space Archives - EcoEvo@TCD

22/07/201922/07/2019

Moon Landing Anniversary – Don’t look to the stars when the ground is burning

Buzz Aldrin on the surface of Earth's moon

Space: the final frontier. This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing mission; the first time we had ever stepped foot on the moon. As Neil Armstrong boldly declared “that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, we perhaps reached a new peak of human achievement. A peak that continues to climb upwards, itself shooting for the moon.

I’ve grown up with franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek. Where somehow there’s always a white (human) man getting into trouble with aliens and flying space ships. One thing that’s common in much science fiction is the idea that we can colonise new worlds, terraforming their surfaces to sustain life (as we know it). This idea is pervasive in the years since the moon landing, and continues to be drawn upon even in recent films claimed to be scientifically sound (e.g. Interstellar and The Martian). Whilst this is a romantic idea—of humans gallivanting across the galaxy (hitchhiking even)—I sometimes worry about the price of this dream. Of course, I’m sure the notion has inspired many great minds the world over to learn about space, and perhaps to successfully take us all there one day. But does this idealism come with a cost?

23/01/2013

Men are from Earth and women are from Earth

We love to explore and our adventures into outer space represent the acme of our derring-do. But when we leave our cozy planet we put an awful lot of stress on our minds and bodies. The billions of years of evolutionary pressures exerted on our ancestors all took place within the confines of Earth so a sudden dose of zero gravity is completely alien to us.

Some of the effects of space travel will give even those among you with the right stuff cause for pause.

There are the obvious perils like the terrifying oxygen-less vacuum of space but other, less obvious, afflictions abound.

Okay, so our skeletal system allows us to saunter around this planet quite comfortably. The whole point of the system is to provide some structure and locomotory ability against the force of gravity. But remove the pull and the bones start to wither away. There’s no longer any strain for the bones to resist. It happens at quite an alarming rate too. An average (?) astronaut can expect to lose 1% of his bone mass per month due to spaceflight osteopenia.

Still there’s no shortage of people who’d jump at the chance to be a star voyager for a few months.

But with longer flights, like a mission to Mars, there are even more insidious problems to consider. Back in 2010, six astronauts were selected to simulate such a mission (I was rejected for being too tall). They were locked in a room modeled on a spacecraft and given tasks that would be typical of such a journey. The whole ‘trip’ took 520 days and was an effort to better understand what happens to a person during a period of prolonged isolation.

While not quite space madness the six developed a range of symptoms. Chief among them were hypokinesis and disturbed sleep-wake cycles. The authors of the study describing the effects believe that the cause of these problems was a disruption to the circadian rhythms of the people involved. On Earth, we have our 24 hour day with its predictable light and dark cycle. But in space there is no such thing. Subtle changes in light can throw off your internal clock. This would be quite problematic. If one person has changed to a 25 hour day this can destroy the working ability of the team because he’ll find himself sleeping when everyone else is up.

It’s quite frustrating that we don’t have a biological blank slate that can adapt to all conditions. When we blast off from Earth, one thing we don’t leave behind is our evolutionary past.

Author

Adam Kane: kaned[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit

wikimedia commons

02/01/2013

A year of discoveries – 2012

With the end of the year and the inevitable onslaught of re-edited best of 2012 countdown shows, I decided to join the year’s long nostalgic trip with a look at some of my favourite scientific discoveries of 2012. As the obvious breakthroughs such as the Higgs boson etc will be covered ad lib elsewhere I decided to stick to topics more closely related to my field and in line with the blog. So here’s my short and erratic list, enjoy.

As a region that is less explored then the surface of the moon, especially after the success of the ebb and flow gravity mapping satellites, deep sea environments show no slowing down in throwing up new discoveries and 2012 was no different. While James Cameron has stolen all the headlines with his record setting trip to the ocean floor, it’s the discovery of a new hydrothermal vent community in Antarctica that makes my list. The Vent system, an ecosystem supported based on bacteria that chemosynthesis and obtains its energy independently of the sun, was found to include a new species of yeti crab and an assemblage of species markedly different from other vent systems. The discovery of the new systems and its marked difference to other vent systems may help us further understand the biogeography and the dispersion and colonisation of such isolated and extreme environments.
Amongst the fantastic successes in space exploration this year included the mapping of the moons surface, the discovery of evidence of water on the asteroid Vesta by Dawn and of course the landing of the mars rover Curiosity. However perhaps one of the most unexpected discoveries of the year came from the most inhospitable of planets Mercury. Despite being the closest planet to the sun were temperatures can reach a searing 400 degrees Celsius at the surface the Nasa found evidence of water and organic compounds at the bottom of a crater near the poles, which is permanently shaded. While life would not be expected to be found in such an inhospitable location it points to the ubiquitous presence of water ice and organic materials throughout the solar systems, a pre-requisite for life on this planet.
With an estimated 86% of the earths species awaiting to be discovered, 2012’s batch didn’t fail to disappoint. Amongst the most notable new species to science include two new species of monkey (Cercopithecus lomamiensis the first to be found in Africa in 28 years and Nycticebus kayan a venomous slow Loris found in Borneo), the smallest know reptile, the largest fossil penguin species and the 126 new species found in Mekong basin just to name a few. Also worth nothing, although not a new species, is the spade toothed beaked whale skeleton, a species yet to be seen in the wild, which no evidence of its existence was known for 30 years.
While probably not the most talked about scientific advancement of the year, a paper in Nature by Sugihara et al explaining a method of unravelling causation was one of the most talked about in this department. The statistical procedure called convergent cross mapping can determine cause and effect problem in complex data such as fisheries population dynamics, a problem that so often pains ecologists. While a statistic method doesn’t usually get the excitement levels up but this method will likely provide numerous insights into ecological systems in the future.
To counter balance including a statistical paper in my festive highlights of the year I decided to include the several instances of what seems to be reverse Doolittleism, animals trying to speak back to us. While parrots ands primates are usually the mainstay of investigating language, it was a beluga whale and an elephant that caught the ears of scientists this year. Noc, a captive beluga whale in the marine mammal foundation in San Diego was reported to have produced such a convincing human voice that handlers in the water surfaced to say “Who told me to get?”. Furthermore the whale was trained to speak on cue by using much lower sound waves than the normal high click sounds of beluga whales. A second incident of an animal attempting to mimic human language was Koshik, a male elephant in Everland theme park in Yongin, South Korea. Koshik can imitate words such as “annyong” (“hello”), “anja” (“sit down”), “aniya” (“no”) and “choah” (“good”). While other animals have been known to imitate human language, the addition of such large charismatic animals that are both intelligent and also unknown to normally imitate sounds, such as birds do, may be an important input into the evolution of vocal learning.

That’s my list of my favourite discoveries of 2012, which is by no means comprehensive, for example take a look at the wiki page of science in 2012 for a day-by-day list of the best discoveries of the year. Lets hope for the same in 2013.

Author

Kevin Healy: healyke[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit

wikimedia commons