Over the past two decades, Michael Dickinson has been interviewed by reporters hundreds of times about his research on the biomechanics of insect flight. One question from the press has always dogged him: Why are flies so hard to swat?

There are few things more irritating than a fly buzzing around the house. South Africans have an unconventional solution to the problem. They hang up a bunch of Roridula gorgonias leaves.

Fruit flies fine-tune their olfactory systems by recalibrating the sensitivity of different odor channels in response to changing concentrations of environmental cues, a new study has shown. Disable this calibration system, and flies have trouble finding a mate, the researchers found.

Seminal fluid contains protein factors that, when transferred from a male to a female at mating, affect reproductive success. This is true of many different animals, from crickets to primates. In fruit flies, for instance, seminal fluid proteins influence the competitive ability of a male's sperm, and alter the female's post-mating behavior by dampening her interest in other males and cueing her to lay eggs.

For male fruit flies, sperm is not enough in the battle to reproduce – at each mating a cocktail of proteins is transferred to the female, many of which directly influence female behaviours in ways that benefit the male. In a new paper, published in this week's PLoS Biology, the online open access journal, a team of biologists from Willie Swanson's lab have investigated these proteins using a new method that is able to identify male proteins in mated females.

Male fruit flies missing a gene for one particular odor receptor become clueless in matters of love, scientists at Duke University Medical Center have discovered.

The nerve connections that keep a fly's gaze stable during complex aerial manoeuvres, enabling it to respond quickly to obstacles in its flight path, are revealed in new detail in research published today (22 July 2008).

Good pollen makes bees hot, biologists at UC San Diego have found. Wasps warm up too when they find protein-rich meat, a separate experiment has shown.

The Drosophila simulans species complex continues to serve as an important model system for the study of new species formation. The complex is comprised of the cosmopolitan species, D. simulans, and two island endemics, D. mauritiana and D. sechellia.

Flies, unlike humans, can't manipulate the temperature of their surroundings so they need to pick the best spot for flourishing. New Brandeis University research in this week's Nature reveals that they have internal thermosensors to help them.

Every year, one million Europeans are confronted with potentially irreparable brain or spinal cord injuries resulting from traffic accidents. Because the nerves in a damaged spinal cord cannot, or cannot fully, be repaired, the patient remains (partially) paralyzed. Now, VIB scientists connected to the K.U.Leuven have become the first to successfully develop a simple model that enables the study of injured brain tissue.

When a young gene known as sphinx is inactivated in the common fruit fly, it leads to increased male-male courtship, scientists report in the May 27, 2008, issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.