The Birds and the Bacteria

A double dose of science goodness for you, my galleons. Aren’t you lucky?

Scientists in Savannah, GA (can anyone read this city’s name in anything other than a lazy, rolling Southern drawl?) have spent the last 30 years studying the songs of sparrows. Which probably does not involve them sitting out on their large porches, sipping mint juleps and listening to the local wildlife, but dammit all, that’s how I want to imagine it went down.

Anyway, the Savannah scientists have discovered that the songs of their sparrows have changed over the course of 30 years. Which might not be too surprising (one would think they’d have to vary their songs every so often, to keep the ladies interested), but considering sparrows actually only learn one type of song in their lives, it is very interesting. The scientists liken it to human speech patterns, making the comparison that the way people spoke in the 80s is quite different than how we speak today. After all, slang terms rise and fall, becoming a central feature of the language of a certain time period. The same holds true for birds- their songs are full of little bits of “slang”, clicks and trills that change over time.

It’s a fascinating look at cultural evolution. Male sparrows learn their song from the males around them, meaning the changes in song are learned changes being passed to new generations. It’s likely the changes came about thanks to the fickle nature of females- their preference for males with shorter trills, for example, means those males will reproduce with them and will teach youngsters the same trilling technique. And all this happened in a mere 30 years, allowing us to study the evolutionary patterns. Awesomesauce.

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Even astronauts have to worry about splattered bugs on their windshields, even if those bugs are microscopic little bacteria. A recent study by NASA of the middle and upper troposhpere has revealed that a host of microorganisms hang out in the trophosphere, a region of the atmosphere 4-6 miles above the Earth’s surface. This raised some sciencey eyebrows, seeing as the trophosphere is a difficult environment for life to flourish in.

The microorganisms consisted of a variety of bacteria types, as well as a few fungi. The types of bacteria varied depending on where the air samples were taken- marine bacteria were found in air samples from above the ocean, while terrestrial bacteria were abundant in the above-ground air samples.

Of course, whether the microorganisms actually make their home in the troposphere is not yet known. While the troposphere does contain carbons than many of the varieties of found bacteria could thrive on, it’s also likely the microorganisms get kicked up there from the planet’s surface. Frankly, based on the concentrations of marine bacteria over water and terrestrial bacteria over land, I’d wager the latter. Still, it was surprising for the NASA group to find so many of the little buggers kickin’ it way up there.

Atmospheric scientists are keenly interested in this discovery for a few reasons. The first is that these microorganisms might play a role in the formation of ice, impacting weather patterns. And second, it could represent a new form of long-distance bacteria transport that would be of note for disease transmission models.

Who knows, maybe there are whole bacterial colonies hanging out in the clouds… An odd ecosystem (unless you are a Care Bear), but hey, whatever works for you, little bacteria.

Curiouser and Curiouser

So, I think it was a given that today’s post was going to be about the Curiosity rover’s fate. And, as I’m sure you’re all aware, dear galleons, Curiosity landed without a problem and is currently hanging out on the Martian surface:

I IS ON MARS NAO

But what you might NOT realize is what is inside that big ol’ rover.

Me.

Well, not me exactly. It’s SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars), which is a big box of science-y goodness tucked inside Curiosity. SAM is a successor to the twin Viking experiments of 1976-77, experiments which detected positive results for life on the red planet at both Viking landing sites (Chryse Planitia and Utopia Planitia). The simple version of the experiment had one of the Viking landers gather some soil and treat it with a solution containing small, organic chemicals labeled with radioactive carbon. These soil samples then released a gas. We don’t actually know which gas was released. The creator of the experiment, Gilbert Levin, believes it was carbon dioxide released from the oxidation of organic chemicals, but it’s also likely the gas was methane. What we do know, however, is that when we heated the samples to temperatures high enough to kill most Earth microbes, the gas was no longer released.

For some, this was proof we’d found life on Mars, but others were… less certain. Another experiment on the landers failed to find any evidence of organic matter in the soil samples.

Since then, we’ve found potential fossilized life in meteorites originating from Mars, but those initial Viking findings remain fuzzy. And by Feynman’s bongos, we want to know if there’s life on the rock next door. It’s a staple of science fiction, an idea most of us have toyed with- the idea that life exists, not just somewhere else in the wide, wide universe, but right here in our own neighborhood.

SAM is working to settle the question once and for all. While it’s not the only question Curiosity is up there to answer, it’s certainly a big one.

Galleons, meet SAM:

SAM is equipped with some badass gear. Its own chemical separation and processing laboratory, quadrupole mass spectrometer, gas chromatograph, tunable laser spectrometer… this baby is one sick science package. With more advanced instruments than Viking, SAM’s gonna figure this shit out. Scanning the soil, scanning the atmosphere… Curiosity and SAM are going to be busy.

I expect you’ll hear a lot more from me… er, from SAM, in the next two years.

O HAI

Zero Hour, Nine A.M.

It’s lonely out in space
On such a timeless flight

Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it’s cold as hell
And there’s no one there to raise them if you did ~Rocket Man Elton John

We are apparently on a Mars kick this week, dear galleons. But I’m sure you don’t mind (and, if you do, you can always stop reading- choice, she is yours).

It’s every science fiction fan’s dream that some day the human race will colonize space. From many of the stories in Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man to the video game series Red Faction to one of the final Doctor Who episodes to feature the 10th Doctor, if you are any kind of nerd, you’ve probably encountered a story of what life on Mars will be like for humanity in the future. However, as we discussed a few days ago, travel to the red planet is still in that nebulous area called the future.

At least, it is for humans.

Yesterday, 10 of the toughest organisms on the planet were loaded into a container no bigger than a hockey puck, tucked into Russia’s Fobos-Grunt spacecraft, and blasted toward the Martian moon, Phobos. The Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment (LIFE… get it?) is a project organized by the Planetary Society of Pasadena, California. The goal of the project is to study the effect of interstellar radiation and temperatures on living organisms without Earth’s protective magnetosphere, as well as test transpermia (the idea that organisms could be ejected off planets through impact, travel through space inside rocks, and be deposited on another world).

Which, if the organisms survive, would lend a small amount of credence to the theory that life on Earth could have started when a chunk of rock from another planet smashed into our planet’s surface.

Anyway, the 10 littlest astronauts have a three-year trip ahead of them. This is no mean feat, so we had to select just the right organisms for the job. Who was the most likely to survive? We needed the extremophiles, the badasses of the natural world. And we needed some variety- a few bacteria, some eukaryotes, some archaea.

Here are the 10 lucky organisms to make the cut:

• Bacillus safensis [bacteria]– this little guy was actually found in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab’s Spacecraft Assembly Facility… so, there’s a chance he’s on Mars already *le gasp*
• Bacillus subtilis [bacteria]– two strains of this guy are going up, one of which is already a seasoned space traveler, having been to the moon and had multiyear exposure in a low Earth orbit
• Deinococcus radiodurans [bacteria]– this sucker can basically survive everything (cold, dehydration, vacuum, acid, radiation) and is the Guinness World Record holder for toughest bacterium
• Haloarcula marismortui [archaea]– a halophile
• Methanothermobacter wolfeii [archaea]– a methane producer
• Pyrococcus furiosus [archaea]– because this puppy thrives at temperatures of 100°C, it can be used as a maximum temperature indicator
• Saccharomyces cerevisiae [fungi]– a yeast, this guy is not only super useful (used for baking and brewing since ancient times), it’s also already proven its resiliency in space- it survived 553 days on an exterior panel of the ISS
• Arabidopsis thaliana [plantae]– this little guy is better known as the mouse-ear cress, a small flowering plant that is frequently used to understand the molecular biology of plant traits (he’s already been to the moon as well)
• Tardigrades [animalia]– known as water bears, these teensy microscopic guys look like a creepy cross between a pig and a caterpillar… they’ve also survived the vacuum and radiation of low Earth orbit

But all is not bright and shiny for LIFE. It’s faced some harsh criticism because many believe the project violates the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. The Outer Space Treaty, for those of you who don’t know, is SPACE LAW. No joke. It is the entire framework for international space laws. And in Article IX, it is expressly stated that, “States Parties to the Treaty shall pursue studies of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter and, where necessary, shall adopt appropriate measures for this purpose.”

If LIFE were to malfunction and crash on either Phobos or Mars itself, these extremophiles have the possibility of surviving. And if the microbes escape, then you have potentially ruined any chance of studying the origin of organic matter found on Phobos (or Mars, depending on where the hypothetical crash occurred).

“It would be difficult to convince anyone that detected organics were not released from the spacecraft,” said Catharine Conley, NASA’s planetary protection officer¹.

Controversy or no, the project is on its way to Phobos now. In three years, we’ll discover just what (if anything) survived the journey.

Here’s looking at you, little astronauts. Godspeed.

1 The planetary protection officer position with NASA ensures that agency projects do not contaminate other solar system bodies with terrestrial life. It’s also probably the single most badass title in the world… I have found my new career goal.

Better Off As Two?

Hehe, Frankmusik.

Anyway, we’re going to get lunar today, dear galleons. Neil Armstrong all up in this shit.

Earth’s moon exhibits strange asymmetry between its near side (the side facing us) and the dark side (the side Pink Floyd was all hot for). Our two-faced moon has some bizarre geography: the near side is the lowlands, a flat, thin-crusted area, while the far side is mountainous and high, with a much thicker crust. This duality has confounded astronomers for ages… and now we may have an answer.

Let’s take it back a bit here, to when the moon first formed. The prevailing theory is that, back when the Earth was just a widdle baby planet, a Mars-sized object body checked the young planet, releasing a cloud of vaporized and molten rock into space, which eventually coalesced into our very own moon.

But scientists think this near-Grecian birth-from-violence could have yielded not just one moon, but two. Actually, scientists have speculated for some time that multiple bodies could have formed from that debris cloud. However, the gravitational pull from the sun would have destabilized these little moonlets, causing them to crash into the larger one.

And there’s your explanation, you might argue- baby moons bombarded Papa Moon, causing the discrepancies in geography. Except… the dark side is missing the trademark craters and melted rock that traditionally signify a collision.

Well, balls.

Scientists now have a new idea. While it is true that many little moonlets may have evolved and that our large moon either swept them into its own formation or ejected them into the cold expanse of space (SPACE!)… one moonlet survived. And parked itself in a gravitationally stable point in orbit. While there are a few such points that could work, the most stable are within our moon’s own orbit, either 60° in front or 60° behind Big Papa Moon.

But we know there aren’t two moons in the sky… and we know that the little moonlet couldn’t just fling itself into Big Papa (I’m really enjoying calling the moon this) for the reasons we established before. So, how did the little moonlet disappear and Big Papa end up forever changed from the experience?

There was an impact, just not the crater-creating, red-hot, moon-on-moon action you’re thinking of.

See, the near side has a thinner crust rich in potassium (K), rare-earth elements (REE) and phosphorus (P), which are collectively known as KREEP. These elements would have been concentrated in the last bits of subsurface magma to crystallize as our moon cooled.

So, what scientists are thinking is that something effectively squished the dark side’s KREEP layer over to the other side after the upper layers of the crust had already solidified. And that something would be our little moonlet.

Martin Jutzi and Erik Asphaug at the University of California have simulated the effect of this impact. Our little moonlet was about 1300 kilometres across (roughly 1/3 as wide as Big Papa). And what happened was the two bodies impacted in what amounts to cosmic slo-mo, at a speed of 7,081 kilometers (4,400 miles) an hour.

“This is the slowest possible collision the two massive bodies could have if they fell into each other’s gravity,” Asphaug said.

Because they were in the same orbit and impacted so slowly, this isn’t your usual crater-inducing situation. Instead, the little moonlet oh-so-slowly smooshed into Big Papa, creating a little crater and then basically pancaking itself onto the surface.

Essentially, Big Papa cannibalized the moonlet.

Little moonlet’s crust squishing itself onto Big Papa accounts for the high, mountainous dark side, and the movement of the KREEP layer accounts for the dark maria (seas) on the near side (which, incidentally, form what many call the “Man in the Moon,” which I just don’t see, much like constellations supposedly being crabs and archers and what-not… I guess I’m just not imaginative enough for that crap).

In order to test this, we’re probably going to have to go gather some new lunar samples. Get on that, NASA.

End of an Era

Galleons, as a space nut (and because you are privy to my stupid Twitter feed), you are probably aware that I spent last Friday in a period of mild mourning for our dear space shuttle program. Today, because I am a masochist, I watched the launch video again.

And cried.

Again.

I’m such a woman.

If this didn’t make you feel at least a little bit sad… we can no longer associate, digitally or otherwise.

Gravity Probe B: It Goes ‘Ding’ When There’s Stuff

I know I am not alone among the nerd community in envisioning the following when imagining a space-time vortex:

Of course, a brilliantly colored wormhole is not what NASA has so enthusiastically been chattering about for the last two days. No, what we’re talking here is a real, non-Time Lordy space-time vortex.

In fact, the idea of a space-time vortex can be traced to Einstein and his theory of relativity.

To discuss a vortex in space-time, it would be helpful to do a quick refresher on what space-time actually entails. The common analogy is to imagine the fabric of space-time as a two-dimensional rubber sheet (though space-time is actually four-dimensional). You drop a bowling ball into the middle of that sheet. What’s going to happen?

The rubber sheet will warp, with the bowling ball sinking down and creating an indentation in the sheet. This is analogous to what gravity does to space-time. It warps the four-dimensional fabric, creating indentations that allow for things like planetary orbits.

I wish I could also import the Feynman-related mouse-over text for this comic... alas.

You’ll remember, though, that our bowling ball is a stationary object. The indentation around it, therefore, is static. But the Earth rotates. Einstein’s theory said that this meant the indentation in the fabric of space-time surrounding the Earth should actually twist in a four-dimensional swirl around the Earth’s axis.

This has proven impossible to measure.

Until now.

Gravity Probe B (GPB) was a NASA experiment that spent years in meticulous study. And when I say meticulous, I mean…

Let’s start from the beginning.

In order to measure whether or not Earth’s space-time indentation is “twisted,” we needed to put a spinning gyroscope into Earth’s orbit. The axis of this gyroscope would be pointed at some distant star, using the star as a fixed reference point. If there wasn’t a vortex around Earth, that little gyroscope would remain pointed at that star forever. However, if there was a vortex, the direction of the gyroscope’s axis should drift over time. And by using this change in direction relative to our reference star, the twists of space-time could even be measured.

Of course, when I say “over time,” I’m talking about an axis change of about 0.041 arcseconds over a year. In order to even measure a change this small, NASA needed a precision of 0.0005 arcseconds. In order to accomplish that, they actually had to invent whole new technologies like a “drag free” satellite and a device to measure the spin of a gyro that never actually touches the gyro.

Oh, and speaking of those gyroscopes… The four 1.5 inch gyros in GPB are the most perfect spheres ever made by humans. They never vary from a perfect sphere by more than 40 atomic layers. Which is a necessity in this experiment- imperfect spheres would have spin axes that wobbled without the effects of a vortex.

And what were the results of GPB’s excursion in space?

“The space-time around Earth appears to be distorted just as general relativity predicts,” says Stanford University physicist Francis Everitt.

Which doesn’t seem like terribly big news, and certainly not worthy of Clifford Will’s comment that the GPB experiment, “will be written up in textbooks as one of the classic experiments in the history of physics.” …Right?

Any experimental verification of a scientific theory is important. And this verification of another aspect of one of the biggest theories in physics is definitely news. After all the time I spend prattling on about unverified potential scientific breakthroughs, isn’t it nice to see a theory actually being backed up by real evidence?

***

You know what? I just remembered “Goes Ding When There’s Stuff” was the former title of this blog…

In Which the Universe Has a Lindsay Fünke Moment and NASA Goes Grissom on Planetary Rings

First up, further proof for the existence of dark energy in the form of a new measurement of the Hubble constant.

The Hubble constant is pretty much the most important number in cosmology, a number that indicates the current rate the universe is expanding at (i.e. the rate at which galaxies are receding from one another).

Using the Hubble Space Telescope’s new infrared camera, scientists have derived a refined Hubble constant of 73.8 kilometers per second per megaparsec (for every million parsecs separating two galaxies, they move apart 73.8 kilometers per second faster). This new value has an uncertainty of only 3.3 percent, about 30 times better than previous estimates.

But what does this have to do with dark energy?

The new value of the Hubble constant rules out an alternative explanation for accelerated cosmic expansion, which basically states that Earth and its environs sit at the center of a vast void (a few billion light-years across), the configuration of which would produce an optical illusion making it appear that the universe’s expansion is accelerating. This scenario requires a much lower Hubble constant that the one recently measured, however.

Interestingly enough, dark energy is not the only thing impacted by the more precise constant. The new value indicates that the universe is about 75 million years older than we originally thought (putting her at the ripe old age of, what, roughly 13.83 billion?).

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But now, dear galleons, we turn our attention to the folks at NASA and their attempts at forensic sleuthing.

Turns out, the rings around planets might share similarities to those found within the trunks of trees:

As a recently engaged friend of mine said, “I liked it, so I put a ring on it.”

Using data from NASA’s Cassini, Galileo and New Horizons missions, scientists have found that some of the imperfections (ripples) in the rings of Jupiter and Saturn can be traced back to cometary fragments and debris clouds hurtling through the ring systems.

“What’s cool is we’re finding evidence that a planet’s rings can be affected by specific, traceable events that happened in the last 30 years, rather than a hundred million years ago,” said Matthew Hedman, a Cassini imaging team associate and research associate at Cornell University. “The solar system is a much more dynamic place than we gave it credit for.”

This all began when scientists first noticed corrugations in Saturn’s innermost ring (the D ring), and that these grooves appeared to wind together more tightly over time. They determined this was caused when something tilted the D ring off its axis by about 100 meters in late 1983. Combined with the effect of Saturn’s gravity, this caused the tight spiral in the ripples:

Later studies found these ripples spread into the neighboring C ring, meaning the mystery “something” had tilted a region more than 19,000 kilometers wide. Unfortunately, because no spacecraft were visiting Saturn and it was situated on the far side of the sun (effectively hidden from the gaze of telescopes), astronomers don’t know what happened in ’83 to cause the imperfections in the rings.

It was time to go CSI on some planetary ass, and our intrepid scientists had a target in mind: Jupiter.

Hidden within Jupiter’s own ring system was a long-forgotten pattern that might help shed some light on how Saturn’s rings gained their striations. After confirming that Jupiter’s ring ripples showed a similar winding pattern, scientists applied the same math they used in Saturn’s case, and “unwound” the spiral to the point where the ring was tilted off its axis- between June and September 1994.

This time, however, we knew what had occurred during that time period: Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 plunged into the Jovian atmosphere during late July 1994. The timing, coupled with the fact that the size of the comet’s nucleus was consistent with the amount of material needed to disturb Jupiter’s ring, gave us our answer. Comets and cometary debris passing through ring systems could shift them off their axes, causing spiraling ring ripples.

Further study found more of these patterns in Jupiter’s rings, proving these ring collisions are rather common.

“Finding these fingerprints still in the rings is amazing and helps us better understand impact processes in our solar system,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist. “Cassini’s long sojourn around Saturn has helped us tease out subtle clues that tell us about the history of our origins.”

Just like the rings in an old tree can give us clues about the environment of past years, so too can these planetary ring patterns help us understand the history of our solar system.

As Mark Showalter, a Cassini co-investigator based at the SETI Institute, said, “Now scientists know that the rings record these impacts like grooves in a vinyl record, and we can play back their history later.”

Musica universalis, indeed.

Dimensional Reduction and Mystery Forces

Before we get into the bulk of today’s post, let’s do a super-brief review on the subject of quantum gravity.

As you may be aware, scientists are spending a great deal of time these days searching for a unified theory of everything. In essence, what they are really trying to do is merge two existing theories- quantum theory and relativity. As it stands right now, physicists are able to use quantum theory when studying extremely small things (like elementary particle interactions) and relativity when studying the large (such as planetary movement). Unfortunately, if quantum theory is used to study the large (or relativity to study the small), the equations yield nonsensical infinities. Impossible and inaccurate answers.

It’s obvious that we are missing something.

Now, general relativity is the framework within which we understand gravity, one of the four fundamental forces (along with electromagnetic, strong, and weak). While the other three have been worked into quantum field theory, gravity seems stubbornly resistant to assimilation. So, instead of trying to fold one theory into the other, scientists have instead started searching for a new theory that encompasses and explains all four fundamental forces and the information present in the standard model of particle physics.

Our theory of everything, then, is often referred to as a quantum theory of gravity. It is our attempt to fuse quantum theory and relativity. Multiple theories of quantum gravity exist, the most popular being superstring theory (my personal favorite) and loop quantum gravity.

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Superstring theory (along with M-theory) stretches the limits of the imagination when we try to picture the natural world conforming to its predictions. 11+ space/time dimensions? Even if these extra dimensions are curled up on the level of the Planck length (16.163×10^⁻³⁶ m) in complex manifolds, it seems preposterous to imagine us moving through all these extra dimensions at every moment… and yet being unable to detect them.

Leonard: At least I didn’t have to invent 26 dimensions to get the math to work.
Sheldon: I didn’t invent them. They’re there.
Leonard: Yeah? In what universe?
Sheldon: In all of them, that’s the point!

As mind-boggling as additional dimensions may seem, research in the realm of quantum gravitational theories has found that several of these theories make some very strange predictions about behavior at incredibly small scales (along the lines of the Planck length). They’ve found that particles (and their fields) start to behave as if space was only one-dimensional.

How is this possible?

Down on the level of the Planck length, space-time becomes a frothing, roiling mess known as quantum foam, which we’ve mentioned before. Steven Carlip at the University of California says that this quantum foam may act similarly to space-time close to a singularity. Remember that, according to general relativity, the gravity near a singularity becomes so strong that it actually warps the fabric of space-time. Light is bent so sharply that it can take an infinitely long period of time for it to travel between two nearby points. Because of this, neighboring pieces of space-time become disconnected from each other, allowing them to expand or contract independently.

Carlip is suggesting that at those extremely tiny distances (like the Planck length), light gets bent just like it does near a singularity. Thus, tiny patches of space-time get disconnected, allowing space at different points to expand or contract faster in one dimension than in the others (which also accounts for the choppy surface of quantum foam). As a result, over these very short space-time distances, particle motion can become dominated by the single, grossly expanded dimension of that disconnected portion of space-time. However, if you watch long enough, the particle’s motion will switch between different singular dimensions (as it moves through those isolated chunks of space-time). This means that if you wait long enough or look at larger distance scales, space becomes effectively three-dimensional.

And how did scientists detect this oddity of particle motion?

Well, they were studying the spectral dimension, a parameter which describes how particles or fields gradually move away from a given point (kind of like diffusion). But, to their surprise, they found that this motion happened much more quickly on the level of the Planck length. This speed can be explained if the particles are moving in just one spatial dimension, as the fewer dimensions available, the fewer directions a particle can move and the less time it will take to wander from its original position.

And while this discovery opens up a host of questions (including how quantum foam can focus light so strongly that nearby regions become disconnected from one another), what’s really interesting about all this is that this dimensional reduction pops up in multiple theories of quantum gravity. “Finding that very different approaches have something in common is exciting, as it suggests we may have stumbled upon an underlying property of quantum gravity,” says Leonardo Modesto of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada.

***

All this talk of dimensional movement reminds me of an Anaïs Nin quote:

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”

That really doesn’t have much to do with what we’re discussing, but I’ve always thought it was a rather lovely quote.

***

We’ll wrap up today’s post with a short (but tantalizing) bit from NASA.

I don’t know if you are familiar with the Pioneer anomaly, galleons. It refers to two NASA space probes (Pioneer 10 and 11) that have been drifting slightly off-course (toward the sun) for nearly 40 years in a way that defies our knowledge of gravity.

Scientists have eliminated all possible causes- gravity, radiation, equipment problems- and have concluded that, bizarre though it may seem, the craft are being affected by a previously unknown force that’s about 10 billion times weaker than the gravitational force.

That’s right- a brand new fundamental force. Number five.

As to what it is and why we haven’t encountered it before, answers are slow in coming. It appears, though, that we’re about to witness a slew of papers and experiments researching and attempting to verify/disprove this so-called new fundamental force.

Exciting, right?

A Rose By Any Other Name May Smell as Sweet, Billy Boy, But Did You Ever Consider What it Would Smell Like… IN SPACE?!

Smells are surer than sights and sounds to make your heart-strings crack. ~Rudyard Kipling

A few days ago, I told you that I had purchased a new bedding set. But despite the nearly sinful softness of the sheets against my bare skin (…yes, what you are thinking in terms of my nightwear is correct), I found it extremely difficult to fall asleep that night.

This is not surprising. Every time I wash my bedding, I spend a night or two in a state of fitful slumber. You see, I discovered long ago that my inherent insomnia is exacerbated by attempting to fall asleep in a bed that doesn’t smell like me.

Scent is a powerful sense. More powerful than most of us give it credit for. And while we humans might lack the scent-tracking abilities of the common canine, Kipling was right- more so than any other sense, smell is the most closely associated with memory and emotion.

The reason for this lies deep within… YOUR BRAIN!

The olfactory bulb is located on the bottom portion of your brain and is part of the limbic system, the area of the brain associated with memory and emotion. Our olfactory bulbs have intimate access to the amygdala (emotion) and hippocampus (memory). Sensory information acquired through smell goes straight into the limbic system, which is why smell can so easily invoke such an intense emotional response or trigger specific memories.

Few things are as memorable as smell. While sight and sound can end up lost in the mire of your short-term memory, there is virtually no short-term memory for olfactory information.

We become acclimated to certain smells. The shampoo used by a lover, the perfume a mother dabs on her wrists, the spicy scent of autumn leaves. Spend too much time around a scent and it seems to fade into the background. Walk through a rose garden for too long and you’ll eventually cease to notice the heavy perfume of the blossoms around you. Spend night after night with your lover and you’ll soon stop noticing the sharp, rich scent of their skin.

But when your lover leaves you, you’ll notice the smell of them anywhere it crops up. When you pass someone on the street who wears the same cologne as your absent partner, memories of your time together will overtake you. You’ll pause for a moment, heart speeding up, looking in vain for the man you know who wears that particular aroma around him like a cloak. It’s a scent you will forever associate with him.

Everything around us has a particular scent. Every day, we encounter the stale odor of the city bus, the crisp aroma of freshly sliced apples, the faint perfume of honeysuckle, the raw scent of the ocean. Coffee, hand soap, public restrooms, old books, soy sauce, disinfectant, popcorn, printer paper, Sharpies… An assault of smells upon our senses, bombarding us every second of every day.

We are so used to the air around us having a particular smell that we barely notice it. But what if we were to travel into space? Would the vacuum of space, cold and unbreathable as it is, have a scent all its own? Or would it be the sterile, scentless base all other smells are layered upon?

Don Pettit, a science officer on the ISS, has an answer for us. Which might seem strange, seeing as you would think that no human could survive sniffing the vacuum. But what you might be forgetting is our uncanny ability to distinguish a new, novel scent from the cacophony we are used to. If you were to hang out near the airlock of the space station after a spacewalk, you would be able to identify a scent you were unfamiliar with. According to Pettit, this is how he knows what space smells like.

So… what does it smell like?

“It is hard to describe this smell; it is definitely not the olfactory equivalent to describing the palette sensations of some new food as ‘tastes like chicken.’ The best description I can come up with is metallic; a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation. It reminded me of my college summers where I labored for many hours with an arc welding torch repairing heavy equipment for a small logging outfit. It reminded me of pleasant sweet smelling welding fumes. That is the smell of space.”

But what we think of as the scent of something is often more than just its base aroma. It’s a layering of various related scents in the area. In your own home, your sweatshirt may appear not to have a distinguishable smell. But take it to the home of a friend, press your nose to that same fabric, and inhale. Now, you notice the scent that is your home, still clinging to your sweatshirt. Depending on our location, the apparent scent of an object can change.

NASA has previously done some work with International Flavors and Fragrances (a perfume company) to determine if the low-gravity environment of space could have any effect on the scent of a flower.

Turns out, a rose in space will smell sweeter than a rose on Earth.

The fragrance of a rose is the product of oils the plant creates to attract insects and birds for pollination purposes. These oils are of particular interest to fragrance companies, naturally, and the exact types of oils and the amounts of each one produced by certain flowers are pieces of information companies like IFF desire. With that data in hand, they can work to create sweeter-smelling, longer-lasting fragrances for women to spray too liberally upon their person so that they might choke innocent passersby as they wander through the narrow aisles of the local grocery store.

In 1998, Discovery STS-95 had a tiny passenger aboard that would help IFF with its sensual science. That passenger was Overnight Scentsation, a miniature rose with two small buds that was housed in a small chamber that helped keep the proper conditions for the little rose to grow.

Scientists aboard the spacecraft took four samples of the rose’s oils during their mission. Upon return to Earth, these samples were turned over to IFF. And IFF found that, while the rose produced fewer oils while in space, it had a more “floral rose aroma”.

Man, even flowers make it into space. Why can’t I?

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Scent can change depending on location, among other factors, but one thing about scent remains consistent- its unerring ability to drag forth, from the recesses of our minds, memories we thought long lost to the ravages of time.

This can be both a blessing and a curse, naturally. Sometimes, I think it would just be easier to forget the smell of your clothes, your hair, your room. To not catch a whiff of your bodywash on a man standing next to me in line at the store. To not have the memories of you come crashing to the forefront when I’m walking down the street.

But even now, as my mind’s eye gently blurs your features to the point where I find myself having to rely more and more often on a photograph to get a complete, sharp picture of your face, the smell that surrounded you is a memory that remains as vivid and strong as ever.

***

We’ll end with a (completely unrelated) riddle… of sorts:

Today, I ordered five Xbox 360 titles off Amazon. Three are games I owned when I owned my last 360 in 2008. Two of the titles were released within the last year.

So…

What games did I order, galleons?

Apathy and Arsenic and Apollo (Oh My!)

So… I had entirely too much free time on my hands at work today. I couldn’t leave early, but I also couldn’t just sit at the nurse’s station and do nothing. I took to wandering the halls, pretending like I was doing something, or hiding out in the bathroom, playing solitaire on my iPod (and never winning a damn game).

This reminded me of two things.

First, the whole “hiding in the bathrooms at work” bit made me think of Shane in Apathy and Other Small Victories. He would always fall asleep in the bathroom of his boring office job.

Second, as I wandered the hospital corridors, I was reminded of a conversation I’d had two nights previous:

Ben: you should slip them arsenic in their pills
Ben: be the greybull angel of mercy [NOTE: For those of you who don’t get that reference, here you are– follow the link to start crawling out from under that rock you’ve been calling your home]
Sam: heh
Sam: i would if i could get my hands on some
Ben: its a hospital, they have it somewhere
Ben: i’m sure you’re crafty enough to get ahold of it

So then, naturally, I wanted to know if I could somehow access the more dangerous drugs (maybe not arsenic). If evening shift really was as unsupervised as it seemed.

However, the most promising hall (the one with the pharmacy and lab) is attached to the ER. The ER was being overseen by a cute bearded man, who kept watching me as I walked past.

The fact that one cute bearded man was preventing me from doing what another one suggested was not lost on me.

I ended up in the old people’s recreation room, reading a National Geographic from 2007.

Yeah…

It was actually pretty interesting. One of the articles was about the future of the U.S. space program. Considering the recent upheavals in NASA and NASA’s government funding, I found this old article amusing.

I’ll share some quotes with you (yes, I stole it and brought it home with me… sue me):

President George W. Bush has outlined a new ”Vision for Space Exploration”: to return American astronauts to the moon by 2020 and eventually send them to Mars.

Yeah… no. We’re not going to the moon anymore. So much for that plan.

NASA calls the new space mission Constellation, and has already ordered construction of new spacecraft- a 1960s-like capsule called Orion, famously described by NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin as ”Apollo on steroids”…

The first few Constellation moon trips- to begin perhaps as early as 2018- will be sorties to reconnoiter a projected outpost at the lunar south pole. Longer missions will follow.

Again, not gonna happen. In February, we heard Obama talk of canceling Constellation in 2011. Though he’s proposing a new plan for the future of space travel, it looks like the big moon-Mars initiative that’s been in the works for years is out of luck.

Anyway, the article as a whole discussed the ol’ space race (those were the days) and the future of space travel. It focused on the goings on in China and Russia, plus it ventured into the “promised land” of commercial space travel.

As I said, it was an interesting article. Nothing I haven’t read before (which would only make sense, seeing as it’s three years old), but I always enjoy me some National Geographic, regardless of the year.

However, I was not pleased with the quote at the end of the article:

“I do not see any need at all to justify human spaceflight on the grounds of what it’s going to do for science. It will do a lot for science, but that’s an ‘oh, by the way,'” Griffin says. “The drive to extend our reach- human destiny- is reason enough to go.”

First, I’m not entirely sure the overwhelming desire to conquer every bleedin’ thing we see can be classed as “destiny.”

But more importantly…

Science is never an “oh, by the way”!!

Damn you, Mike Griffin. Damn you.