Closest temperate world orbiting quiet star discovered

This artist's impression shows the temperate planet Ross 128 b, with its red dwarf parent star in the background. This planet, which lies only 11 light-years from Earth, was found by a team using ESO's unique planet-hunting HARPS instrument. The new world is now the second-closest temperate planet to be detected after Proxima b. It is also the closest planet to be discovered orbiting an inactive red dwarf star, which may increase the likelihood that this planet could potentially sustain life. Ross 128 b will be a prime target for ESO's Extremely Large Telescope, which will be able to search for biomarkers in the planet's atmosphere.

A team working with ESO's High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) at the La Silla Observatory in Chile has found that the red dwarf star Ross 128 is orbited by a low-mass exoplanet every 9.9 days. This Earth-sized world is expected to be temperate, with a surface temperature that may also be close to that of the Earth. Ross 128 is the "quietest" nearby star to host such a temperate exoplanet.

"This discovery is based on more than a decade of HARPS intensive monitoring together with state-of-the-art data reduction and analysis techniques. Only HARPS has demonstrated such a precision and it remains the best planet hunter of its kind, 15 years after it began operations," explains Nicola Astudillo-Defru (Geneva Observatory -- University of Geneva, Switzerland), who co-authored the discovery paper.

Red dwarfs are some of the coolest, faintest -- and most common -- stars in the Universe. This makes them very good targets in the search for exoplanets and so they are increasingly being studied. In fact, lead author Xavier Bonfils (Institut de Planétologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble -- Université Grenoble-Alpes/CNRS, Grenoble, France), named their HARPS programme The shortcut to happiness, as it is easier to detect small cool siblings of Earth around these stars, than around stars more similar to the Sun.

Many red dwarf stars, including Proxima Centauri, are subject to flares that occasionally bathe their orbiting planets in deadly ultraviolet and X-ray radiation. However, it seems that Ross 128 is a much quieter star, and so its planets may be the closest known comfortable abode for possible life.

Although it is currently 11 light-years from Earth, Ross 128 is moving towards us and is expected to become our nearest stellar neighbour in just 79 000 years -- a blink of the eye in cosmic terms. Ross 128 b will by then take the crown from Proxima b and become the closest exoplanet to Earth!

With the data from HARPS, the team found that Ross 128 b orbits 20 times closer than the Earth orbits the Sun. Despite this proximity, Ross 128 b receives only 1.38 times more irradiation than the Earth. As a result, Ross 128 b's equilibrium temperature is estimated to lie between -60 and 20°C, thanks to the cool and faint nature of its small red dwarf host star, which has just over half the surface temperature of the Sun. While the scientists involved in this discovery consider Ross 128b to be a temperate planet, uncertainty remains as to whether the planet lies inside, outside, or on the cusp of the habitable zone, where liquid water may exist on a planet's surface.

Astronomers are now detecting more and more temperate exoplanets, and the next stage will be to study their atmospheres, composition and chemistry in more detail. Vitally, the detection of biomarkers such as oxygen in the very closest exoplanet atmospheres will be a huge next step, which ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is in prime position to take.

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Scientists create yellow, three-eyed, wingless mosquitoes by using gene editing tool

CRISPR/Cas9-mediated disruption of genes associated with cuticle pigment caused mosquitoes to turn from black to yellow, and disruption of genes associated with eye pigment caused eye color to change from black to white.

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have developed transgenic mosquitoes that stably express the Cas9 enzyme in their germline. The addition of Cas9 will enable the use of the CRISPR gene editing tool to make efficient, targeted changes to the mosquitoes' DNA.

As proof of concept, the researchers used the system to disrupt cuticle, wing, and eye development, producing completely yellow, three-eyed and wingless mosquitoes. Their long-term goal is to use Cas9-expressing mosquitoes together with another technology -- called gene drives -- to insert and spread genes that suppress the insects while avoiding the resistance that evolution would typically favor. Aedes aegypti are major carriers of dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever, and zika viruses, and are rapidly becoming resistant to commonly used pesticides.

Published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the study was led by Omar Akbari, an assistant professor of entomology in UCR's College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences and a member of the university's Institute for Integrative Genome Biology.

Previous efforts to use genome editing to prevent mosquitoes from spreading pathogens have been hampered by low mutation rates, poor survival of edited mosquitoes, and inefficient transmission of disrupted genes to offspring. Akbari and colleagues developed transgenic mosquitoes that stably express a bacterial Cas9 enzyme in the germline, enabling highly efficient genome editing using the CRISPR system. CRISPR works like a pair of molecular scissors, cutting out and replacing specific DNA sequences based on a ribonucleic acid (RNA) guide. In the paper, the team used the system to disrupt genes that control vision, flight and feeding, resulting in mosquitoes with an extra eye, malformed wings, and defects in eye and cuticle color, among other changes.

Akbari said these strains represent the first step toward using gene drive systems to control mosquito populations and reduce the diseases they spread.

"These Cas9 strains can be used to develop split-gene drives which are a form of gene-drive by which the Cas9 and the guide RNA's are inserted at separate genomic loci and depend on each other for spread. This is the safest way to develop and test gene drives in the laboratory to ensure no spread into the wild," Akbari said.

Gene drives greatly increase the odds that a gene or set of genes will be passed on to offspring -- from 50 percent to 99 percent. This number can potentially increase to 100 percent when a target gene is disrupted in multiple sites, a technique called multiplexing that has recently been mathematically modeled by Akbari and colleagues at UC Berkley.

Gene drives can be used to bias genetic inheritance in favor of rapidly spreading, self-destructive genes -- such as those that disrupt fertility -- and could be an environmentally friendly and cost-effective way to suppress populations of disease-spreading insects.

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Earthquakes on Venus Could Be Detected by an Atmospheric Balloon

Venus’s atmosphere is the heaviest of any planet in the solar system, roughly equivalent to deep-ocean pressure at a depth of 1 kilometer. The crushing weight and layers of sulfuric acid make it utterly inhospitable — but investigators could read the planet’s atmospheric pressure from above to find earthquakes on the hellish surface.

A team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory proposes deploying a balloon in the upper reaches of Venus’s atmosphere that would be equipped with a sensor to detect seismic activity.

“On Venus, the atmosphere has about 90 times the pressure as what you find on the surface of the Earth. It's almost like an ocean surrounding the solid crust,” Siddharth Krishnamoorthy, a postdoctoral associate with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a member of the team working on the Venus mission, told Seeker. He and his colleagues will present the proposal at the American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans on Thursday, Dec. 14.

Floating at 34 miles above the surface, the balloon would operate in Earth-like pressure and temperature conditions, no extra shielding needed. It would also be safe from the oven-like temperatures on the surface (864 degrees Fahrenheit or 462 degrees Celsius) that could fry unprotected spacecraft in seconds. There's even enough sunlight available to run the balloon's instruments on solar power.

When an earthquake occurs on Venus, the theory goes, it generates pressure waves in radio frequencies. These are below what human ears hear, but instruments would be able to pick them up.

“In principle, they can be detected by the very sensitive pressure sensors on the balloon,” said Krishnamoorthy.

The ideal mission profile would see the balloon fly anywhere between six months and a year.

“It's not unheard of to be able to deploy a balloon at Venus,” Krishnamoorthy pointed out. The Soviet Union successfully flew balloons during the Vega 1 and 2 missions in 1984, though they each only lasted about two days before their batteries died. “The technology has been demonstrated before, but we need to prolong the lifespan.”

The Soviet Union landed several probes on Venus from the 1960s to 1980s, and ran orbital missions besides. Other notable missions to Venus include NASA’s Magellan (1990-1993), the European Space Agency’s Venus Express (2005-2014), and Japan's Akatsuki, which entered orbit in 2015 after a failed attempt in 2010.

These missions mapped the surface of Venus and gave insights into activity in its atmosphere. The surface appears extremely young, geologically speaking, and there are likely active volcanoes on Venus’s surface. But we don’t know very much about the planet's seismic activity or its interior.

“We know, with a degree of certainty, that Venus has no global plate tectonics like on Earth,” Krishnamoorthy said. “Below the surface, there is seismic activity of a different nature, but we don't know exactly what.”

Sending a probe of this kind to Venus would require hundreds of millions of dollars, so Krishnamoorthy cautioned this is a very early-stage study. The team is keeping an eye out for NASA's announcements of opportunity for solar system missions. Perhaps the spacecraft could be paired with another mission, or maybe it could be launched on its own. In either case, the balloon wouldn’t get there for many years.

Meanwhile, the team, led by Attila Komjathy, the principal investigator of the JPL’s Ionospheric and Atmospheric Remote Sensing Group, is refining the sensor technology here on Earth. The group recently produced an artificial earthquake in water, and are preparing to disclose details about the experiment at AGU. The next step will be flying a probe in Earth’s stratosphere and looking for any naturally occurring earthquakes.

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Early-life behavior of grey seal pups at sea

This is a grey seal pup.

Male and female grey seal pups show distinct behavioural differences as they learn to forage in the early stages of their independence, according to new research which scientists believe could be crucial to the future protection of their habitat.

The pups are abandoned by their mothers when they are just three weeks old, with many of them never having ventured into the sea, let alone sourced their own food.

In a critical period lasting around 40 days after going to sea, pups have to find regular sources of food and perfect their diving and prey-catching techniques before their energy stores run out.

Using data from tracking devices, scientists showed that female pups from Welsh colonies were more likely to dive in shallower water than their male counterparts, reaching the seabed more frequently and likely having greater feeding opportunities as a result.

Although adult male grey seals are much larger than females, there is no significant difference in body size at this age and scientists think the differences in behaviour of pups may be driven by underlying physiological processes that prepare them for adult life.

The study also presented data of young seals from Scotland, showing them heading across the North Sea as far as Norway, while individuals from West Wales travelled as far as the northern coast of France. Some of the seals remained at sea without returning to land for up to two months during this early developmental phase.

The research was conducted by academics from the University of Plymouth, the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St Andrews and Abertay University, and is published in Scientific Reports.

Scientists believe the insights it provides into the initial foraging behaviour of grey seal pups around the UK could be important for the development of future protection of key habitat for these animals when they are at their most vulnerable.

Matt Carter, a PhD student within the Marine Vertebrate Research Group at the University of Plymouth, led the research. He said: "Grey seals are a top predator in UK seas, but we know very little about the early-life behaviour of young pups at sea. In the first three weeks of their lives, whilst suckling on land, they can treble in mass, but they are then abandoned and have to fend for themselves. This study fills in some of the blanks with regards to what happens when they go to sea, and will help us to understand more about the types of habitat that are important for their development."

The UK is home to around 40% of the world grey seal population and has an obligation under European Union legislation to maintain them in favourable conservation status. As part of that, critical habitats must be identified both on land and at sea where disturbance caused by human activity is minimised.

This study used data from 52 recently-weaned grey seal pups from colonies in Scotland and Wales, tagged by the Sea Mammal Research Unit. The tracking devices recorded their movements including dive duration and depth as well as location data.

The results show that in the first 40 days after leaving the colony, the pups show a fast rate of behavioural development, which includes increasing their dive performance and learning where best to source food.

Dr Clare Embling, Lecturer in Marine Ecology, said: "This initial stage is when the pups are at their most vulnerable and juvenile survival is important to sustain stable populations. Seals are facing increasing threats, such as fisheries bycatch and increasing noise from shipping and construction activities, which we are continuing to explore as part of our wider research."

Read more at Science Daily

Anatomy of a cosmic snake reveals structure of distant galaxies

The Cosmic Snake is the image of a distant galaxy, deflected by a strong gravitational lens.

We have a fair understanding of the fundamental mechanisms that regulate star formation in galaxies, from the interstellar matter to the diffuse clouds distributed in space, whose gravitational contraction leads to the birth of stars within large stellar clusters. But observations of distant galaxies have questioned this picture, the size and mass of these distant stellar nurseries largely exceeding that of their local counterparts. An international team of astrophysicists led by the Universities of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, for the observations and Zurich (UZH) for the simulations has tackled this inconsistency, which seems to question our knowledge of star formation when we study the early Universe, far away in time and space. They have found the first answers thanks to the observation of the Cosmic Snake. Their study is published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The study of star formation relies on the coordinated work of several international teams that perform observations on different scales. The Hubble Space Telescope, when pointed toward high-redshift galaxies, studies in detail very distant objects when the Universe was much younger than its present age, far away from us both in time and space.

These observations have triggered an unexpected debate amongst astronomers: in the distant past, was star formation governed by different laws or physical conditions? This is what data from the Hubble Space Telescope was apparently suggesting when observations of distant galaxies revealed the presence of giant star forming regions, clumps of gas and stars attaining sizes as large as 3000 light-years, a thousand times larger than those observed in the nearby Universe. And these giant clumps, intriguingly, appeared to be ubiquitous in high-redshift galaxies.

The need for a gravitational telescope

The distance that separates us from these objects prevents their detailed observation, but the astronomers have overcome this difficulty exploiting gravitational lensing, a powerful "instrument" that is offered by the Universe itself, and the laws that govern it. The telescope is pointed in direction of an extremely massive object able to deviate with its gravitational field the path of the light coming from a more distant galaxy located behind it. The light is deflected by the massive object, creating thus multiple and amplified images of the galaxy. In our case, the astronomers have pointed Hubble at a huge gravitational lens, which generates several stretched, warped and almost overlapping images of the galaxy, featuring a true Cosmic Snake in the sky. "The amplified image is more precise, luminous, and allows us to observe details up to 100 times smaller," explains Antonio Cava, lead author of the study and Research and Teaching fellow in the Department of Astronomy at the UNIGE.

The fact that the image of the source galaxy is repeated five times at different spatial resolutions allows, for the first time, to perform a direct comparison and to establish the intrinsic structure -- and size -- of the observed giant clumps. Far from concluding that different laws hold in the young and distant Universe, the international team of astronomers led by UNIGE, and including researchers from the CNRS, the Universities of Zurich and Lyon, and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, have discovered that the giants clumps are in reality not so large and massive as suggested by previous Hubble observations, but that they are intrinsically smaller or composed by multiple and unresolved small components, something that was not possible to directly prove so far. The researchers are thus supporting the simulations developed by Valentina Tamburello from the Institute of Computational Science at UZH. Co-author of the study, she stresses that "thanks to the incredibly high resolution of the cosmic snake, we were able to compare our calculations with the UNIGE observations and confirm their match. This was an incredible luck for us."

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When water met iron deep inside the Earth, did it create conditions for life?

An illustration from the paper showing oxygen and hydrogen cycling in the deep Earth.

Reservoirs of oxygen-rich iron between Earth's core and mantle could have played a major role in Earth's history, including the breakup of supercontinents, drastic changes in Earth's atmospheric makeup, and the creation of life, according to recent work from an international research team published in National Science Review.

The team -- which includes scientists from Carnegie, Stanford University, the Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research in China, and the University of Chicago -- probed the chemistry of iron and water under the extreme temperatures and pressures of Earth's core-mantle boundary.

When the action of plate tectonics draws water-containing minerals down deep enough to meet Earth's iron core, the extreme conditions cause the iron to grab oxygen atoms from the water molecules and set the hydrogen atoms free. The hydrogen escapes to the surface, but the oxygen gets trapped into crystalline iron dioxide, which can only exist under such intense pressures and temperatures.

Using theoretical calculations as well as laboratory experiments to recreate the environment of the core-mantle boundary, the team determined that iron dioxide can be created using a laser-heated diamond anvil cell to put materials under between about 950 and 1 million times normal atmospheric pressure and more than 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

"Based on our knowledge of the chemical makeup of the slabs that are drawn into Earth's deep interior by plate tectonics, we think 300 million tons of water could be carried down to meet iron in the core and generate massive iron dioxide rocks each year," said lead author Ho-kwang "Dave" Mao.

These extremely oxygen-rich solid rocks may accumulate steadily year-by-year above the core, growing into gigantic, continent-like sizes. A geological event that heated up these iron dioxide rocks could cause a massive eruption, suddenly releasing a great deal of oxygen to the surface.

The authors hypothesize that such an oxygen explosion could put a tremendous amount of the gas into Earth's atmosphere -- enough to cause the so-called Great Oxygenation Event, which occurred about 2.5 billion years ago and created our oxygen-rich atmosphere, conditions that kickstarted the rise oxygen-dependent life as we know it.

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Earliest Evidence of Grape Wine-Making Discovered From 8,000 Years Ago

Scientific analysis of 8,000-year-old pottery jars unearthed in Georgia offers the world’s earliest evidence of grape wine-making, dating the tradition almost 1,000 years earlier than previously thought, researchers said Monday.

Before, the oldest known chemical evidence of wine in the Near East dated to 5,400-5,000 BC (about 7,000 years ago) and was from the Zagros Mountains of Iran, said the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal.

The world’s very first wine is thought to have been made from rice in China around 9,000 years ago, followed by the grape-based alcohol in Iran.

“We believe this is the oldest example of the domestication of a wild-growing Eurasian grapevine solely for the production of wine,” said co-author Stephen Batiuk, a senior research associate at the University of Toronto.

Scientists on the team came from the United States, Canada, Denmark, France, Italy, Israel and Georgia. They have been working for the past four years to re-analyze archeological sites that were found decades ago.

The fragments of ceramic casks, some decorated with grape motifs, were found at two archeological sites called Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) south of the Georgian capital Tbilisi.

Scientists used new methods to analyze the residue preserved inside — specifically, an exacting chemical technique known as tandem liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry-mass spectrometry, or LC-MS-MS.

This chemical analysis “confirmed tartaric acid, the fingerprint compound for grape and wine,” said the PNAS report.

Researchers also found three associated organic acids — malic, succinic and citric — in the residue from the eight jars.

This “discovery dates the origin of the practice to the Neolithic period around 6,000 BC, pushing it back 600-1,000 years from the previously accepted date,” according to the study.

‘Social lubricant’

The Neolithic period began around 15,200 BC in parts of the Middle East and ended between 4,500 and 2,000 BC.

During this era, people began farming, domesticating animals, making polished stone tools, crafts and weaving, researchers said.

“Pottery, which was ideal for processing, serving and storing fermented beverages, was invented in this period together with many advances in art, technology and cuisine,” said Batiuk.

“As a medicine, social lubricant, mind-altering substance, and highly-valued commodity, wine became the focus of religious cults, pharmacopeias, cuisines, economics, and society throughout the ancient Near East,” he said.

People in Georgia cultivated the Eurasian grapevine, Vitis vinifera, which likely grew abundantly under environmental conditions similar to modern-day France and Italy.

“The domestication of the grape apparently led eventually led to the emergence of a wine culture in the region,” said Batiuk. “The Eurasian grapevine that now accounts for 99.9 per cent of wine made in the world today, has its roots in Caucasia.”

Read more at Seeker

Sheep Recognize the Faces of Obama and Other People in Photographs

Sheep deciding whether or not to choose a photograph of former US president Barack Obama or an image of another person in a study that tested how well these animals identify people based on images alone.

Sheep are not usually on the short list of the world’s most intelligent animals. They seem to be more associated with insomnia cures — envisioned furry passive creatures jumping over a fence — or children’s nursery rhymes like "Little Bo Peep."

In reality, studies over the past decade show that sheep brainpower can be comparable to that of many primates, with sheep sometimes matching human skills, depending on the given test.

The latest finding, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, shows sheep can be trained to recognize human faces from two-dimensional portraits, and can identify a picture of their handler without prior training.

“I knew before that they had very good recognition skills,” senior author Jenny Morton from the University of Cambridge’s department of psychiatry told Seeker. “When I picked them up from the field, to work them over to the arena where they were about to be tested, they would come up running. If it was someone else, they would just stay where they were, or hide in the last corner of the field.”

She added that they even recognized her after a 6-month break.

How animals like sheep recognize us, however, has remained unclear. As for identifying each other, smells and sounds play key roles, but photos remove those cues. Sheep do not even see the world the same way that we do.

“They have very different vision from humans,” lead author Franziska Knolle, also from the University of Cambridge, explained to Seeker, adding that sheep can see about 270 degrees, but “have a blind spot in front of their nose.”

Knolle, Morton, and their colleague Rita Goncalves began by selecting four images to show to their animal charges. The goal was to find photos of two well-known women and two famous men. One of the first to be added was a portrait of former U.S. president Barack Obama.

“We ran the study last year, so it was during a time when Obama was constantly on the news, and the new elections were discussed,” Knolle said. “So, we were certain about using Obama, hoping our sheep would be smart enough to pick Obama. In general, we were looking for natural faces, and faces popular in the UK.”

For the other portraits, which were displayed on computer screens shown to the sheep, the researchers selected television journalist Fiona Bruce, who US TV viewers might know as the host of British Antiques Roadshow, actress Emma Watson, and actor Jake Gyllenhaal.

The eight sheep participants came from a flock that Morton saved seven years ago, when they were lambs headed to a slaughterhouse. Now, they live a comfortable life grazing outdoors at the UK university.

Training involved the sheep making decisions as they moved around a specially-designed pen. At one end of the pen, the sheep would see two photographs displayed on two computer screens and would receive a reward of food for choosing — by breaking an infrared beam near the screen — the photograph of the celebrity. If they chose the wrong photograph, a buzzer would sound and they would receive no reward. Over time, the sheep learned to associate a reward with the celebrity's photograph.

After training, the sheep were shown two photographs: the famous person’s face and another face. For this test, sheep correctly chose the VIP face eight out of ten times.

The researchers then showed the sheep the same faces, but in portraits taken at an angle. The sheep’s accuracy at selecting the right photos dropped by about 15 percent, which is a figure comparable to that seen when humans perform the task.

Finally, the researchers looked at whether the sheep participants were able to recognize a handler from a photograph without pre-training. The handlers typically spend two hours a day with the sheep and so the sheep are very familiar with them.

When a portrait of the handler was interspersed randomly in place of the celebrity, the sheep chose the handler's photograph over the unfamiliar face seven out of ten times. In each case, the sheep did a “double take,” by first looking at the handler’s photo, then at that of the unfamiliar face, and back again to the image of the handler before making their decision.

“We interpret our data as the sheep recognizing the 2D images as representing 3D people,” Morton said.

The findings are not a mere novelty demonstrating sheep skills. Morton and her team are studying the animals as part of research on neurodegenerative disorders, such as Huntington’s disease.

Huntington’s is an incurable disease that typically begins in adulthood. Initially, it affects motor coordination, mood, personality, and memory and can lead to other complex symptoms including impairments in recognizing facial emotion. Eventually, patients have difficulty in speech and swallowing, suffer loss of motor function and die at a relatively early age. There is no known cure for the disease; there are only ways to manage the symptoms.

Morton and her team say sheep are a good animal model for studying neurodegenerative diseases because of the relatively large size of their brains and their longevity.
The scientists are now working with a new flock of sheep that were imported from Australia.

“Half of these sheep carry the gene mutation for Huntington’s disease,” Morton said. “They are genetically modified. Sheep do not get Huntington’s disease naturally.”

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Scientists investigate how different houses and lifestyles affect which bugs live with us

Carpet beetles are among our tiniest roommates.

Humans have lived under the same roof with bugs since we first began building shelters 20,000 years ago. Now, scientists are studying how physical factors of our homes -- from the floor plan and the number of windows to even how tidy we are -- may play a role in the diversity of the multi-legged communities populating the indoor environment. Researchers from the California Academy of Sciences, North Carolina State University, and the Natural History Museum of Denmark published findings today in Scientific Reports revealing that a greater number of bug species can be found in high-traffic, ground-level, carpeted rooms with many windows and doors. (And a word of comfort for pet owners with messy habits: don't worry, bugs don't really care.)

"We are just beginning to realize -- and study -- how the home we create for ourselves also builds a complex, indoor habitat for bugs and other life," says Dr. Misha Leong, lead author and postdoctoral researcher at the Academy. "We're hoping to better understand this age-old coexistence, and how it may impact our physical and mental well-being."

Humans spend the majority of their time indoors. Aside from pests, most life within the home -- be it bacteria, fungi, or arthropods (a group that includes insects and their close relatives like spiders and millipedes) -- has rarely been studied. The scientific team surveyed 50 urban homes in Raleigh, North Carolina to see what it is about a home that might lead to a buggier abode.

From the attic to the basement

Next time you climb the stairs, remember that insects, too, prefer lower levels. Survey findings revealed that as floor numbers increase, fewer types of insects thrive. Larger rooms, especially on the ground floor (or even below ground), harbored more insect diversity. More varied types of insects were also observed in carpeted rooms versus those with bare floors as well as "airier" rooms with more windows and doors offering greater accessibility to the outdoors. Species diversity within the home tends to mirror the life thriving outside, with neighborhood affluence playing an important and recently studied role.

"While the idea of uninvited insect roommates sounds unappealing, bugs in houses may contribute to health in a roundabout way," says Dr. Michelle Trautwein, senior author and the Academy's Schlinger Chair of Diptera. "A growing body of evidence suggests some modern ailments are connected with our lack of exposure to wider biological diversity, particularly microorganisms -- and insects may play a role in hosting and spreading that microbial diversity indoors."

Room to room

Bugs can also vary from room to room. An analysis of core representative species -- like booklice, fruit flies, and ladybugs -- revealed how common areas like living rooms hosted more diverse communities when compared to bathrooms, kitchens, and bedrooms. Basements also proved unique: these dark, damp, and cavernous spaces lent to diverse communities of cave-dwelling insects like spiders, mites, millipedes, camel crickets, and ground beetles.

Every room within the home revealed a complex ecological structure of predator and prey -- with scavenger species, strays from the outdoors, and transient go-betweens all playing critical roles. The study also noted how indoor ecology is much like island ecology -- a scientific discipline that examines what lives where, and why. Once species permeate inside, they tend to colonize their new "island" habitat and disperse across the household.

"We're beginning to see how houses can be a passive go-between for insects traveling through the surrounding landscape," says Trautwein. "The more numerous the entry points of windows and doors, the more diverse the community that thrives inside."

No need to de-clutter; cats and pups are A-OK

For the messy among us, rest assured: study findings revealed that tidiness does not play a significant role in insect diversity except for the presence of cellar spiders -- delicate, long-legged critters of the family Pholcidae typically spotted in damp crawl spaces. While more cluttered areas hosted a greater number of these web-spinners, on the whole human behavior played a minimal role in determining the composition of bug communities in the survey.

The presence of cats or dogs, houseplants, pesticides, and dust bunnies revealed no significant impact, suggesting that our indoor communities are more strongly influenced by the environment outside the window than how tidily we live inside with Fido and Kitty.

"Even though we like to think of our homes as shielded from the outdoors, wild ecological dramas may be unfolding right beside us as we go about our daily lives," says Leong. "We're learning more and more about these sometimes-invisible relationships and how the homes we choose for ourselves also foster indoor ecosystems all their own."

Read more at Science Daily

Twin study finds genetics affects where children look, shaping mental development

Two lines captured with eye-tracking technology show that twins will follow a similar pattern with their eyes when shown the same image.

A new study co-led by Indiana University that tracked the eye movement of twins finds that genetics plays a strong role in how people attend to their environment.

Conducted in collaboration with researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, the study offers a new angle on the emergence of differences between individuals and the integration of genetic and environmental factors in social, emotional and cognitive development. This is significant because visual exploration is also one of the first ways infants interact with the environment, before they can reach or crawl.

"The majority of work on eye movement has asked 'What are the common features that drive our attention?'" said Daniel P. Kennedy, an assistant professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. "This study is different. We wanted to understand differences among individuals and whether they are influenced by genetics."

Kennedy and co-author Brian M. D'Onofrio, a professor in the department, study neurodevelopmental problems from different perspectives. This work brings together their contrasting experimental methods: Kennedy's use of eye tracking for individual behavioral assessment and D'Onofrio's use of genetically informed designs, which draw on data from large population samples to trace the genetic and environmental contributions to various traits. As such, it is one of the largest-ever eye-tracking studies.

In this particular experiment, the researchers compared the eye movements of 466 children -- 233 pairs of twins (119 identical and 114 fraternal) -- between ages 9 and 14 as each child looked at 80 snapshots of scenes people might encounter in daily life, half of which included people. Using an eye tracker, the researchers then measured the sequence of eye movements in both space and time as each child looked at the scene. They also examined general "tendencies of exploration"; for example, if a child looked at only one or two features of a scene or at many different ones.

Published Nov. 9 in the journal Current Biology, the study found a strong similarity in gaze patterns within sets of identical twins, who tended to look at the same features of a scene in the same order. It found a weaker but still pronounced similarity between fraternal twins.

This suggests a strong genetic component to the way individuals visually explore their environments: Insofar as both identical and fraternal twins each share a common environment with their twin, the researchers can infer that the more robust similarity in the eye movements of identical twins is likely due to their shared genetic makeup. The researchers also found that they could reliably identify a twin with their sibling from among a pool of unrelated individuals based on their shared gaze patterns -- a novel method they termed "gaze fingerprinting."

"People recognize that gaze is important," Kennedy said. "Our eyes are moving constantly, roughly three times per second. We are always seeking out information and actively engaged with our environment, and ultimately where you look affects your development."

After early childhood, the study suggests that genes influence at the micro-level -- through the immediate, moment-to-moment selection of visual information -- the environments individuals create for themselves.

"This is not a subtle statistical finding," Kennedy said. "How people look at images is diagnostic of their genetics. Eye movements allow individuals to obtain specific information from a space that is vast and largely unconstrained. It's through this selection process that we end up shaping our visual experiences.

"Less known are the biological underpinnings of this process," he added. "From this work, we now know that our biology affects how we seek out visual information from complex scenes. It gives us a new instance of how biology and environment are integrated in our development."

Read more at Science Daily