Existence and nonexistence of skew branes

A skew brane is a codimension 2 submanifold in affine space such that the tangent spaces at any two distinct points are not parallel. We show that if an oriented closed manifold has a nonzero Euler characteristic \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\chi}$$\end{document}, then it is not a skew brane; generically, the number of oppositely oriented pairs of parallel tangent spaces is not less than \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\chi^2{/4}}$$\end{document}. We give a version of this result for immersed surfaces in dimension 4. We construct examples of skew spheres of arbitrary odd dimensions, generalizing the construction of skew loops in 3-dimensional space due to Ghomi and Solomon (2002). We conclude with two conjectures that are theorems in 1-dimensional case.