During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, while the rest of us were binge-watching TV shows and baking banana bread, a couple of researchers at Johns Hopkins University took their minds off the healthcare crisis by counting the brain cells of fruit flies and mosquitoes.
The researchers, Joshua Raji and Christopher Potter, discovered that the two animals had around 200,000 brain cells on average, mostly neurons, with about 10 to 15 percent non-neuronal cells, such as glial cells. (Glial cells are the brain's connective tissue, providing a supportive network for neurons, though they have some important metabolic functions as well).
Compared to larger animals, that's not a lot of neurons. Humans have approximately 86 billion neurons, and mice have about 12 billion. But don't be too quick to write off these tiny critters as dunderheads. Fruit flies feel pain, have working memory, make predictions about the future and even ...
