{"id":38673,"date":"2004-06-28T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-06-28T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2004\/06\/28\/ringside-seats-at-fruit-fly-fight-club\/"},"modified":"2004-06-28T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2004-06-28T07:00:00","slug":"ringside-seats-at-fruit-fly-fight-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20040628-00\/?p=38673","title":{"rendered":"Ringside seats at Fruit Fly Fight Club"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first rule of Fruit Fly Fight Club<\/a>: Flies can’t talk about Fruit Fly Fight Club. Because they can’t talk at all. At least not to humans.\n Researchers at Harvard Medical School took a break from studying lobster fighting<\/a> and shifted their focus to fruit fly fights, and even mutant fruit fly fights<\/a>.\n (Via The Annals of Improbable Research<\/a>.)\n Fruit flies are strange creatures. Or perhaps it’s that fruit fly researchers are strange creatures.\n One of my cousins was a fruit fly researcher. She took fruit fly testicles and squashed them and then studied them under a microscope, looking for… something… I forget. I think just finding the fruit fly testicles in the first place was accomplishment enough.\n Fruit fly researchers like to give their discoveries strange names. Typically, a gene is named after what results when you disable it. For example, a gene without which fruit flies die in two days is named Kenny<\/a>, after the South Park character.\n My favorite: The gene without which fruit flies get drunk really easily is called cheap date<\/a>. (That last page has several more funny gene names.)\n Yes, that’s right. Fruit flies get drunk<\/a>. There’s a fruit fly drunk-o-meter, though I forget how it works. But one amusing aspect of fruit fly drunkenness is that just before they finally pass out, there’s a big burst of activity.<\/p>\n

Strange gene naming has spread beyond the fruit fly world. There is a human gene named sonic hedgehog<\/a> after the Sega video game character. (It’s related to the fruit fly gene “hedgehog”, so named because disabling it causes the fly to develop into a ball with spikes.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first rule of Fruit Fly Fight Club: Flies can’t talk about Fruit Fly Fight Club. Because they can’t talk at all. At least not to humans. Researchers at Harvard Medical School took a break from studying lobster fighting and shifted their focus to fruit fly fights, and even mutant fruit fly fights. (Via The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-38673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

The first rule of Fruit Fly Fight Club: Flies can’t talk about Fruit Fly Fight Club. Because they can’t talk at all. At least not to humans. Researchers at Harvard Medical School took a break from studying lobster fighting and shifted their focus to fruit fly fights, and even mutant fruit fly fights. (Via The […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38673\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}