The brains of flies are wired to avoid the swatter, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

At the mere hint of a threat, the insects adjust their preflight stance to flee in the opposite direction, ensuring a clean getaway, they said in a finding that helps explain why flies so easily evade swipes from their human foes.

“These movements are made very rapidly, within about 200 milliseconds, but within that time the animal determines where the threat is coming from and activates an appropriate set of movements to position its legs and wings,” Michael Dickinson of the California Institute of Technology said in a statement.

“This illustrates how rapidly the fly’s brain can process sensory information into an appropriate motor response,” said Dickinson, whose research appears in the journal Current Biology.

Dickinson’s team studied this process in fruit flies using high-speed digital imaging equipment and a fancy fly swatter.

In response to a threat from the front, the fly moves its middle legs forward, leans back and raises its back legs for a backward takeoff. If the threat is from the side, the fly leans the other way before takeoff.

The findings offer new insight into the fly nervous system, and lends a few clues on how to outsmart a fly.

“It is best not to swat at the fly’s starting position,” Dickinson said. Instead, aim for the escape route.

Dickinson, a bioengineer, has devoted his life’s work to the study of insect flight. He has built a tiny robotic fly called Robofly and a 3-D visual flight simulator called Fly-O-Vision

As I was scrolling through Google News, an article titled “Microsoft vs. Google” added 9 hours ago caught my eye. How could a title like that not?

Clicking through, I was taken to this article:

Now hang on a second, Google can’t even crawl the latest news properly anymore? Surely it’s smart enough to carry out a date check?

A gorilla at a zoo in the German city of Muenster is refusing to let go of her dead baby’s body several days after it died of unknown causes.
The gorilla at a German zoo has been carrying around her dead baby since he died last week.

Allwetter Zoo spokeswoman Ilona Zuehlke says the 3-month-old male baby died on Saturday but its 11-year-old mother continues to carry its body around. Zuehlke says such behavior is not uncommon to gorillas.

Zuehlke says the mother “is mourning and must say goodbye.” The mother gorilla is named Gana.

Signs were posted near Gana’s enclosure Wednesday to explain the situation to visitors. A staff member is also present to answer questions.

The baby was named Claudio and was Gana’s second baby. She had a female baby in 2007 that now lives at the Stuttgart Zoo.

A monkey stopped morning commuters in their tracks at one Tokyo’s busiest subway stations this week, as it curiously peered down at them from its perch atop the departures and arrivals board.

Monday marked the third time a monkey has been spotted in the capital this month — surprising, because the beasts usually live in the mountains and hills outside Tokyo, more than a two-hour train ride away from the city center.

Surprised commuters snapped cell phone pictures of the simian, while about 30 police officers scrambled to rope off the area.

They held up green nets and tarps, trying to coax the animal down from the overheard electronic board.

The monkey jumped over the officers’ heads, leaped into the crowd and scampered out fo the station, with police in hot pursuit.

In the end, the monkey got away. But it was enough to make Japanese media go bananas.

Reporters looked for the animal throughout Shibuya, an entertainment district most familiar to Western audiences as one of two locations where the movie “Lost in Translation” was filmed.

Bloggers posted their cell phone videos online, with comments such as, “Poor little guy looks scared to death.”

A monkey was spotted in metropolitan Tokyo’s Koganei city on August 12 and in Setagaya on Monday.

Officials do not know whether it is the same sightseeing simian wandering around Tokyo.

Japanese law requires a license to keep a monkey as a pet. A check of license holders in Tokyo revealed that no one had reported a monkey missing, a city spokeswoman said.

Officials are hoping people will call in additional sightings. They worry that while the animal looks cute, it could pose a danger to commuters — as all wild animals might.

A 27-year-old Egyptian woman gave birth to septuplets early Saturday in the coastal city of Alexandria, family members and the hospital director said.

Ghazala Khamis was in good condition after having a blood transfusion during her Caesarean section due to bleeding, said Emad Darwish, director of the El-Shatbi Hospital where she gave birth.

The newborns, four boys and three girls, weigh between 3.2 pounds and 6.17 pounds and are in stable condition, Darwish said. They have been placed in incubators in four different hospitals that have special premature baby units, he said.

“This is a very rare pregnancy — something I have never witnessed over my past 33 years in this profession,” Darwish told The Associated Press by phone from the hospital.

Darwish decided to carry out the Caesarean section at the end of Khamis’ eighth month of pregnancy due to the pressure on her kidneys. He said Khamis, who already has three daughters, took fertility drugs in an effort to have a son.

Khamis, the wife of a farmer in the northern Egyptian province of Beheira, was admitted to the hospital two months earlier, Darwish said.
“From the initial checkup, I say that none of the babies have any sort of deformities or incomplete organs,” Darwish said.

The woman’s brother, Khamis Khamis, said even though his sister was trying to conceive more children so she could have a son, the family was astonished when they found out she would give birth to multiple babies.

“We thought about an abortion, but then we felt it’s religiously forbidden. So we said ‘Let God’s will prevail,’” he told the AP by phone.

Egypt’s health minister announced that the seven babies will receive free milk and diapers for two years, the brother added.

A man with a black hood pours water on the face of a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit strapped to a table: no, it’s not Guantanamo Bay naval base, but New York’s Coney Island amusement park.

The scene using robotic dolls is an installation built by artist Steve Powers to criticize waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique the United States has admitted using on terrorism suspects, but that rights group say is torture.

“Waterboard Thrill Ride” beckons a sign along with cartoon character “SpongeBob SquarePants” who appears tied down and exclaiming: “It don’t Gitmo better!”

The public can peek through window bars and feed a dollar into the slot to bring the robotic dolls into action, one more attraction in the beachfront amusement park in the New York neighborhood of Brooklyn.

“Anyone can see this is painful from 50 feet away,” said Powers, who had previously been painting signs and storefronts in the area. “I wanted people to understand the psychological ramifications of this.”

Marion Tracey, 57, from New Jersey, said she found the installation disturbing. It made her think of her father who had nightmares after returning from World War II. “In all wars, horrible things happen,” she said. “I’d rather not see it.”

Alex Soto, 23, said he thought it was a good thing for people to learn about waterboarding, but he added: “It is pretty twisted.”