RE: https://mastodon.online/@neuroinformatics/115643481413121555
I'll be coordinating the "Animals in Motion" track of this summer school, returning to London in August 2026.
Apply to join us for some hands-on learning and collaboration on open-source tools for video behavioural analysis.
Circadian rhythms are endogenous 24-hour oscillations that regulate physiology, metabolism, sleep-wake cycles, and cellular homeostasis. Drosophila melanogaster, a genetically tractable model organism, has played a foundational role in uncovering the molecular mechanisms of circadian rhythms. The discovery of major clock genes, including period (per), timeless (tim), clock (clk), cycle (cyc), double time (dbt), and regulators such as Casein kinase 2 (CK2), emerged primarily from Drosophila research. CK2 operates as a critical post-translational regulator of PER protein phosphorylation, stability, nuclear entry, and degradation. Because PER dynamics dictate the timing and robustness of circadian rhythms in both flies and mammals, altered CK2 activity can profoundly impact rhythmic behaviour. CK2 dysregulation contributes not only to circadian disruption in Drosophila but also models broader pathological processes relevant to cancer, metabolic disease, neurodegeneration, and psychiatric disorders. This review synthesises CK2's molecular role in the Drosophila clock system, includes insights from computational modelling of CK2-PER dynamics, integrates tables throughout the text, and summarises the implications of dysregulated PER phosphorylation for human health.
Insects are exposed to radio-frequency electromagnetic fields emitted by wireless telecommunication networks. A part of these fields will be absorbed by these insects. This absorption might have biological effects, depending on the amount of absorbed power. It is currently unknown at what level of absorption this might occur. To investigate this, we used RF dosimetry of adult Drosophila melanogaster flies, which we combined with two assays studying the locomotor activity and fecundity of D. melanogaster exposed to electromagnetic fields at 3.6 GHz. To perform dosimetry, we created a 3D digital twin of an adult fly using micro-CT scans of a female D. melanogaster. We used this model in numerical EM simulations to estimate the absorbed power in the fly as a function of RF frequency in the far field of an antenna and during the two experimental assays at 3.6 GHz. In the behavioural experiments, no effects were found on the locomotor activity for a 5-day exposure to RF field values between 5.4 and 9 V/m, which correspond to 3.56 nW to 9.88 nW absorbed power. We also did not find any effects on fecundity, at an absorption level of 1.91 mW for 48h at 3.6 GHz. In our future work, we aim to investigate possible exposure effects at higher frequencies and exposures, and for immature stages.
27-Nov-2025
#Metronome-trained #monkeys can tap to the #beat of human #music
Macaques can tap along to a musical beat, according to a new study – findings that upend the assumption that only animals with vocal-learning abilities can find and move to a groove. According to the authors, the discovery offers fresh insights that suggest the roots of rhythm may run far deeper in our evolutionary past than previously believed. Humans have a unique ability to perceive and move in time to a steady musical beat. It is a skill that develops early in life and requires complex pattern recognition, prediction, and motor coordination. Outside of humans, the ability to synchronize movement to rhythm – isochronicity – is strikingly rare in the animal kingdom and has only been observed in some birds and exceptional individuals of other species, leaving a gap in our understanding of its evolutionary and neurobiological roots. One powerful leading theory, the vocal-learning hypothesis, suggests that rhythmic synchronization depends on specialized brain circuits that tightly link hearing and movement, which evolved to support complex vocal learning. However, previous research shows that macaques, despite not being vocal learners, can be trained to synchronize their taps predictively with metronome beats, hinting at the neural dynamics required for isochronicity. In this study, Vani Rajendran and colleagues investigated whether macaques trained to synchronize their taps with metronome beats could extend their metronome-tapping skills to real music in all its acoustic complexity. Rajendran et al. observed that two metronome-trained macaques independently initiated experimental trials in which they heard one of three human-selected songs and were rewarded when they tapped in time to each song’s tempo. Remarkably, both animals developed consistent tapping rhythms across all songs, and when the authors shifted the music’s tempo, the macaques’ tapping phases shifted as well, demonstrating that they were synchronizing to musical structure rather than responding reflexively to experimental cues. This behavior was observed even when the monkeys were presented with a song they had not yet heard before and when they were no longer rewarded for tapping to the beat. According to the authors, the findings suggest that, although monkeys do not experience music as fully as humans do and require substantial training, beat perception may span a broader evolutionary continuum than previously believed; it is not just restricted to vocal-learning species. “Rajendran et al. are careful to note that the abilities they observed are not natural behaviors: They were conditioned through extrinsic rewards, not the seemingly intrinsic ones that humans experience when they follow rhythmic beats,” write Asif Ghazanfar and Gavin Steingo in a related Perspective that highlights the study’s caveats. “A behavior that has been conditioned may not be equivalent to a behavior that emerges spontaneously.” Podcast: A segment of Science's weekly podcast with Vani Rajendran, related to this research, will be available on the Science.org podcast landing page [http://www.science.org/podcasts] after the embargo lifts. Reporters are free to make use of the segments for broadcast purposes and/or quote from them – with appropriate attribution (i.e., cite "Science podcast"). Please note that the file itself should not be posted to any other Web site.
Dr Ullas Karanth explaining the value of camera trap data to tiger conservationists
Niko Sirmpilatze
flypapers
michael
AboutZoos