The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory is set to revolutionize our knowledge of the solar system’s “small bodies” — asteroids, comets and other minor planets.

The Rubin Observatory, under construction on the Cerro Pachón ridge in northern Chile, features the 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope with a unique three-mirror design capable of surveying the entire visible sky every few nights. At its heart is the world’s largest digital camera — the 3.2 gigapixel Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera — covering a 9.6 square-degree field of view with six filters, roughly 45 times the area of the full moon. Together, this “wide-fast-deep” system will generate 20 terabytes of data every night — creating an unprecedented time-lapse “movie” of the cosmos over the next 10 years, and an incredibly powerful dataset with which to map the solar system.

The team of astronomers, led by Queen’s University’s Meg Schwamb, created Sorcha, an innovative new open-source software used to predict what discoveries are likely to be made. Sorcha is the first end-to-end simulator that ingests Rubin’s planned observing schedule. It applies assumptions on how Rubin Observatory sees and detects astronomical sources in its images with the best model of what the solar system and its small body reservoirs look like today.

“Accurate simulation software like Sorcha is critical,” said Schwamb, a reader in the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen’s University. “It tells us what Rubin will discover and lets us know how to interpret it. Our knowledge of what objects fill Earth’s solar system is about to expand exponentially and rapidly.”

In addition to the eight major planets, the solar system is home to a vast population of small bodies that formed alongside the planets more than 4.5 billion years ago. Many of these smaller bodies remain essentially unchanged since the solar system’s birth, acting as a fossil record of its earliest days. By studying their orbits, sizes and compositions, astronomers can reconstruct how planets formed, migrated and evolved.

These objects — numbering in the tens of millions — — provide a powerful window into processes such as the delivery of water and organic material to Earth, the reshaping of planetary orbits by giant planets and the ongoing risk posed by those whose paths bring them near our planet.

In addition to Queen’s University and the UW, the international team includes researchers from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

A series of papers describing the software and the predictions have been accepted for publication by The Astronomical Journal.

Beyond just finding these new small bodies, Rubin Observatory will observe them multiple times using different optical filters, revealing their surface colors. Past solar system surveys typically observed with a single filter.

“With the LSST catalog of solar system objects, our work shows that it will be like going from black-and-white television to brilliant color,” said Joe Murtagh, a doctoral student at Queen’s University. “It’s very exciting — we expect that millions of new solar system objects will be detected and most of these will be picked up in the first few years of sky survey.”

The team’s simulations show that Rubin will map:

• 127,000 near-Earth objects — asteroids and comets whose orbits cross or approach Earth. That’s more than tripling today’s known objects, about 38,000, and detecting more than 70% of potentially hazardous bodies larger than 140 meters. This will cut the risk of undetected asteroid impact of catastrophic proportions by at least two times, making a tremendous contribution to planetary defense.

• Over 5 million main-belt asteroids, up from about 1.4 million, with precise color and rotation data on roughly one in three asteroids within the survey’s first years. This will give scientists unprecedented insight into the characteristics and history of the solar system’s building blocks.

• 109,000 Jupiter Trojans, bodies sharing Jupiter’s orbit at stable “Lagrange” points — more than seven times the number cataloged today. These bodies represent some of the most pristine material dating all the way back to the formation of the planets.

• 37,000 trans-Neptunian objects, residents of the distant Kuiper Belt — nearly 10 times the current census — shedding light on Neptune’s past migration and the outer solar system’s history.

• Approximately 1,500-2,000 Centaurs, bodies on short-lived giant planet-crossing orbits in the middle solar system. Most Centaurs will eventually be ejected from the solar system, but a few lucky ones will survive to become short-period comets. The LSST will provide the first detailed view of the Centaurs and the important transition stage from Centaur to comet. 

Rubin Observatory’s LSST is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fill in the missing pieces of our solar system, said Mario Juric, a member of the Sorcha team and a UW professor of Astronomy. Juric also is a team lead of Rubin’s Solar System Processing Pipelines and a director of UW’s DiRAC Institute.

“Our simulations predict that Rubin will expand known small-body populations by factors of 4-9x, delivering an unprecedented trove of orbits, colors and light curves,” Juric said. “With this data, we’ll be able to update the textbooks of solar system formation and vastly improve our ability to spot — and potentially deflect — the asteroids that could threaten Earth.”

It took 225 years of astronomical observations to detect the first 1.5 million asteroids, and researchers found that Rubin will double that number in less than a year, said Jake Kurlander, a doctoral student at the UW.

“Rubin’s unparalleled combination of breadth and depth make it a uniquely effective discovery machine,” Kurlander said.

Siegfried Eggl, an assistant professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign added: “Only by debiasing LSST’s complex observing pattern can we turn raw detections into a true reflection of the solar system’s history — where the planets formed, and how they migrated over billions of years. Sorcha is a game changer in that respect.”

The Sorcha code is open-source and freely available with the simulated catalogs, animations at https://sorcha.space. By making these resources available, the Sorcha team has enabled researchers worldwide to refine their tools and be ready for the flood of LSST data that Rubin will generate, advancing the understanding of the small bodies that illuminate the solar system like never before.

Rubin Observatory is scheduled to unveil its first spectacular imagery at its “First Look” event on June 23, offering the world an early glimpse of the survey’s power. Full science operations are slated to begin later this year.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, worked with pet owners across the United States and Canada to determine whether video telehealth visits could help improve care and the home environment for cats with feline degenerative joint disease, commonly referred to as feline arthritis.

The findings, published in the journal Frontiers in Veterinary Science, show that video calls where pet owners can ask questions and get non-medical advice can be beneficial. More than 95% of those who took part in the research said they would pay for telehealth visits, though most were willing to pay a little less than for in-clinic appointments.

“Teleadvice is meant to provide advice and support for caregivers caring for their cats,” said lead author Grace Boone, an assistant specialist in the UC Davis Animal Welfare Epidemiology Lab. “We found that overall everybody was quite interested in video telehealth for home management of their cats and their mobility issues.”

A common ailment

Routine veterinary care is important to prevent, mitigate and treat health and behavioral problems. And feline arthritis is quite common, present in roughly 6% to 30% of cats under age 10 and from 64% to 92% of those older than 10, Boone said.

“Cats are great at hiding signs of pain,” said Carly Moody, senior author on the paper and an assistant animal science professor. “These conditions are prevalent and pain is a serious health and welfare issue that needs to be addressed. Telehealth is beneficial because it allows you to take out that clinic stressor for some aspects of care.”

The researchers recruited 106 pet owners whose cats had mobility issues. Each one filled out a questionnaire about their cat’s mobility, barriers to getting in-person care and how they felt about telehealth.

Pet owners in the test group took the survey and participated in six video visits — one every three weeks over four months — and then retook the survey. The control group only received the questionnaire at the beginning of the research and four months later. A presentation on caring for cats with mobility issues also was offered to all participants at the end.

In the home video session, Boone asked general questions about the cat’s wellbeing and mobility, and suggested modifications if owners asked for advice. Suggestions included elevated food and water dishes to ease neck strain, larger litter boxes with shorter walls, and additional steps to access favorite places. Pet owners reported that the visits helped them understand their cats’ needs, making them more confident in how they cared for their cats.

“There’s a lot of in-home modifications that can be implemented to increase cat comfort in the home,” Moody said. “Telehealth allows veterinary professionals to see and understand the cat’s home environment and make recommendations which can be helpful for the cat.”

Advice not medicine

Telehealth visits don’t require a veterinarian. A registered veterinary technician or other knowledgeable staff member can conduct the calls, answer questions and give advice. They are not meant to replace in-person veterinary care but rather supplement it, Moody said.

“There’s ways you can incorporate telehealth to make it easier for the owner and the cat and increase the number of visits and support an owner is receiving, particularly when they’re caring for a cat that requires chronic high levels of care at home,” Moody said.

The visits have the potential to foster better veterinarian-client-patient relationships. “Rather than being something that detracts from in-person care, I think you can improve it and help supplement it,” Boone said.

Evaluating changes in the home

Next up is to determine whether recommended changes based on expert advice can improve a cat’s wellbeing in the home.

“I think it would be really interesting to look at these interventions and specifically say, ‘Are they helpful?’ If somebody’s not willing to change a lot of things in their home, you could prioritize the ones that make the most difference for the cat’s welfare,” Moody said.

Moody’s lab may also examine whether telehealth could be beneficial for other health issues like obesity and disease prevention.

Hao-Yu Shih from the Mayo Clinic and Daniel Pang, who is affiliated with the University of Calgary and University of Montreal in Canada, contributed to the research. It was supported by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the family foundation Maddie’s Fund.

Unlike cells in the central nervous system, sensory neurons in the nasal cavity have a remarkable ability to regenerate throughout life despite near constant exposure to the outside environment.

Viral infections such as COVID-19, exposure to toxins, or even aging itself can diminish their function or the ability of these cells to replicate, which can lead to a partial or complete loss of smell. The team of researchers devised a new, easy-to-create, three-dimensional olfactory tissue mouse model or organoid to help scientists better study how neurons are continually formed in the nose and why this process might decline in disease and aging.

Their research, published recently in Cell Reports Methods, uses this mouse model to show how two types of stem cells in the nose, called horizontal basal cells (HBCs) and globose basal cells (GBCs), communicate and support each other to develop new smell-sensing nerve tissue.

“Our research suggests that these two stem cells may be interdependent,” says Brian Lin, senior author on the study and a research assistant professor in the Department of Developmental, Molecular and Chemical Biology. “One type that we thought was largely dormant — HBCs — may actually play a crucial role in supporting the production of new neurons and the repair of damaged tissue.”

Using this model, the team identified a specific subpopulation of HBCs, marked by their production of the protein KRT5, that actively support the generation of new olfactory neurons. The researchers observed that these particular HBCs play a key role in the formation of the organoids, and they found that when these cells were selectively depleted from the organoid cultures, the generation of new neurons was significantly impaired. These results suggest that these stem cells, once thought to be dormant, are essential players in the regenerative process.

“We also looked at cells from mice of different ages and grew them in the model,” Lin says. “We found a decline in the ability of the older mice cells to generate new neurons. We think this is due to a decrease in the GBC population as we age, but we need to do more work to test this hypothesis and if so, develop ways to rejuvenate them.”

An Easy-To-Use Model

Lead author of the study, Juliana Gutschow Gameiro, a former Ph.D. student visiting GSBS, came to Tufts from the State University of Londrina, Parana, in Brazil. Lin says she was dedicated to developing a model that was easy to create in labs with limited funds and equipment.

“Because loss of smell is associated with COVID-19, as well as with Parkinson’s disease and other conditions, a much larger number of researchers from a variety of different fields have begun researching olfactory epithelial cells in the last few years,” says Lin.

“We wanted to develop an easy-to-use model so that non-stem cell biologists and those working in labs with limited resources could use it to better understand how olfactory neurons regenerate and what happens that causes that process to diminish or fail completely,” he says.

Next Step: A Human Organoid

The ultimate goal is to use this mouse-tissue model of olfactory sensory neurons as a pathway to developing a human organoid that can be used to screen drugs to treat people whose sense of smell is significantly diminished or gone.

Organoids make pre-clinical trial research quicker, less expensive, and potentially more effective than using whole animals or existing human cell cultures. Organoids have already been developed for lungs, kidneys, and other organs, but not for human olfactory tissue.

“It’s challenging to get pure olfactory tissue from humans,” Lin says. Individuals are anesthetized and a brush similar to a COVID test wand is pushed deep into the nasal cavity. Unlike in their mouse model, human respiratory stem cells and olfactory stem cells collected in this process are difficult to separate.

The research team’s next challenge is to develop a simple, inexpensive technique for separating out the human olfactory stem cells and coaxing them to grow in the lab.

“AI offers new efficiencies and opportunities, yet its deeper integration into daily life requires careful consideration to ensure that AI tools are safe, especially for adolescents,” according to the report, entitled “Artificial Intelligence and Adolescent Well-being: An APA Health Advisory.” “We urge all stakeholders to ensure youth safety is considered relatively early in the evolution of AI. It is critical that we do not repeat the same harmful mistakes made with social media.”

The report was written by an expert advisory panel and follows on two other APA reports on social media use in adolescence and healthy video content recommendations.

The AI report notes that adolescence — which it defines as ages 10-25 — is a long development period and that age is “not a foolproof marker for maturity or psychological competence.” It is also a time of critical brain development, which argues for special safeguards aimed at younger users.

“Like social media, AI is neither inherently good nor bad,” said APA Chief of Psychology Mitch Prinstein, PhD, who spearheaded the report’s development. “But we have already seen instances where adolescents developed unhealthy and even dangerous ‘relationships’ with chatbots, for example. Some adolescents may not even know they are interacting with AI, which is why it is crucial that developers put guardrails in place now.”

The report makes a number of recommendations to make certain that adolescents can use AI safely. These include:

Ensuring there are healthy boundaries with simulated human relationships. Adolescents are less likely than adults to question the accuracy and intent of information offered by a bot, rather than a human.

Creating age-appropriate defaults in privacy settings, interaction limits and content. This will involve transparency, human oversight and support and rigorous testing, according to the report.

Encouraging uses of AI that can promote healthy development. AI can assist in brainstorming, creating, summarizing and synthesizing information — all of which can make it easier for students to understand and retain key concepts, the report notes. But it is critical for students to be aware of AI’s limitations.

Limiting access to and engagement with harmful and inaccurate content. AI developers should build in protections to prevent adolescents’ exposure to harmful content.

Protecting adolescents’ data privacy and likenesses. This includes limiting the use of adolescents’ data for targeted advertising and the sale of their data to third parties.

The report also calls for comprehensive AI literacy education, integrating it into core curricula and developing national and state guidelines for literacy education.

“Many of these changes can be made immediately, by parents, educators and adolescents themselves,” Prinstein said. “Others will require more substantial changes by developers, policymakers and other technology professionals.”

Report: https://www.apa.org/topics/artificial-intelligence-machine-learning/health-advisory-ai-adolescent-well-being

In addition to the report, further resources and guidance for parents on AI and keeping teens safe and for teens on AI literacy are available at APA.org.