A research team from National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) has mapped the neural pathways that mediate between external sensory signals and the behavior in a fruit fly’s brain, which could bring researchers closer to understanding how the human brain is wired.
Funded by the National Science Council, the research team led by Chiang Ann-shyn (江安世), a professor of life sciences and director of NTHU’s Brain Research Center, said that although the human brain has more than 100 billion neurons, while a fruit fly’s has only about 100,000, they share similar basic behaviors and gene regulation mechanisms, so understanding the functions of a fruit fly’s brain can provide clues to that of a human.
Using fruit flies, which can sense carbon dioxide, the team discovered that contrary to previous assumptions that sensory signals are transmitted through a single neural pathway, they found that three parallel neural pathways activate when a fly senses carbon dioxide, and also mapped the functions of these pathways.
“When a fly senses a lower concentration of carbon dioxide, it only activates the first pathway that leads it to perform an avoidance behavior. But if it senses a higher concentration of carbon dioxide, all three pathways are activated, with the third pathway repressing the first, causing the signal to go via the second pathway,” said Lin Hui-hao (林暉皓), a team member and lead author of a research paper on the study published in Science magazine this month.
Giving the example of railway trains switching tracks, Chiang said they found that the third pathway serves as a “shunting” mechanism mediating signals and responses in the fly’s neural pathways.
Chiang said that if researchers can determine whether the mechanisms work the same on the fly’s other senses, and if human brains operate in the same way, the discoveries could help decode mechanisms in the human brain and prevent or cure diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or Huntington’s.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching