Some insects make dirt look like — well, dirt. And they’ve been doing it for a while.

Donning a bit of debris to blend in with the environment is common practice for a subset of insects and other creepy-crawlies trying to hide from predators. (Crabs, spiders and snails do it, too.) To investigate when this behavior originated, Bo Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and colleagues examined insects preserved in amber from Burma, France and Lebanon that date back 100 million years to the Cretaceous period.

Out of 300,000 insect specimens examined, 39 of them sported what appear to be dirt and vegetation disguises. Anatomical analysis suggests that these insects are early relatives of lacewings, assassin bugs and owlflies. The ancient critters decorated themselves with soil, sand, bits of wood and even tiny ferns, the team reports June 24 in Science Advances.

Until now, only one preserved, dirt-decorated insect from the Mesozoic era had been discovered. But the new finds suggest that this behavior was already widespread in some insect families back then.

It now appears that women can pass Zika virus to men through sex.

U.S. health officials have reported the first known case of female-to-male sexual transmission of Zika virus. The woman, who was not pregnant, had traveled to a Zika-afflicted region, the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention reports July 15. On the day of her return to New York City, she had vaginal intercourse with a male partner, who wasn’t wearing a condom.

Three days later, after developing a rash, fever and other symptoms, doctors detected Zika virus RNA in her blood and urine. A week after sex, the woman’s partner, who had not recently traveled outside the United States and had not noticed any mosquito bites, developed similar symptoms. Tests revealed that he also had Zika RNA in his urine.

Scientists knew that men could transmit Zika to women through sex, and had hints that reverse was true as well. Earlier this month, researchers detected Zika RNA in the genital tract of an infected woman.

The annual Perseid meteor shower, which peaks on the morning of August 12, might be more dazzling than usual this year. Researchers predict that up to 200 meteors per hour could race across the sky — roughly double the typical rate — as Earth plows through debris left behind by comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle.

Earth usually grazes the edge of the debris stream, home to pieces that flake off the comet during its 133-year journey around the sun. But this year Jupiter’s gravity might have nudged the debris so that Earth passes closer to the center of the swarm.

While the shower peaks tonight, Perseid meteors will be visible for at least two more nights. No special equipment is needed to watch the shower. Just find a dark sky, away from lights, get comfortable and look up. The best time to watch the storm will be between midnight and dawn.

NEW ORLEANS — Chronic sleep problems are associated with atrial fibrillation — a temporary but dangerous disruption of heart rhythm — even among people who don’t suffer from sleep apnea. An analysis of almost 14 million patient records has found that people suffering from insomnia, frequent waking and other sleep issues are more likely than sound sleepers to experience a condition in which the upper chambers of the heart quiver instead of rhythmically beating, allowing blood to briefly stagnate.

“Even if you don’t have sleep apnea, is there something about sleep disruption that puts you at a higher risk of fibrillation,” said Gregory Marcus, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. “We should put a higher priority on studying sleep itself.” Marcus and Matthew Christensen, from the University of Michigan, presented their results November 14 at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association.
People with atrial fibrillation have double the risk of having a heart attack, and up to five times the risk of stroke. Although the heart condition can be a consequence of aging, its prevalence is rising at about 4 percent per year for reasons that aren’t totally explained. In the United States, about 5 million people currently have the condition, and that number is expected to rise to 12 million by 2030.

A large body of studies has found that sleep apnea, which occurs when a person stops breathing during the night, can lead to atrial fibrillation and a host of other health concerns. Identifying a risk of atrial fibrillation among people with no sleep apnea is unexpected, says Richard Becker, director of the University of Cincinnati Heart, Lung & Vascular Institute, who was not part of the study.

Marcus, Christensen and colleagues analyzed data from three different sources, including the California Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project, a database of almost 14 million patients. They also drew on records from more than 4,600 participants of Health eHeart Study who had filled out a sleep survey, and from the Cardiovascular Health Study, which has tracked more than 5,700 people for more than a decade. Those data allowed the researchers to follow patients over time, tracking which came first — the fibrillation or the sleep issues. The researchers included a variety of sleep disorders, such as insomnia, nighttime waking and shortened periods of rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep.

Among the results: People who frequently woke had a 33 percent greater chance of developing atrial fibrillation in one analysis, and a 47 percent higher chance in another. For the eHeart group, insomnia increased the odds by 17 percent. And among more than 14 million California records studied, insomnia increased the odds of future atrial fibrillation by 36 percent. Analysis of a subgroup undergoing sleep studies showed that less REM sleep also was associated with a higher probability of developing atrial fibrillation.

The study can’t explain why a lack of sleep even with normal breathing might hurt the heart, but the authors hypothesize that the mechanism could be tied to the body’s stress response.

Becker believes that cardiologists should emphasize sleep just as they do diet and exercise for lifestyle management. To workaholic, screen-fixated Americans, “this study sends a powerful message about wellness as a continuum throughout the day and night,” he says. “It offers clinicians and the public a 360-degree view of what is important for good health.”

Bedbugs give me nightmares. Really. I have dreamt of them crawling up my legs while I lie in bed. These are common bedbugs, Cimex lectularius, and after largely disappearing from our beds in the 1950s, they have reemerged in the last few decades to cause havoc in our homes, offices, hotels and even public transportation.

Now there’s a new nightmare. Or rather, another old one. It’s the tropical bedbug, C. hemipterus. Its presence has been confirmed in Florida, and the critters could spread to other southern states, says Brittany Campbell, a graduate student at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who led a new study that tracked down the pests.

Tropical bedbugs can be found in a geographic band of land running between 30° N latitude and 30° S. In the last 20 years or so, they’ve been collected from Tanzania, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Australia, Rwanda and more. Back in 1938, some were collected in Florida. There were more reports of the species in the following years, but none since the 1940s.

Then, in 2015, researchers at the Insect Identification Laboratory at the University of Florida identified bedbugs sent to the lab from a home in Brevard County, Florida, as tropical bedbugs. To confirm the analysis, researchers went to the home and collected more samples. They were indeed tropical bedbugs, the team reports in the September Florida Entomologist.

The family thought that the bedbugs must have been transported unknowingly into the house by one of the people who lived there. But no one living in the home had traveled outside the state recently, let alone outside the country. This suggests that tropical bedbugs can be found elsewhere in Florida, the team concludes.

Additional evidence comes from the Florida State Collection of Arthropods, which holds two female tropical bedbugs that, according to their label, were collected in Orange County, Florida, on June 11, 1989, from bedding. “Whether this species has been present in Florida and never disappeared, or has been reintroduced and remains in small populations, is not currently known,” the researchers write.

Why hasn’t anyone noticed? Well, people don’t usually send bedbugs to entomologists when they have an infestation, and your average victim isn’t going to notice the difference between the two species. “Both species are very similar,” Campbell says. Not only do they look alike, but they also both “feed on blood, hide in cracks and crevices and have similar lifestyles.” Plus, there’s been little research directly comparing the two species, she notes, so scientists don’t know how infestations might differ.

Just to give us all a few more nightmares, Campbell points out something else: While there’s probably no reason to worry that the creepy critters will spread as climate change warms the globe, she says that there is a potential for the species to move north “because humans provide nice conditions for bedbugs to develop.”

Macaque monkeys would be quite talkative if only their brains cooperated with their airways, a new study suggests.

These primates possess the vocal equipment to speak much as people do, say evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist W. Tecumseh Fitch of the University of Vienna and colleagues. But macaques lack brains capable of transforming that vocal potential into human talk. As a result, the monkeys communicate with grunts, coos and other similar sounds, the scientists conclude December 9 in Science Advances.

“Macaques have a speech-ready vocal tract but lack a speech-ready brain to control it,” Fitch says.

His team took X-ray videos of an adult macaque’s vocal tract while the animal cooed, grunted, made threatening sounds, smacked its lips, yawned and ate various foods. Measures of shifting shapes during these vocalizations allowed the researchers to estimate what types of speech sounds the monkey could potentially utter.
Monkeys, and presumably apes, have mouths, vocal cords and other vocal tract elements capable of articulating at least five vowel sounds, the researchers say. These consist of vowel pronunciations heard in the words bit, bet, bat, but and bought.
Consonant sounds within monkeys’ reach include those corresponding to the letters p, b, k, g, h, m and w, the scientists add.

An animal that can voice those vowels and consonants is capable of making understandable statements in English and many other languages, they conclude.

The new findings expand monkeys’ gab potential beyond that described in a pioneering 1969 study led by anthropologist and cognitive scientist Philip Lieberman, Fitch claims. Lieberman, now at Brown University in Providence, R.I., devised a computer model of a macaque’s speech potential based on measures of a cadaver monkey’s vocal tract.
Lieberman regards the new study as a replication of his 1969 report. Both investigations find that monkeys can emit a partial range of vowel sounds, Lieberman says. Each paper also determines that two especially distinctive vowel sounds, found in the words beet and boot, lie outside macaques’ vocal realm.

Hearing those sounds is another issue. Acoustic properties of the vowel sounds monkeys can produce make them relatively difficult for people to identify while listening to someone talk, Lieberman emphasizes. “If monkeys had humanlike brains, they could talk, but their speech would sound indistinct,” he says.

Fitch disagrees. By studying a living monkey’s vocal tract in action, the new study finds that these animals can make a broader range of sounds related to each of the five key vowels than reported by Lieberman, he argues. A talking monkey “would be distinct enough to understand, no worse than a foreign accent,” Fitch says. A computer-generated version of the spoken phrase “Will you marry me?” — based on newly calculated properties of the macaque’s vocal tract — is easily grasped by a listener, although less clear than the same phrase spoken by a human female, Fitch says.

Fitch and colleagues confirm a growing body of evidence that monkeys have speech-ready vocal tracts, says biological anthropologist Adriano Lameira of Durham University in England. It’s too soon, though, to say that monkeys’ brains aren’t at least partially speech-ready, he argues. Recent studies of apes, some conducted by Lameira, find that these close relatives of humans exert considerable control over their vocal tracts, allowing them to learn novel calls containing sounds similar to vowels and consonants. Neural control of various parts of the vocal tract is needed to master these sounds, Lameira says. Little is known about whether monkeys can do the same.

An aptitude for incorporating new sounds into vocal communication possibly originated in ancient primates, laying the evolutionary groundwork for human speech, Lameira proposes.

A part of the brain that’s responsible for recognizing faces seems to grow new tissue throughout childhood. That’s surprising, because brain development during childhood usually involves pruning back neural connections rather than growing new ones, researchers report in the Jan. 6 Science.

The research shows that “pruning isn’t the only game in town,” says Brad Duchaine, a psychologist at Dartmouth College who wasn’t part of the study. “I’m really excited about it.”

Researchers used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, to identify regions of the brain’s visual cortex that showed more activity when processing faces versus regions that lit up when processing photos of places like cityscapes or hallways. Then the scientists compared the structures of those regions in 22 kids’ brains (ages 5 to 12) with those of 25 young adults (ages 22 to 28).
The place-sensitive area — the collateral sulcus — didn’t change dramatically between childhood and adulthood. But face-sensitive areas in a region called the fusiform gyrus did.

Adults had denser fusiform gyrus brain tissue than kids and that tissue contained a different composition of cells and proteins, the researchers found.

MRI scans alone can’t reveal exactly what types of cells and structures are behind the increased tissue seen in adults’ fusiform gyrus. But evidence from previous studies suggests that the effect might come in part from increases in dendrites — the fingerlike projections of nerve cells that receive messages from other nerve cells. Dendrites might branch out more, making more connections. Another culprit might be the oligodendrocytes, brain cells that produce nerve cells’ insulating myelin coating. The actual number of nerve cells isn’t increasing, though, says Jesse Gomez, a neuroscientist at the Stanford University School of Medicine who led the study.

The visual cortex contains regions specific to processing many different types of visual stimuli — faces and places but also movement and colors. Since this study compared only facial processing and location processing, it’s not clear yet whether the increase in brain tissue is really limited to facial recognition areas, Duchaine says. But the finding does show that the brain circuits behind different types of visual processing don’t all develop in the same way.

Humans take longer to develop facial recognition skills than other types of visual processing, which could help explain the effect, the researchers propose.
“Throughout development, our social circle grows,” Gomez says. “That might be one reason why the region continues to grow — that piece of hardware in the brain itself just takes time to develop.” The current data can’t pin down the age cutoff for tissue growth, but Gomez and his colleagues are following their subjects over time to try to figure that out.

The team thinks similar tissue growth might occur in other parts of the visual cortex, too. In future studies, they hope to investigate the development of these other specialized regions.

A new species of worm-snail is rather snotty. Thylacodes vandyensis shoots out strands of mucus that tangle together, building a spiderweb-like trap for plankton and other floating snacks, researchers report April 5 in PeerJ.

Other worm-snails use this hunting technique, but T. vandyensis stands out because of the “copious amounts of mucus” it ejects, says coauthor Rüdiger Bieler. This goo net, which can stretch up to 5 centimeters across, exits the animal’s tentacles at, of course, “a snail’s pace,” jokes Bieler, a curator at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

Like other worm-snails, T. vandyensis permanently glue themselves to spots. Bieler found T. vandyensis, which typically grow half as tall as a pinkie finger, on the hull of a sunken ship in the Florida Keys. But they don’t belong there: DNA analysis shows that this invasive species’ closest relatives are in the Pacific Ocean. The worm-snail may have made its way to the Atlantic as a stowaway on a ship.

Egyptian mummies are back in style at the summer box office — and in genetics labs. A study of genetic blueprints from 90 mummies repairs the frayed reputation of sarcophagus occupants as sources of ancient DNA. And it reveals evidence of a hookup history with foreigners from the east.

An Egyptian mummy served up the first ancient human DNA sample in 1985 (SN: 4/27/85, p. 262). But both chemicals used in mummification and Egypt’s steamy climate can degrade DNA, and scientists weren’t sure if mummies could supply samples free of modern contamination.

Carefully screening for quality and using the latest in sequencing tech, Verena Schuenemann of the University of Tübingen in Germany and her colleagues extracted and analyzed mitochondrial DNA, which passes from mom to child. They worked primarily with samples from teeth and bones, rather than from soft tissue. Three mummies yielded readable samples of DNA from cell nuclei, which includes DNA from both parents. The mummies ranged in age of origin from 1388 B.C. to A.D. 426.

The analysis reveals genetic ties to the Middle East and Greece — not a huge surprise since Egypt was a center of travel and trade at that time. The conspicuous absence of genetic connections to sub-Saharan Africa seen in modern Egyptians points to a later influx of foreigners from that region, the researchers write May 30 in Nature Communications.

Imagine for a moment that you lived on another planet. Not Tatooine, Trantor or another fictional orb, but a real-deal planet circling a star somewhere in our real-deal galaxy. What would your world look like? Would there be a rocky surface? An atmosphere? How long would a day last? How about a year? What special physiology might you need to survive there? There’s no single scenario, of course. Starting with some basic facts, you can speculate in all sorts of surprising directions. That’s the fun of the exercise.

Over the last quarter century or so, astronomers have confirmed more than 3,600 exoplanets — that’s 3,600-plus worlds in addition to the planets, moons and other heavenly bodies known in our own solar system. People have long imagined what it would be like to live on Mars, and bold thinkers have dared to envision an existence on, say, Jupiter (see “Juno spacecraft reveals a more complex Jupiter“). Today there are many more possibilities, including planets orbiting dim red stars very different from our sun. In “Life might have a shot on planets orbiting dim red stars,” Christopher Crockett describes the hurdles life might face in evolving and surviving near these cool stars. On planets orbiting Proxima Centauri, TRAPPIST-1 and other M dwarfs, water could be extremely sparse, energetic flares might regularly singe the surface and you might live always in sun or forever in darkness.
Reading about these worlds, I’d say, is better than fiction — as is a lot of what Science News covers. You don’t need a novel or a movie to escape into what feels like another reality. Just flip through these pages. The stories will take you to other worlds, as well as inner, hidden ones. Former Science News intern Elizabeth S. Eaton writes about the bacteria that infect our bodies and the problem of antibiotic resistance. Picturing these invisible, single-celled organisms wreaking havoc in the body, unchecked by our best medicines, gives me goose bumps. Eaton’s story is about the battle that would ensue if predatory bacteria are sent in to hunt down and kill these bad guys, as some researchers have proposed. One researcher likens the bacteria to the antagonists in the Alien films. There’s true cinematic potential.

And it doesn’t end there. Bruce Bower takes readers into the past, to the roots of the human evolutionary tree. Most scientists think Africa was the birthplace of hominids, but new research suggests it could have been Europe. And Susan Milius offers an opportunity to consider what it might be like to live in another type of body — a flamingo’s. The birds have an off-kilter shape, with ankles where we’d expect knees. For flamingos, Milius reports, standing on one leg might be more stable than standing on two. After reading the story, I couldn’t help but attempt to balance on just my right foot, in hopes of getting a handle on human-flamingo differences. (It was an unsuccessful 20 seconds. Thank goodness my office door was closed.)

Every issue of Science News includes similar inspiration. There’s serious stuff to be sure, but there are plenty of chances to ponder the strangeness of reality — and to stretch it. After thinking about living on Proxima b or being a wading bird, consider being a wading bird on Proxima b. For fuel to help your imagination run, you’ve come to the right place.