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Researchers have created a new device that uses ultrasound to trigger smells directly in the brain for VR The small device rests on the forehead with a soft gel pad. It sends gentle sound waves through the skull to the area of the brain that processes smell. Current VR smell systems use cartridges that need constant refills and can make a mess. This new method is cleaner and could one day let people smell virtual worlds like forests or oceans naturally. The project is still in early prototype stage from a small research team. Safety levels were kept low, but more testing is needed.

JUST IN: SpaceX has secured the right to acquire Cursor AI for $60 billion later this year.

The sheer scale of biology is absolutely crazy. If you blow the human body up to a scale where a single carbon atom was the size of a marble (1.5 cm), your body would be about 180,000km tall, halfway to the moon, or roughly 15 times taller than The Earth is wide. One medium cup breast on the average woman would be the size of Earth A single human cell would be 2km in diameter. A covid-19 virus would be about 10m across (the size of a medium house or maybe a superheavy tank) But a strand of DNA would be just 6 inches or 20cm wide. Typical enzymes and proteins would be the size of a microwave oven or something. One water molecule would be roughly 3cm across. That cell that's 2km across contains 10 trillion of them. And there are 30 trillion cells, each of which contains 10 trillion water molecules, along with many other small molecules in the high tens of billions, and 10 billion ATP molecules each of which is the size of a coffee cup. ATP is the "liquid energy" currency of biology. Each one of your cells in this scale model is about the same width as Manhattan island (but usually not as long, because most cells are roughly spherical) and the same volume as all the buildings and infrastructure in New York City - more than just Manhattan - and contains: - water: about 100 trillion molecules - proteins: about 8 billion molecules - ribosomes: about 10 million - mitochondria: about 300 - nucleosomes: about 30 million - nuclear pores: about 500 - lysosomes/peroxisomes: about hundreds - nucleus/Golgi/ER: usually one nucleus, one Golgi complex, one ER network Each Mitochondrion is roughly the size of an aircraft carrier. There are 300 of them packed into each cell. 300 aircraft carriers packed into lower Manhattan. Each aircraft carrier produces a million ATP molecules per second. Each ATP molecule is the size of a large coffee cup and has about the energy of a half dozen fully charged AA batteries (energy density is not great!). But because it has to charge up a million of them per second, the mitochondrion has a power rating of about 50-100GW, which is about the electrical power of Texas, or at least 100× the power of an actual aircraft carrier. The biology of the human body is like if we made a pile of Manhattans stretching from Earth halfway to the moon, about 5 Earths wide and deep, each of which contained 300 super-powerful nuclear aircraft carriers. Each of these Manhattan-sized cells is consuming 300 million of these "ATP" battery packs per second. Each Manhattan-sized cell contains about 10 million Ribosomes which are like the "workers" of Manhattan (actually 10 million is the whole of NYC). Each "Worker" is 2.5m tall and fat, like a car. And its power use is comparable to a powerful race car like a McLaren F1. And a single virus the size of a large lorry or dump truck is capable of destroying this thing, because its security is abysmally bad. *This* is why it is hard to solve human health. The human body, scaled up so that you could see the machinery, is basically a kardashev level 2 megastructure in scale, power and complexity.