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.

The research, published May 29 in Nature Sustainability, demonstrates that Australia can fully decarbonize its domestic and energy export economies by 2060 while avoiding harm to important areas for biodiversity outcomes, safeguarding agricultural activities, and respecting Indigenous land rights.

“The amount of land required for the energy transition is massive, and the speed at which we need to be deploying renewable infrastructure is unprecedented,” said first author Andrew Pascale, research scholar in the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. “At the same time, we’ve shown here that not only can it be done, but that it can and should be done while incorporating the perspectives of many different stakeholders.”

If stakeholders work collaboratively to identify the most suitable areas for development, the researchers found it would be possible to site the over 110,000 square kilometers — around 1.7 times the size of Tasmania — of renewable energy infrastructure needed by 2060 to reach net-zero in Australia while preserving lands for biodiversity and agriculture.

If stakeholders refuse to compromise on their interests, however, it would lead not only to higher energy prices but also a clean energy shortfall of almost 500 gigawatts. Such a shortfall would undermine the modeled decarbonization pathway, potentially requiring an unwanted and likely costly pivot to an alternative.

“There are legitimate tensions surrounding renewable energy development,” said co-author Chris Greig, theTheodora D. ’78 & William H. Walton III ’74 Senior Research Scientist in the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. “There are values — protecting biodiversity, respecting Indigenous estate, supporting farmers — that must be respected and incorporated into planning processes alongside concerns about the climate.”

The researchers drew from their prior work on the Net Zero Australia study, a multi-year, multi-institutional collaboration that charted unique pathways for Australia to fully decarbonize and maintain its domestic and export economy — a nearly $6.2 trillion task (in 2020 U.S. dollars). During Net Zero Australia, the team consulted with stakeholder groups including the National Farmers Federation, National Native Title Council, and the Australian Conservation Foundation. In the present study, the team drew from those conversations to incorporate stakeholder values about land use into their technoeconomic model, identifying the most suitable lands for renewable energy development and those that should be excluded from consideration.

“In thinking about renewable energy planning, we’re taking into account different biodiversity goals and protections for natural capital, which is critical for when you’re trying to implement projects,” said co-author James Watson, a professor of environmental management at The University of Queensland. “This is among the first works to put biodiversity and natural capital into the same picture as energy planning in Australia, which is a much-needed step in the right direction.”

The researchers combined the modeling results and stakeholder input to propose a ‘traffic-light’ approach for siting renewable infrastructure. They identified where energy projects could be easiest to site (green), where they could be potentially sited pending further stakeholder engagement (orange), and where development would be off-limits (red).

The researchers contrasted their proposed system with the renewable energy zones that the Australian Energy Regulator uses for energy planning, noting that at least two existing renewable energy zones have over 90% overlap with biodiversity exclusion areas.

“There is a difference between modeling a net-zero pathway and planning one,” Pascale said. “What looks good from the standpoint of resource quality and proximity to existing infrastructure might not hold when you simultaneously consider biodiversity and other national commitments. If 90% of the land in a proposed renewable energy zone will trigger a response from conservation groups, then it may be time to rethink.”

Greig added that at a broader level, the research highlights the importance of flexible, robust net-zero pathways that account for land-use uncertainties. Such a methodology would require moving away from conventional, top-down modeling approaches to flexible pathways that are conscious of different and sometimes competing priorities for natural capital.

“We’ve identified a need for a government planning and approval process that integrates the diverse interests of energy development, Indigenous land rights, environmental values like biodiversity, and natural resources more broadly,” said Greig. “Those perspectives are typically siloed, which is a recipe for decisions that make unacceptable tradeoffs and compromise biodiversity alongside Indigenous and farmers’ rights.”

The researchers suggested that an immediate planning goal would be to prioritize turning possible development sites (orange) into ones acceptable to diverse stakeholders (green) as quickly as possible.

They also underscored several uncertainties, such as missing critical habitat data for many Australian species and how all species might respond to climate change, which would require greater flexibility within individual transition pathways accompanied by regular model updates. If any unexpected and extreme changes in land availability exceed the flexibility designed in the pathway, the researchers acknowledged that the model’s outcomes could change.

However, Watson said that such uncertainties should not prevent planners from using the best available data to take action on renewable energy development.

“We have to deal with the problem we are facing today, thinking about where endangered species are right now and focusing on keeping those habitats intact,” said Watson. “We can take action while acknowledging we need better data, which is far preferable to simply forgetting or ignoring biodiversity.”

“I see this paper as a wake-up call,” he added. “The take-home message is that we need a clean energy future, and that we need to plan for that future — and the large spatial footprint it will require — without defeating our other societal goals.”

Neurons communicate through a process called synaptic transmission, where one neuron releases chemical messengers called neurotransmitters from a presynaptic terminal. These molecules travel across a microscopic gap called a synaptic cleft and bind to receptors on a neighboring postsynaptic neuron, triggering a response.

Traditionally, scientists believed spontaneous transmissions (signals that occur randomly) and evoked transmissions (signals triggered by sensory input or experience) originated from one type of canonical synaptic site and relied on shared molecular machinery. Using a mouse model, the research team — led by Oliver Schlüter, associate professor of neuroscience in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences — discovered that the brain instead uses separate synaptic transmission sites to carry out regulation of these two types of activity, each with its own developmental timeline and regulatory rules.

“We focused on the primary visual cortex, where cortical visual processing begins,” said Yue Yang, a research associate in the Department of Neuroscience and first author of the study. “We expected spontaneous and evoked transmissions to follow a similar developmental trajectory, but instead, we found that they diverged after eye opening.”

As the brain began receiving visual input, evoked transmissions continued to strengthen. In contrast, spontaneous transmissions plateaued, suggesting that the brain applies different forms of control to the two signaling modes.

To understand why, the researchers applied a chemical that activates otherwise silent receptors on the postsynaptic side. This caused spontaneous activity to increase, while evoked signals remained unchanged — strong evidence that the two types of transmission operate through functionally distinct synaptic sites.

This division likely enables the brain to maintain consistent background activity through spontaneous signaling while refining behaviorally relevant pathways through evoked activity. This dual system supports both homeostasis and Hebbian plasticity, the experience-dependent process that strengthens neural connections during learning.

“Our findings reveal a key organizational strategy in the brain,” said Yang. “By separating these two signaling modes, the brain can remain stable while still being flexible enough to adapt and learn.”

The implications could be broad. Abnormalities in synaptic signaling have been linked to conditions like autism, Alzheimer’s disease and substance use disorders. A better understanding of how these systems operate in the healthy brain may help researchers identify how they become disrupted in disease.

“Learning how the brain normally separates and regulates different types of signals brings us closer to understanding what might be going wrong in neurological and psychiatric conditions,” Yang said.