Month: April 2022

Enlarge / A woman holds a nasal swab for a COVID-19 antigen rapid test in front of her desk on January 5 in Berlin. (credit: Getty | Thomas Trutschel)

Although the loss of smell and taste became apparent symptoms of COVID-19 early in the pandemic, researchers are still working out why that happens—is the virus directly infecting and destroying the cells responsible for these critical senses, or is it collateral damage from our immune systems fighting off the invading foe?

According to a postmortem study out this week in JAMA Neurology, it's the latter. The study—which dove deep into the noses, nerves, and brains of 23 people who died of COVID-19—is the most detailed look at the coronavirus' effects on our sniffers. Researchers concluded that inflammation—not the virus—is behind the loss of smell and taste during a bout of COVID-19, which is good news in some ways. It suggests that treatments with anti-inflammatory drugs could prevent severe or long-term damage to those critical senses.

The finding follows a mix of data on the effects of SARS-CoV-2 on our sense of smell. Some data suggested that the virus can infect the nerves that carry smells signals to our brain—olfactory neurons. Thus, the lost senses could be caused by direct infections. But others found that the virus wasn't present in those neurons at death.

Enlarge / A purchase confirmation dialog in Horizon Worlds. (credit: Meta)

Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, announced some initial plans on Wednesday to allow content creators to monetize in its would-be Metaverse platform, Horizon Worlds. Meta's planned revenue share for contributors' creations could add up to nearly 50 percent.

Horizon Worlds is a network of shared 3D spaces that is currently exclusively available on Oculus Quest headsets. (Meta has plans to bring it to mobile, game consoles, and desktop VR in the coming months and years.)

There are already people creating spaces for Horizon Worlds, including a virtual yoga studio and a Second Life-like fast-food brand integration in the form of the "Wendyverse." But to date, Horizon Worlds has not offered the tools for creators to make a living creating that content like they could on similar services like Roblox.

Enlarge / Artist's illustration of NASA's Psyche spacecraft, set to launch in August 2022. The Psyche mission will explore a metal-rich asteroid of the same name that lies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)

Ars Technica had the rare opportunity to tour NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California this week, suiting up for a clean room sneak peek at the Psyche spacecraft now nearing completion. This ambitious mission, named after the eponymous asteroid it will explore, is due to launch in August on a Falcon Heavy rocket. Scientists are hopeful that learning more about this unusual asteroid will advance our understanding of planet formation and the earliest days of our solar system.

Discovered in March 1852 by the Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis, 16 Psyche is an M-type asteroid (meaning it has high metallic content) orbiting the Sun in the main asteroid belt, with an unusual potato-like shape. The longstanding preferred hypothesis is that Psyche is the exposed metallic core of a protoplanet (planetesimal) from the earliest days of our solar system, with the crust and mantle stripped away by a collision (or multiple collisions) with other objects. In recent years, scientists concluded that the mass and density estimates aren't consistent with an entirely metallic remnant core. Rather, it's more likely a complex mix of metals and silicates.

Alternatively, the asteroid might once have been a parent body for a particular class of stony-iron meteorites, one that broke up and re-accreted into a mix of metal and silicate. Or perhaps it's an object like 1 Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter—except 16 Psyche may have experienced a period of iron volcanism while cooling, leaving highly enriched metals in those volcanic centers.

Enlarge / A PC running Windows 11. (credit: Microsoft)

Windows 11 has settled down a lot since its original release, but Microsoft continues testing new features and tweaks to the operating system in its Insider Preview program. So far this month, the builds have focused on bug fixes and UI tweaks, but a few notable changes are notable enough to call out.

This week's build, version 22598, is relatively low on user-visible changes. One is that "a limited number of Windows Insiders" performing clean installs will have their desktop wallpapers set to rotating Windows Spotlight images by default. The other change is Microsoft experimenting with 4K wallpapers via Spotlight. There's also a new album-centric view for artist pages in the redesigned Media Player app.

Last week's preview, build 22593, brought some changes for the File Explorer and some window management improvements. The default view for new File Explorer windows is now called "Home," though the available content doesn't change much. Folders can still be pinned to your Home window, but the "Quick access" label has been moved from the navigation sidebar to the main window, and "pinned" files are now called "Favorites" to make them more consistent with the labeling used in OneDrive and Office.

Enlarge / Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin (right) speaks to Russia President Vladimir Putin (left) and Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko during their visit at the Vostochny cosmodrome on Tuesday. (credit: Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images)

To mark the 61st anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic first spaceflight, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited his country's newest spaceport on Tuesday. Putin was accompanied by the chief of Russia's space program, Dmitry Rogozin, and Belarusian President Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko, who has managed to hold on to his office since 1994.

Russians are understandably proud of their nation's historic spaceflight glory, and Putin wanted to cloak himself in the glow of Gagarin's achievement. Putin also sought to explain to Russians how he will continue Gagarin's legacy by talking up Russia's civil spaceflight efforts. "We need to successfully stand up to the challenges of space exploration," he said. To that end, Putin said Russia is working on a "next-generation transport ship," as well as a nuclear-powered space tug. And, according to Russian media reports, Putin added, "We will resume the lunar program."

The next-generation ship presumably refers to the "Orel," or Eagle, spacecraft that would be capable of launching cosmonauts into low Earth orbit as well as to the Moon. The problem with this is that Orel, under various guises and names, has been in development for nearly two decades and is likely years away from flying—if it ever does. And the nuclear-powered space tug is a concept that is years or more likely decades-to-never away from launching.