Science Fact or Fiction? Matt Damon’s life on Mars

One of the most enjoyable parts of being an unapologetic nerd is the satisfaction that can be won by tearing apart bogus science in movies. Whether you are laughing at the impossibility of humans producing more energy than they consume in the Matrix or you are on the level of Neil DeGrasse Tyson who shamed director James Cameron for digitally producing the wrong constellations in the night sky in Titanic, there is a certain sick thrill in pointing out the details that writers and directors overlook (seriously though, why no feathered dinosaurs in Jurassic Park?).

Cynical movie-goers with a nerdy flare may however be disappointed in this regard by the latest science-fiction blockbuster: The Martian. While not every detail of the movie (based on a fantastic book by former computer engineer Andy Weir) is completely based in reality, the story integrates a surprising number of real NASA technologies. From Matt Damon’s emergency potato farm to the vehicle he uses to explore the red planet, NASA is hard at work creating the technology that will be needed to allow humans to survive on another planet.

Habitat

In the book/movie, astronaut Mark Watney survives an accident that leaves him stranded on Mars after his crewmates evacuate. Watney is fortunate to have access to a base of operations known as the Hab. Astronauts today train for long duration space missions using the Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Surprisingly, the real life version is a little more comfortable than Hollywood’s take on it. While Watney’s Hab is a single story affair made up of one large room with bunks, the HERA is a two story environment that provides living quarters, workspaces, hygiene modules and a simulated airlock. You’d think that 20 years in the future NASA could spring for the extra walls.

Food and Water

While the book and movie might take things a little further than current science has been able to achieve, we are well on our way to being able to produce both food and water in space. In 2014 astronauts in low-Earth orbit successfully planted the first ever extraterrestrial lettuce crop which they were recently able to harvest and taste. This marks a huge step towards sustaining astronauts for seriously long-term missions to other worlds. In terms of staying hydrated, Watney’s water reclaimer is a good stand-in for the technology already used on the International Space Station (ISS) which collects all the waste water from the day-to-day operations and from the astronauts own bodies, filters it and redistributes it. It’s not an exaggeration to say that astronauts end up making coffee with the water that left their bodies the day before.

Oxygen

In The Martian Mark Watney is lucky to have an “oxygenator” that pulls carbon dioxide from the air and supplies him with a steady stream of oxygen to breath. In real life we aren’t quite at the same level of sustainability, but NASA has managed to come up with a system that works well using a semi-closed loop. Astronauts on the ISS rely on the less cooly named Oxygen Generation System which uses electrolysis to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen in water by running a current through a sample. The oxygen is cycled back into the air while the hydrogen is pumped out into space. The system does, therefore rely on new water to keep it going, a problem that will have to be solved before we start shipping people to Mars.

Near Miss – Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG)

One aspect of Mark Watney’s odyssey that features prominently and isn’t quite right is his misadventures with the missions RTG. The RTG is a source of power generation that in the book, movie and in real life uses radioactive plutonium-238 to create energy from heat. Plutonium-238 is ridiculously radioactive and becomes quite hot all on its own. In the movie, this causes problems for Watney as NASA protocol calls for him to bury the system far from the Hab as its radioactivity could fry his DNA. In real life Plutonium-238 is dangerous, but not quite that dangerous. The radiation it gives off wouldn’t be able to penetrate a space suit or even human skin. Actually the thin atmosphere on Mars would make radiation from the Sun a bigger threat to Watney than the RTG, which can generate a little more electricity than it takes to run an incandescent lightbulb.

All in all, The Martian does a better job than most science fiction stories at keeping things real. There are a tonne of other elements from the movie that are true and we just didn’t have the space to share. For a more comprehensive list, check out this article by NASA themselves. If you’ve got NASA giving you props on the technology in the movie you made, you’ve probably done a pretty good job. Even better, Andy Weir managed to take the potentially boring science behind space travel and turn it into an awesome story.

The Trouble with Tardigrades: The Trials and Tribulations of Nature’s Toughest Animal

Imagine for a moment that you are a hitman for mother nature. It is your job to find and kill any animal she requests. Obviously some contracts are going to be easier than others. Taking the life of a grizzly bear or a great white is going to be a bit more challenging than ending a lamb or grasshopper. However, even sharks and grizzly bears are easy targets compared to nature’s toughest creature. Freeze a shark solid in a block of ice and boil a grizzly bear and your job is pretty well taken care of, but do the same to a tradigrade and you’re in for a long and frustrating wait.

You may not have ever heard of tardigrades, but they are everywhere you have ever been. There are billions and billions of them in every environment on earth. In fact there is a stout branch on the tree of life that contains nothing but the 1000+ species of these little guys. A tardigrade isn’t a bacteria or any other kind of those not-quite animals you hear about being everywhere either, they are honest to goodness animals that you can see with the naked eye… in the right light.

Tardigrades, also known as water bears for their resemblance to very tiny pandas, are on average about 1 millimeter long. That is about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. They are mostly transparent and have eight stubby legs, each ending in an alien/bear/eagle like claw. They spend their days sucking water off of moss and feasting on algae with their spear-like mouths. However, unlike most animals that live in the land of the very small, tardigrades are actually kind of cute in a monstrous sort of way.

They get their name from the Italian word tardigrada meaning “slow walker” because unlike most tiny animals that dart around like Carrot Top on PCP, tardigrades lumber around slowly and pretty clumsily, doing their tardigrade thing. Tardigrades are a scientists best friend because they are small and breed quickly. An individual contains about 1000 cells and has a lifespan of around one year… Unless of course you subject them to the cruelest kinds of punishment imaginable, then they will live WAY longer.

Indeed, a tarigrade is a very peculiar thing. Leave it alone and it will lead a pretty uninteresting life, but if you freeze them, dry them out, cook them, or expose them to radiation you had better be prepared to have your mind blown. Tardigrades can withstand temperatures from 1 Kelvin (-458 F/-272 C) to 148 C (300 F). They can survive pressures 6 times greater than the deepest point of the ocean and brush off a dose of radiation 1000 times greater than what would kill an elephant.

When a tardigrade is thrown into one of these woefully undesireable situations it pulls off an amazing trick. It can dehydrate it’s body by 97%, converting water into a sugar called trehalose which prevents cells from rupturing when they freeze or heat up. When they do this, tardigrades go into a sort of hibernation, almost entirely shutting down their metabolisms. When conditions improve, they simply rehydrate and go back to the business of moss sucking. A tardigrade can survive in its hibernating state for at least ten years but possibly for more than a century.

As if all of this wasn’t enough to bestow them with the honour of nature’s most indestructible creature, tardigrades are the only animals we know of that have survived the vacuum of space. In 2007 NASA sent a team of tardigrades along with a few astronauts up into orbit. They opened the airlock and set the tardigrades floating in space for ten days where they were exposed to extreme cold, extreme heat, and intense radiation. Apparently the tardigrades just treated this as a vacation because when they were brought back to earth they woke themselves up from an extended nap and just went on living. A few even reproduced.

This is all pretty amazing but why does it matter? We can get jealous of tardigrades until the cows come home but it doesn’t help us much, does it? Actually, tardigrades provide good evidence for a long held idea in science called panspermia which is meant to explain where life on earth came from. It is thought that life may have started elsewhere in the universe and been spread by collisions with meteors. When a meteor hits a planet it sends pieces of that planet rocketing into space and drifting through the void. If creatures like tardigrades are tough enough to survive such a trip and land on another planet, life might be a pretty common feature of the universe. Tardigrades themselves might even be an alien life form.

That is real gift that tardigrades give us. Through their survival of nearly everything, including all 5 mass extinction events so far on earth, through their uncountable numbers on earth, and through their ability to travel in space tardigrades provide strong evidence that we aren’t alone in the universe… And if you’re reading this in a mossy forest alcove you’re really not alone.

References:

http://tvblogs.nationalgeographic.com/2014/03/19/5-reasons-why-the-tardigrade-is-natures-toughest-animal/

http://www.wired.com/2014/03/absurd-creature-week-water-bear/

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/tardigrades/5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H0E77TdYnY

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/05/the-amazing-tardigrade-the-toughest-known-creature-on-earth-and-beyond/

Is Your Cell Messing with Your Cells? The health effects of mobile phones

21^st century technology is pretty amazing stuff. Over the past year we have explored a number of tech-topics (from solar power, to graphene, to Moore’s Law) that underscore just how influential new innovations can be on our day to day living. The drawback to all these new gizmos is that we are effectively living in a giant, uncontrolled experiment with respect to the health effects. Technology is moving forward at such a fast pace that we often adopt things as a normal part of our lives before we fully understand what impact those things can have on us. All you need to do is look at ads like this one from the 50’s, marketing the wonderful health benefits of using beauty products containing radium (the radioactive element that killed its discoverers) to understand that we often get ahead of ourselves when it comes to new science.

One topic that is beginning to attract some attention is whether or not cell phones are giving us brain tumors. Mobile phones are so convenient and so increasingly useful that we haven’t even begun to consider if they might not be too good to be true in the sense of safety.  In 2011 the International Agency for Research on Cancer unhelpfully told the world that the radio frequency fields emitted by cell phones were “possibly carcinogenic.” But the science remains unclear.

First off, the radio waves emitted by your cell phone are not even close to the same thing as the fallout from an atomic bomb, so you can put that out of your mind right now. Nuclear bombs, X-rays, and radium infused beauty products all emit “ionizing radiation.” That means that the energy they give off shakes up the atoms in your body enough to knock some electrons off of them. This creates atoms with a different charge than they usually have and wreaks havoc on things like DNA. Cell phones give off “non-ionizing radiation” meaning that the energy will still shake up your atoms, but your electrons will generally remain intact. 

Therein lies the first problem with the “cell phone mutating our brains” hypothesis. Based on what we know right now, there isn’t a mechanism for them to cause cancer. That means that pretty much any study you hear about looking at cell phones and cancer is relying hugely on correlation. That is to say, the researchers are looking at how often two things occur together and trying to make guesses about one causing the other. This can be a useful method when there are no other options, but it can also lead you to conclude that global temperatures are rising because the number of pirates in the Caribbean has declined dramatically since the 1700’s.

Even still, the correlational data from studies on cell phones isn’t entirely clear. One Danish study looked at over 400,000 cell phone users and found no evidence of increased cancer risk (Johansen, et al. 2000). Another study from Israel looked at cancer rates in a small community located very near to a cell-phone transmitter station and found cancer rates over 10 times the national average (Wolf & Wolf, 2004). Especially worrying, if you are a fan of healthy sperm, research from Hungary has linked cell phone use to deficient motility (AKA poor swimmers) (Zavaczki et al., 2005).

The only thing we can say with any degree of confidence right now is that excessive cell phone use probably isn’t a good idea. A number of studies, including a French one published a few weeks ago, have suggested that while normal use may or may not cause problems, using your phone for at least 30 minutes per day over a period of several years can triple your risk of brain tumors. Researchers compared high-intensity users (ex. people working in sales) to normal users and the results were bad news.

If you’re worried about your phone scrambling your brain there are a few things you can do. Don’t make unnecessary calls that last a long time, send text messages (who doesn’t love texting?), and use your speaker phone option to keep the phone’s antenna away from your grey matter. It might be a few years before we find out the truth about the health risks of constant connectivity. In the mean time, it might be an idea to use your head... Just in case you're inadvertently cooking it.

The Fountain of Youth and Why You Won’t Drink From It

On a street near the harbor in the town of Punta Gorda, Florida there is an old public faucet built into a stone pillar that juts from the sidewalk next to a trash can. The tap is a little rusty, and the stonework is cracked but it is in remarkably good shape considering that it was built in 1926. It almost seems to exist outside of time. Then again, it should… It is the fountain of youth.

The first European to have landed on the mainland US (according to the generally accepted historical record) was Ponce de Leon. He anchored his boat, met the locals, and promptly began tearing apart the forest looking for the source of everlasting life. The tap that stands today in Punta Gorda won’t make you immortal, but it seems to help residents of the town stay healthy well into old age.

The curious thing about the fountain is that, tacked to the Spanish tiles is a sign from the city that warns would-be drinkers about the waters unacceptably high level of radioactivity. The only reason that the tap is still functional is that residents have continuously fought the city to keep it that way. The untreated water was almost shut off in the 1970’s and the sign marks something of a compromise.

It is not the radioactivity that carries the health benefits brought on by the water (reduced blood pressure, more regular heartbeat, increased regularity), it is the significantly elevated magnesium content. The water comes directly from one of Florida’s aquifers which just so happens to incase it in magnesium-rich limestone.

Magnesium is something that most people don’t get enough of. According to National Geographic 80% of Americans are deficient in magnesium; and a 1977 study by the US Academy of Science claimed that 150,000 deaths per year in the US could be prevented by adding magnesium to public water. Unfortunately, cities tend to do the opposite and treat water with fluoride, which counteracts magnesium but gives you a nice toothy grin.

The fountain in Punta Gorda is a good example of one of the quirks of the human brain. Even though something is probably good for us, we can get scared off by the smallest chance of something bad happening. The benefits of the magnesium clearly outweigh the risks posed by the radioactivity. Zoltan Szabo if the US Geological Survey has said that if you drank the radioactive water at a rate of one liter a day for 70 years, your chance of getting cancer would be 1 in 20,000. Despite that, the crowds that once flocked to the fountain now largely avoid it.

It is the same phenomenon that makes people nervous about flying even though they drive their much more dangerous cars to work every day. Psychologists call it an Availability Heuristic. Since we can more easily imagine something big and complicated like a plane getting into an accident, compared with our familiar and simple little cars, we think it is more likely to be dangerous. It’s not. It’s not even close. Likewise, since the word “radioactivity” conjures up images of nuclear bombs and glowing bananas people get scared away from something as clearly helpful as a public fountain that makes you healthier.

That makes the lesson of the fountain of youth one of psychology over biology. The human brain is capable of amazing tricks and seriously flawed judgment. It’s up to you to be aware of it, think rationally, and drink the water anyway. You’ll be laughing all the way to whatever the opposite of the morgue is.

Opposite of the morgue... apparently.

Radioactivity – Everybody cover your junk

I’ll bet you didn’t know that bananas are radioactive. It is one of those weird facts that science abounds with, but it is most certainly true. There is even a tongue-in-cheek unit of radiation exposure that some people (scientists seems too strong a word) refer to as the “Banana Equivalent Dose.”

It’s not anything worth worrying about (trust me, I’ve looked into it), but it’s interesting all the same. The best comparison that I came across while researching this article was made by Keith Yost, a columnist for MIT’s newspaper:

“The risk of death is on par with smoking 1/700th of a cigarette, or spending a third of a second in a canoe.”

But what is radioactivity, anyway? The short answer is that it is energy released by atoms as they turn from one substance into another. One of the cooler things about atoms is that some of them  come in different flavours… Unstable flavours. For example, about one in every 10,000 potassium atoms is an “unstable isotope.” What that means is that if a particularly feisty beta-particle comes shooting down from space and crashes into our unstable potassium atom, one of the protons in the nucleus can turn into a neutron.

                

When you change the number of protons in an atom, you change what that atom is. If you take an atom of mercury and subtract a proton, congratulations you just made some gold. Knock off another proton and it becomes platinum, even better. In our example with the potassium, when a proton turns into a neutron, the atom becomes argon; and when that happens, a little bit of radioactive energy is released.

                

The trouble with radioactive energy is that large doses of it don’t agree with DNA. When cells divide in the presence of radioactivity, they act like a 17 year old raiding his parents’ liquor cabinet... Things get messy. Mistakes happen when the DNA of cells tries to replicate and that can lead to out of control division down the road, AKA cancer. 

Radiation can also make you sick to your stomach, which is why, if you ever find yourself downwind of a nuclear blast, you don’t want to try catching anything on your tongue as is drifts down from the sky. Unfortunately, Native Pacific Islanders caught downwind from the experimental nuclear blasts on the Bikini Atoll in the 1940's and 50's got this advice a little too late.

               

Since humans discovered radioactivity in 1895, we haven’t been as careful with it as present common sense would suggest. Marie Curie, a Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of the element radium, died in 1934 from aplastic anemia; probably the result of radium mutating cells in her bone marrow. When the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 it killed between 60,000 and 80,000 people instantly, but the total death toll from the bombing is estimated at around 135,000 when radiation related deaths are included.

And that brings us back to the banana. The reason that bananas are radioactive is because they are loaded with potassium. And, as we now know, 1 in every 10,000 potassium atoms is able to have an identity crisis. Bananas aren’t the only thing that might leave you glowing green if you spend too much time with them, though. Radioactivity is everywhere. Kitty litter, glossy magazine pages, granite counter tops, and even the city of Denver all increase your exposure to radiation. Again though, the doses are tiny, so don’t lose any sleep over it… 

But you might want to invest in some lead-lined underwear.