Parasitic worms modify immune cells in mice in a way that protects animals from developing obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Future therapies that mimic these effects in humans could prevent such conditions.

It sounds strange, but researchers have known for decades that infecting humans and other animals with parasitic worms is associated with lower rates of disease. many diseasesincluding type 2 diabetes and…

Why is it important

Scientists still don’t fully understand how dust and gas coalesced into moons and planets in the early solar system.

Like the first ring around Quaoar announced by a team of astronomers in February, the second ring is outside the so-called Roche limit. Material orbiting closer than this distance tends to be torn apart by tidal forces. Thus, a ring within the Roche limit will tend to remain a ring, while a debris ring outside the Roche limit will typically merge into the moon.

For the Quaoar, the Roche limit is calculated as 1,100 miles. The second ring, 1500 miles from the center of Quaoar, is closer than the ring announced in February, which has a radius of about 2500 miles.

Background

Quaoar (pronounced KWA-truth, and the name of the creator god of the Tongva indigenous people who live around Los Angeles) orbits the Sun in the Kuiper Belt, a region of frozen debris beyond Neptune that includes Pluto.

The ring is not visible in telescope images. Rather, astronomers found it indirectly when distant stars accidentally passed behind Quaoar, blocking starlight. From 2018 to 2021, Quaoar passed in front of four stars, and astronomers on Earth were able to observe eclipse shadows, also known as stellar occultations.

They also observed some dimming of starlight before and after the star went out, indicating the existence of a first ring.

Another eclipse occurred on August 9 last year, and astronomers once again turned telescopes, large and small, to Quaoar in the hope of learning more about the ring.

The new observations have revealed more detail, including a dense, narrow core in a ring just a few miles wide that is surrounded by a shell of more diffuse material. Observations also revealed a second ring.

what’s next

Another eclipse will occur on May 13 and will be visible through telescopes in the US and Canada.

“This event is associated with a bright star and will be useful for better delineating the shape of the quaoar, as well as a good opportunity to get more information about these two remarkable rings,” Mr. Pereira said.

A potential explanation for the distant rings of Quaoar is the presence of the moon Weywot. The moon may have created gravitational perturbations that prevented accretion of ring particles into additional moons. Both rings meet at locations close to so-called resonances with Veyvot, and the resonances may be more important than the Roche limit in determining whether the rings turn into moons or remain rings.

Virtual reality is already widespread in the entertainment industry and is starting to spread across fields ranging from education to healthcare. But while the visual and auditory interfaces are extremely advanced, and the sense of touch or “tactile connection” is being improved, the virtual world is missing one key sense: smell.

This may change. Engineer Xingye Yu of the City University of Hong Kong and colleagues have developed a lightweight, flexible and wireless olfactory interface that can accurately convey scents such as lavender, pineapple or green tea virtual reality users and immerse them more fully in flavored virtual worlds. “Bringing scent into virtual reality expands it into another dimension,” Yu says. “We wanted to develop something in a wearable, skin-integrated format that people could go anywhere and use at any time.”

The design of the team was described in an article published on Tuesday in Connection with nature. The key advantage is that it can control the intensity of the odor. One demonstration in the study involved an increase in the intensity of the scent when a woman in a 4D film held a rose up to her nose.

Previous scent interfaces have typically used liquid perfume bottles, an atomizer (a device that turns liquids into a fine mist), and some method of blowing the atomized droplets out. It works, but it’s stiff and has a limited run time between fills, and doesn’t allow for easy intensity control. These shortcomings have made the devices less practical for VR systems.

The new design uses small wax pads filled with scents that are heated by an electrode to release the scent. A temperature-dependent resistor, or thermistor, detects the temperature, which controls the intensity of the smell. And the magnetic induction coil drives a metal plate that removes heat from the electrode to quickly cool it down and cover up the odor. Millimeter-sized arrays of these odor generators are embedded in thin, flexible sheets of electronics.

The study describes two different device formats. The first one is small enough to be attached to the user’s upper lip, but it only includes two scent generators. The second is worn as a face mask and has nine. Both are customizable with a choice of 30 flavors including gardenia, caramel, ginger, clove, mojito and coconut milk. Different combinations can be mixed in different intensities to create a palette of thousands of possible scents.

Proximity to the user’s nose, combined with a smart design, reduces the delay between activation and odor to 1.44 seconds. Atomizers are faster than that, but they lack control over new devices and are as small as they’ll ever be, says Judith Amores, senior fellow at Microsoft Research and an MIT research affiliate who studies olfactory interfaces for medical applications but did not participate in the study. “The advantage of this system is that it can be further miniaturized,” she says. “That’s what’s interesting.”

The study includes demonstrations of possible applications beyond a simple extension of virtual reality, including odor-based messaging and the awakening of emotions. The researchers suggest the devices could even be used to alleviate depressed mood or improve memory in people with age-related cognitive decline. “Smell is directly related to the emotional parts of the brain and memory, so there are many applications related to well-being and health,” says Amores. “It can also be used as a way to train your sense of smell to help people who have lost their sense of smell due to COVID.”

Researchers have already started downsizing. They have a system that is now two to three times smaller, and in the future they plan to reduce it to a size five to ten times smaller. “This is the next step,” Yu says.