Marta Zlatic owns what could be the most tedious film collection ever. In her laboratory at the Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, the neuroscientist has stored more than 20,000 hours of black-and-white video featuring fruit-fly (Drosophila) larvae. The stars of these films are doing mundane maggoty things, such as wriggling and crawling about, but the footage is helping to answer one of the biggest questions in modern neuroscience: how the circuitry of the brain creates behavior.
It's a major goal across the field: to work out how neurons wire up, how signals move through the networks and how these signals work together to pilot an animal around, to make decisions or — in humans — to express emotions and create consciousness.
To read more, click here.