cranial Direct Current Stimulation. In layman terms, that's "putting electrodes on your head in hopes of shocking yourself smarter". At first blush, maybe it doesn't sound so appealing, but bear with me. Image Credit : TZA via flickr  | Rights Information

This week on the Physics Central Podcast, I interview acclaimed physics writer Jennifer Ouellette. Her latest book is called Me, Myself and Why: Searching for the Science of Self . The book delves into various aspects of "self" including genetics, psychology, and neuroscience. But never fear—the book also features some awesome physics. Neuroscientists are using ideas like emergent properties and network theory to explain how things like wakefulness emerge out of the lump of cells we call our brain. Also, what does a unicorn with bunny ears have to do with self? Listen to the podcast to learn more. You can find more from Jennifer Ouellette on her website . Her Twitter account is a great place to find cool science stories from all over the web. Ouellette's first book, Black Bodies and Quantum Cats , is an expanded version of her "This Month in Physics History" column for APS News (APS is the parent organization of Physics Central).

Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, died in 1855. His brain has been resting at the University of Gottingen for the last 150 years—but under the wrong label. A mix-up that appears to have taken place in the 1860's put Gauss's brain the wrong jar. It wasn't until this year, when scientists from the Max Planck institute were taking fMRI images of the brain for archival purposes, that neuroscientist Renate Schweizer noticed something was amiss. To most people, human brains all look the same. But Schweizer knows one brain from the next, and she realized this couldn't be the brain of Carl Friedrich Gauss—because she'd seen this brain before. Listen to the podcast to learn how Schweizer identified the impostor brain, and where they found the real one.