Fly ball: Drosophila can learn while playing with tiny spheres

For more than a century, the fruit fly has been a workhorse of the biological sciences that has helped scientists to make fundamental breakthroughs in fields such as genetics and neuroscience. As it turns out, human scientists are not the only ones learning during these experiments. A recent study by Harvard neuroscientists in Current Biology shows how fruit flies are themselves figuring things out—in this case, how to manipulate balls with "play-like" experimentation.