Two Drosophila articles accepted for publication

Last week two of our manuscripts were accepted by the peer-reviewed journal Learning & Memory. They will appear back to back in the same issue. Those are my first back to back publications and I’m happy it turned out that way.The articles are about how fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) learn what is important in their environment and how they use this information to form flexible memories. For instance, the flies learn that certain visual patterns in their environment can predict dangerous heat. If this predictive learning takes place in a colored background (say, green), the flies are flexible enough to treat the "dangerous" patterns still as dangerous in a new background color (one they can distinguish from green, say, blue-green). If however, these same colors indicate that different sets of patterns are dangerous in different colors, the flies can learn such "if-then" relationships as well. For example, the animals can learn: "if the background is ...