There's a bio professor at my university, Michael Dickinson, who is one of the world's leading experts on flies, so much so that his email handle is "flyman". H

There's a bio professor at my university, Michael Dickinson, who is one of the world's leading experts on flies, so much so that his email handle is "flyman". His group is trying to understand the relationship between the fruit fly's biological structure and it's behavior. They do all these zany experiments with motion tracking where they observe a bunch of flies interacting and try to figure out what's going on in their brains. Really cool stuff. I've always felt that if we could understand the genes -> cells -> systems -> behavior pathway much better then our understanding of the world might be completely transformed... I think octopuses would be an especially interesting model organism to study.