What happened
President Joe Biden took an aerial tour over Asheville, North Carolina, yesterday to view the devastation from Hurricane Helene. He also ordered the Pentagon to deploy 1,000 active-duty troops to help deliver food, water and other services, joining thousands of federal emergency personnel and National Guard members working in areas hit by the storm. Vice President Kamala Harris took a separate trip to Augusta, Georgia.

Who said what
"The president and I have been paying close attention from the beginning to what we need to do to make sure the federal resources hit the ground as quickly as possible," Harris said in Augusta. "We are here for the long haul." She said the federal government would cover 100% of debris removal and other emergency measures for three months. Harris also handed out food at a community center and toured the local emergency operations center, telling first responders, "I'm here to thank you and to listen."

The vice president's Georgia trip, where she tested out the "role of consoler-in-chief," offered a "stark contrast to the overtly political posture Donald Trump took" during his visit to the state on Monday, Politico said. But "Trump's knack for politicking off disasters has proved a vulnerability for the Biden administration" in the past, The New York Times said, pointing to Trump's 2023 visit to East Palestine, Ohio, after a toxic train derailment.

What next?
Biden is scheduled to visit "impacted communities" in Georgia and Florida today, the White House said. Harris is putting back on her campaign hat to visit Wisconsin today and Michigan on Friday, though she is "later set to travel to North Carolina to assess storm damage," the Times said.

What happened
A consortium of scientists published the first complete map of a fruit fly's brain yesterday in the journal Nature. Identifying and charting the 130,000 neurons and 50 million connections inside the poppy seed–sized brain of the fly, Drosophila melanogaster, took 10 years and involved hundreds of researchers worldwide.

Who said what
Scientists had mapped the 300-neuron brain of a tiny worm, but this is "the first time we've had a complete map of any complex brain," said Mala Murthy, a Princeton neurobiologist who helped lead the FlyWire project. The "stunning detail" of the "tremendous complexity" packed into the fruit fly's tiny brain could "reveal principles that apply to other species, including humans, whose brains have 86 billion neurons," The New York Times said.

The "beautiful" and complex "tangle of wiring" mapped out in computer simulations may hold the "key to explaining how such a tiny organ can carry out so many powerful computational tasks," like sight, hearing and movement, the BBC said. 

What next?
This "amazing technical feat" paves the way for mapping the neural pathways of "larger brains such as the mouse and, maybe in several decades, our own," brain researcher Lucia Prieto Godino of London's Francis Crick Institute told the BBC. A mouse brain "contains about 1,000 times as many neurons as a fly," while the human brains has a million times more, the Times said, and scientists recognize that "bigger brains may not follow" the same "fundamental rules" for sending signals quickly across a fly's brain.