Gabi: We wanted to see how the masses look like in Rosophila. So Igor Sivanovitz, our collaborator, it lots of anatomy to visualize how those muscles attach to this membrane inside the flyhead. And so we got access to the motor neurons that innovate those muscles and then you can express a redshift that channel would opt in and activate the muscles using red light. The thing that convinced us this is not just kind of random jiggles was at some point then Lisa moved a visual image in front of the eye and the retina tracked it. That is the moment we kind of switched to saying this is probably the most interesting thing we could be working on.
00:46 How flies can move their eyes (a little)
It's long been assumed flies’ eyes don’t move, and so to alter their gaze they need to move their heads. Now, researchers have shown that this isn’t quite true and that fruit flies can actually move their retinas using a specific set of muscles, which may allow them to perceive depth. The team also hope that this movement may provide a window into some of the flies’ internal processes.
How the 80-year-old wreck of a sunken warship is influencing ocean microbes, and tracing an epilepsy-related gene variant back to a single person from 800 years ago.
11:11 Calls to mandate militaries’ emissions reporting
The eyes of the world will be focused on the UN’s upcoming COP27 conference to see what governments will pledge to do to reduce global emissions. But there’s one sector of countries’ carbon outputs that remains something of a mystery: the emissions of their militaries. We speak to Oliver Belcher, one of a group of researchers who have written a Comment article for Nature, calling for better reporting and greater accountability for these military emissions.
We discuss some highlights from the Nature Briefing. This time: efforts from Middle East countries to cut greenhouse-gas emissions while still supplying fossil fuels; the upcoming demise of NASA’s InSight spacecraft; and new estimates for how long bacteria could survive on Mars.