Choice Modeling for the Commercial Cultivation of Underutilized Aromatic Plants for Producing Mosquito Repellents: Targeting Rural Sector Income Generation.

Tropical countries face considerable economic losses due to mosquito-borne diseases which can be effectively combatted using plant-based mosquito repellents. Therefore, using a questionnaire survey, we selected the 25 top-ranked common but underutilized aromatic plants with mosquito repellent ability in Sri Lanka to investigate the rural sector's willingness to cultivate and supply them. Cinnamomum verum, Citrus aurantiifolia, Citrus sinensis, Citrus reticulata, Aegle marmelos, and Ocimum tenuiflorum were the common species thus identified. The willingness to cultivate and supply aromatic plants with mosquito repellent ability varied between 88% and 60%. The Chi-squared test indicated a significant association between gender and willingness to cultivate and supply these plants. Men had a higher willingness (82%). Persons formally educated up to elementary school level had the highest willingness (85%). The willingness from households with many non-income-generating members was 100%. The random forest model developed in this study identifies farmers' willingness to cultivate and supply aromatic plants with mosquito repellent properties. It was trained using an upsampling strategy. Our findings aid in understanding the scenarios involved with introducing, cultivating, and supplying aromatic plants.

iPTF16geu: A multiply imaged, gravitationally lensed type Ia supernova.

We report the discovery of a multiply imaged, gravitationally lensed type Ia supernova, iPTF16geu (SN 2016geu), at redshift z = 0.409. This phenomenon was identified because the light from the stellar explosion was magnified more than 50 times by the curvature of space around matter in an intervening galaxy. We used high-spatial-resolution observations to resolve four images of the lensed supernova, approximately 0.3 arc seconds from the center of the foreground galaxy. The observations probe a physical scale of ~1 kiloparsec, smaller than is typical in other studies of extragalactic gravitational lensing. The large magnification and symmetric image configuration imply close alignment between the lines of sight to the supernova and to the lens. The relative magnifications of the four images provide evidence for substructures in the lensing galaxy.

A dust-obscured massive maximum-starburst galaxy at a redshift of 6.34.

Massive present-day early-type (elliptical and lenticular) galaxies probably gained the bulk of their stellar mass and heavy elements through intense, dust-enshrouded starbursts--that is, increased rates of star formation--in the most massive dark-matter haloes at early epochs. However, it remains unknown how soon after the Big Bang massive starburst progenitors exist. The measured redshift (z) distribution of dusty, massive starbursts has long been suspected to be biased low in z owing to selection effects, as confirmed by recent findings of systems with redshifts as high as ~5 (refs 2-4). Here we report the identification of a massive starburst galaxy at z = 6.34 through a submillimetre colour-selection technique. We unambiguously determined the redshift from a suite of molecular and atomic fine-structure cooling lines. These measurements reveal a hundred billion solar masses of highly excited, chemically evolved interstellar medium in this galaxy, which constitutes at least 40 per cent of the baryonic mass. A 'maximum starburst' converts the gas into stars at a rate more than 2,000 times that of the Milky Way, a rate among the highest observed at any epoch. Despite the overall downturn in cosmic star formation towards the highest redshifts, it seems that environments mature enough to form the most massive, intense starbursts existed at least as early as 880 million years after the Big Bang.

Anti-apoptotic gene Bcl2 is required for stapes development and hearing.

In this paper we describe novel and specific roles for the apoptotic regulators Bcl2 and Bim in hearing and stapes development. Bcl2 is anti-apoptotic while Bim is pro-apoptotic. Characterization of the auditory systems of mice deficient for these molecules revealed that Bcl2⁻/⁻ mice suffered severe hearing loss. This was conductive in nature and did not affect sensory cells of the inner ear, with cochlear hair cells and neurons present and functional. Bcl2⁻/⁻ mice were found to have a malformed, often monocrural, porous stapes (the small stirrup-shaped bone of the middle ear), but a normally shaped malleus and incus. The deformed stapes was discontinuous with the incus and sometimes fused to the temporal bones. The defect was completely rescued in Bcl2⁻/⁻Bim⁻/⁻ mice and partially rescued in Bcl2⁻/⁻Bim⁺/⁻ mice, which displayed high-frequency hearing loss and thickening of the stapes anterior crus. The Bcl2⁻/⁻ defect arose in utero before or during the cartilage stage of stapes development. These results implicate Bcl2 and Bim in regulating survival of second pharyngeal arch or neural crest cells that give rise to the stapes during embryonic development.

The suppression of star formation by powerful active galactic nuclei.

The old, red stars that constitute the bulges of galaxies, and the massive black holes at their centres, are the relics of a period in cosmic history when galaxies formed stars at remarkable rates and active galactic nuclei (AGN) shone brightly as a result of accretion onto black holes. It is widely suspected, but unproved, that the tight correlation between the mass of the black hole and the mass of the stellar bulge results from the AGN quenching the surrounding star formation as it approaches its peak luminosity. X-rays trace emission from AGN unambiguously, whereas powerful star-forming galaxies are usually dust-obscured and are brightest at infrared and submillimetre wavelengths. Here we report submillimetre and X-ray observations that show that rapid star formation was common in the host galaxies of AGN when the Universe was 2-6 billion years old, but that the most vigorous star formation is not observed around black holes above an X-ray luminosity of 10(44) ergs per second. This suppression of star formation in the host galaxy of a powerful AGN is a key prediction of models in which the AGN drives an outflow, expelling the interstellar medium of its host and transforming the galaxy's properties in a brief period of cosmic time.

The detection of a population of submillimeter-bright, strongly lensed galaxies.

Gravitational lensing is a powerful astrophysical and cosmological probe and is particularly valuable at submillimeter wavelengths for the study of the statistical and individual properties of dusty star-forming galaxies. However, the identification of gravitational lenses is often time-intensive, involving the sifting of large volumes of imaging or spectroscopic data to find few candidates. We used early data from the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey to demonstrate that wide-area submillimeter surveys can simply and easily detect strong gravitational lensing events, with close to 100% efficiency.

Weak Lensing by Large-Scale Structure: A Dark Matter Halo Approach.

Weak gravitational lensing observations probe the spectrum and evolution of density fluctuations and the cosmological parameters that govern them, but they are currently limited to small fields and subject to selection biases. We show how the expected signal from large-scale structure arises from the contributions from and correlations between individual halos. We determine the convergence power spectrum as a function of the maximum halo mass and so provide the means to interpret results from surveys that lack high-mass halos either through selection criteria or small fields. Since shot noise from rare massive halos is mainly responsible for the sample variance below 10&arcmin;, our method should aid our ability to extract cosmological information from small fields.