The physical manifestations of the disease that Alois Alzheimer noticed in 1906 are sticky plaques of one type of protein, now known as beta-amyloid, and nerve-cell-engulfing tangles of a second type, called tau protein.

ECONOMIST: Alzheimer's disease

With the help of Chiara Cirelli, who also works at the University of Wisconsin, Dr Tononi has created a mutant fruit fly that sleeps only two or three hours a night. (A normal fly sleeps between eight and 14 hours.) The mutation itself is in a gene for a nerve-cell protein of a type known as an ion channel.

ECONOMIST: Memory formation

Specifically, she used antibodies to a particular type of the protein, known as collagen I, that had been extracted from chickens.

ECONOMIST: Some 68m-year-old evidence that birds are dinosaurs