Show Notes 28 April 2023
Story 1: NASA Unveils Interior of Simulation Mars Habitat for Future Missions
Source: ExtremeTech.com Story by Adrianna Nine
Source: https://www.nasa.gov/chapea/habitat
See video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmjV6Grlo7s
- This summer, four volunteers will move into NASA’s Mars Dune Alpha, a 3D-printed structure and massive sandbox comprising a simulated Mars habitat.
- The Mars Dune Alpha will host an experimental program called Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog – or CHAPEA for short.
- The volunteers will live in Mars Dune Alpha for one year at a time, conducting farming, geology, and even medical experiments to help NASA determine the viability of long-term life on Mars.
- On April 11, NASA showed off the 1,700-square-foot structure, which was 3D printed using red lavacrete – a proprietary material created by the material science team at large-scale 3D printer maker ICON.
- Mars Dune Alpha’s airlock opens to four private quarters, a full bathroom, several workstations, a medical station, a communal lounge area, and a small vertical farm.
- The vertical farm will allow the volunteers to grow ready-to-eat produce like tomatoes and lettuce.
- The lounge—complete with a TV, some board games, and a couple of video game consoles—will provide space for socialization, relaxation, and food prep.
- Outside the airlock lies the habitat’s 1,200-square-foot sandbox, which contains a couple of treadmills and a whole lot of red sand. In imitation space suits, the volunteers will pair the treadmills with virtual reality kits to simulate longer traverses called “Marswalks.”
- During each Marswalk, the volunteers will identify rocks of interest, evaluate potential base sites, and conduct other reconnaissance.
- Every little part of the volunteers’ lives will be analyzed for future Mars missions.
- For example, NASA will assess the volunteers’ trash to develop products that can be reused in space.
- And any communication with the outside world will occur with a 22-minute delay, as it would on the Red Planet.
- To measure the toll that “life on Mars” takes on their bodies and minds, the volunteers will provide regular blood tests and complete periodic psychological surveys.
- Over the next three years, NASA’s Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog experiment will combine the insights gleaned from these simulations with Artemis data [NASA’s upcoming Moon mission] to determine how humans can work, sleep, exercise, socialize, and otherwise exist on Mars.
Story 2: ‘Big sponge’: new tech aims to extract CO2 from the Earth’s oceans to tackle global warming
Source: Phys.org Story by Romain Fonsegrives
Link: https://phys.org/news/2023-04-big-sponge-co2-tech-oceans.html
See video here: https://tinyurl.com/2p9d96u9 [great additional information!]
- Floating in the port of Los Angeles, a strange-looking barge covered with pipes and tanks contains a concept that scientists hope to make waves: a new way to use the ocean as a vast carbon dioxide sponge to tackle global warming.
- Scientists from the University of California Los Angeles have been working for two years on SeaChange—an ambitious project that could one day boost the amount of CO2, a major greenhouse gas, that can be absorbed by our seas.
- Their goal is “to use the ocean as a big sponge,” according to Gaurav Sant, director of the university’s Institute for Carbon Management.
- The oceans, covering most of the Earth, are already the planet’s main carbon sinks, acting as a critical buffer in the climate crisis.
- They absorb a quarter of all CO2 emissions, as well as 90 percent of the warming that has occurred in recent decades due to increasing greenhouse gases.
- But they are feeling the strain. The ocean is acidifying, and rising temperatures are reducing its absorption capacity.
- The UCLA team wants to increase the ability of the world’s oceans to absorb CO2 by using an electrochemical process to remove vast quantities of CO2 already in seawater—rather like wringing out a sponge to help recover its absorptive power.
- Here’s what they did:
- Engineers built a floating mini-factory on a 100-foot (30-meter) long boat which pumps in seawater and subjects it to an electrical charge.
- Chemical reactions triggered by electrolysis convert CO2 dissolved in the seawater into a fine white powder containing calcium carbonate—the compound found in chalk, limestone and oyster or mussel shells.
- Reminder: electrolysis [in this application] is chemical decomposition produced by passing an electric current through a liquid or solution containing ions.
- This powder can be discarded back into the ocean, where it remains in solid form, thereby storing CO2 very durably… over tens of thousands of years.
- Meanwhile, the pumped water [without the CO2] returns to the sea, ready to absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
- The UCLA team is confident the process will not damage the marine environment, although this will require further testing to confirm.
- A potential additional benefit of the technology is that it creates hydrogen as a byproduct. As the so-called “green revolution” progresses, hydrogen gas could be widely used to power clean cars, trucks, and planes in the future.
Story 3: Scientists are planning to send a robot snake to search for life on a small icy moon of Saturn
Source: Talker News on MSN
See video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O4TAXaL4bw
- The Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS robot) system is being developed at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
- The snake-like elongated robot will have the ability to slither along otherworldly terrains thanks to spinning wheels along its body.
- Its target is the vent systems on the small icy moon of Saturn called Enceladus.
- Data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft [a space probe sent to study the planet Saturn and its system, including its rings and natural satellites] indicates that Enceladus has a liquid ocean under its icy crust.
- The plumes erupting from its surface are conduits directly to liquid water, potentially making this the easiest path to a habitable liquid ocean.
- Unlike rover vehicles, the EELS robot snake would be able to investigate scenarios like this by crawling down crevasses and swimming through water.
- The system uses “first-of-a-kind rotating propulsion units” that act as tracks, gripping mechanisms and propeller units underwater, enabling the robot to access a plume vent exit and follow it to its ocean source.
- Project Manager Dr. Martin Robinson says the goal is a platform that could explore anywhere, even venturing down lava tubes on the Moon.
- The adaptability of the system opens other destinations such as Martian polar caps, and descending crevasses in ice sheets on Earth.
- Tests have so far been conducted inside Canada’s Athabasca Glacier and Mount Meager volcano.
Story 4: Scientists Create Gelatin-Based Surgical Sealant for Rapid Sealing Inside the Body
Source: Medgadget.com Story by Conn Hastings
- To fully appreciate this news the author of the article set the stage with the following background:
- Sealing incisions within the body can be challenging. The slippery surfaces of our internal tissues are not amenable to ease of handling, and also repel many sealants that would work in more hospitable conditions.
- Many of our tissues move constantly, such as the lungs, making it difficult to seal incisions to accommodate this movement while also maintaining a seal. And traditional sutures and staples can take time to insert properly and can cause blood loss.
- To overcome these issues, researchers have been developing new surgical sealants that can rapidly seal incisions within the body, even in challenging tissues such as the heart or lungs.
- As these substances must be biodegradable and biocompatible, many such technologies rely on naturally occurring materials, such as gelatin, which derives from animal collagen.
- Reminder: Collagen is a protein in the body. Different types of collagens are in many body parts, including hair, skin, nails, bones, ligaments, tendons, cartilage, blood vessels, and intestines.
- With all that said, here’s the news: Researchers at the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation in Los Angeles have developed a new gelatin-based surgical sealant that marks a key advancement as it rapidly seals wounds, etc.
- The sealant is thermoresponsive, meaning that it will rapidly form a semi-solid bolus when it reaches body temperature.
- A “bolus” is a single dose of a drug or other substance given over a short period of time. It is usually given by infusion or injection into a blood vessel. It may also be given by mouth.
- The new gelatin-based surgical sealant is also bioadhesive, adhering to slippery, wet surfaces in the body with relative ease.
- The researchers achieved this by incorporating caffeic acid, a substance that is naturally found in coffee and olive oil, into the gelatin gel, which helped to increase the adhesive strength of the formulation.
- So far, the sealant has demonstrated impressive effectiveness, including being able to seal a hole in lungs that are actively being inflated.