Profile

I moved to the UK four years ago with my family, and we live in Cambridge. My daughter is 6 and my son is 2. all of us can speak two languages, Hebrew and English. it is nice to have our family’s ‘secret language’. I also speak some German because we lived in Germany for 7 years before moving to Cambridge. I like Cambridge because I can get everywhere cycling, for example to take my children to school and to go to lab. where I grew up everybody travel with cars, and cycling is much nicer. I love theatre and besides science, I also studied acting, and I perform myself sometimes on stage.
Now that everybody stay at home, I spend my time home-schooling my daughter and playing with my son, we spend a lot of time in our garden, and we have planted vegetables.

Just like people, fruit-flies have to make important decisions all the time. they need to find food when they are hungry, to find friends when they are lonely and to find a place to sleep when they are tired. Inside their tiny head, their brain is collecting information about the world around, using the five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. This information can help the fly to make a decision. The human brain is organized in a similar way to a fly brain, and scientists can learn a lot about humans from studying very simple animals such as flies. For example when a hungry fly smells something like a fruit, it needs to decide whether it is a delicious fruit for eating, or a bad one. It is dangerous to eat something bad or rotten, as you can get sick. Flies are very good at choosing only good food to eat. How does the brain know to make the right decision?

Finding a friend is an even more complicated decision. what do you notice when you get to know someone new? The behaviour of the other person is important. This is true for flies too! When two flies meet, they use their senses to decide if they like each other. when a male fly (boy) and a female fly (girl) meet each other, the male makes a show for the female: he dances and sings to her, and has a special smell, like a perfume. The female is using her senses: watching, listening and smelling, to decide if she likes him or not.

In the video you can see two flies, a male and a female, as they meet for the first itme. The male has a blue dot and the female has a red dot, which I added to the video. The male is singing and dancing around the female, spreading one wing to the side and going in circles around her. The female is watching and listening. What will she decide?

The human brain works in a similar way to brains of all other animals, including flies. So, understanding how the fly brain makes decisions can help us understand how people and animals collect information, think, and behave.

I keep flies for my experiments in little bottles with food, in a warm room in the lab. I look after them and give them fresh food when they need it. for some experiments, I put two flies together and watch their behaviour. I record them with a video camera to watch and analyse later. Using genetics, scientists can change some properties of flies such as their eye colour or wing shape. I use different types of flies for different experiments. I also use a microscope to look on their tiny brain from up close.

I listen to other scientists and read about what they have done, because maybe they had similar questions to my questions, and we can learn from each other.