snails with the beard - Day

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10:59PM - welcome worm

In a laboratory in Germany, a tiny worm dances to flashes of light. A flash of yellow and it darts forward. A flash of blue and it jerks back. Yellow, forward, blue, back - right on cue every time.

The worm is not a toy or a robot but a living creature. It has been engineered so that its nerves and muscles can be controlled with light. With each flash of blue its neurons fire electric pulses, causing the muscles they control to clench. A flash of yellow stops the nerves firing, relaxing the worm's muscles and lengthening its body once again.

The worm is in the vanguard of a revolution in brain science - the most spectacular application yet of a technology that allows scientists to turn individual brain cells on and off at will. "It's really changing the whole field of neuroscience," says the worm's developer, neurobiologist Alexander Gottschalk at the University of Frankfurt.

newscientist.com