
Scientists film inside a flying insect - seewhat
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001823
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jws
The basic setup is a stake on a turntable in the path of an X-ray beam. There
is a blower from above to simulate moving through air. Also included are a
stereo pair of high speed cameras. The hapless fly is glued to the stake and
rotated while he flaps in the air stream. They collect the X-ray data,
correlate it to wing position using the stereo cameras and reconstruct the 3d
model of the fly's interior at different phases of the wing flapping cycle.

Very nice science. Robert Hooke would be most impressed. There is an elegant
mastery of space and time here where they can interchange them freely to come
up with a result that makes sense.

␄

A tangent off in the weeds: There appear to be no legs on the fly in the
pictures. I presume some lab technician is tasked with pulling the legs off of
flies. Who knew that would be a job skill?

~~~
habi
<Disclosure>I work in the group where these experiments were performed. Marco
Stampanoni is my boss, Rajmund Mokso one of my office mates.</Disclosure>

The flies legs were not pulled off as far as I know (I can ask tomorrow). It's
simply that the field of view of the microtomographic setup is not big enough
to have the whole fly in it (at this magnification and speed). I.e. the sample
is bigger than the FOV, which we call "local tomography".

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CamperBob2
Awesome video clip buried in the paper:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6lBkK3J9wg&feature=youtu.be](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6lBkK3J9wg&feature=youtu.be)

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intslack
PLOS blog post on this paper:
[http://blogs.plos.org/biologue/2014/03/25/flies-
fly/](http://blogs.plos.org/biologue/2014/03/25/flies-fly/)

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seewhat
For the curious: When the HN-posting bookmarklet limited the length of the
article title, I lifted the title of the BBC News story.

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downer76
This isn't quite what I thought it might be. I thought it was going to be a
POV video, _from_ inside a flying house fly.

This is really an animated CT scan of a restrained house fly, studying the
mechanisms of its ability to propel itself through the air and maneuver during
flight.

The video is really cool:

[http://s3-eu-
west-1.amazonaws.com/files.figshare.com/1434931...](http://s3-eu-
west-1.amazonaws.com/files.figshare.com/1434931/Movie_S1.mov)

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primitivesuave
PETA is probably preparing a statement right now over the inhumane treatment
of flies in experiments like this.

