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1 In 10 People May Face Malnutrition As Fish Catches Decline  

Many people around the world rely on fish not just for protein but for critical micronutrients like iron and zinc. So declining fisheries pose major risks for global health, scientists warn.

 
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Quantum computer simulates fundamental particle interactions for the first time  
Trapped ions model the creation and annihilation of electronpositron pairs  
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Brave new Jupiter  
With NASA's Juno spacecraft arriving at Jupiter this July, Stephen Ornes reports on what scientists have in store for this distant probe  
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Brave new Jupiter  
With NASA's Juno spacecraft arriving at Jupiter this July, Stephen Ornes reports on what scientists have in store for this distant probe  
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http://twitter.com/dragonlady9947/status/748581961396953088 
CITES: list the WHITE RHINO, AFRICAN ELEPHANT and LION as ENDANGERED SPECIES UNDER APPENDIX I in 2016 https://t.co/dQNoldI2BH 
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CITES: list WHITE RHINO, AFRICAN ELEPHANT & LION as ENDANGERED SPECIES UNDER APPENDIX I in 2016 https://t.co/PJhFWd6EwT #BanTrophyHunting 
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Punks, Goths, Disco Queens, Rockers And Ravers: Portraits Of UK Nightlife  
Four decades of images capturing alternative London's unique counter-cultural history.  
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Trujillo is the second largest city in Peru with slightly less...  

Trujillo is the second largest city in Peru with slightly less than 800,000 residents in its urban area. España Avenue - the circular road that is visible at the center of this Overview - contains the city's monument area and also traces the historic outline of the defensive wall that was constructed around the city in 1786. /// Source imagery: @dailyoverview (at Trujillo, Peru)

 
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Parched Land. Farmer Suicides. Forced Migration: Rural India's Crippling Drought  
Life is precarious in Bundelkhand, and now it's suffocating under an intense drought that's affected a staggering 330 million people nationwide.  
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Free by Sanjeev Kugan  

Free by Sanjeev Kugan

Sometime you have to let it be.

Sanjeev Kugan: Photos

 
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Pride I by Jon Stockford  

Pride I by Jon Stockford

New York, 2016

Jon Stockford: Photos

 
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Minneapolis by Isaac Villanueva  

Minneapolis by Isaac Villanueva

Minneapolis has two seasons: Construction and Snow Removal

Isaac Villanueva: Photos

 
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The Obscure Blogger Who Reversed the Recession  

Scott Sumner is a monetary economist who studies the Great Depression and runs the blog The Money Illusion. He also used his knowledge 20th century economics to help fix the 2007-2009 recession. “Most of the discussion was missing the point,” Sumner says in this film by Ian Reid. “Other economists were looking at interest rates. They assumed money was easy. But commodity prices, stock prices, real estate prices, every other asset market was signaling money was too tight.”

This film was produced by Distant Moon and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

 
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Why Do We Need Zoos? A Follow-Up  
After the death of the gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo (a decision made by Zoo officials after a young child fell into the gorilla's enclosure), I posted "Why do we need zoos?" There I wrote, "If zoos are the best we can offer animals so magnificent as tigers and gorillas, then it's time to recognize zoos as sad vestiges of a past when animals were broadly considered nothing other than objects for labor and shallow entertainment."

I've heard from several readers in response to that post, most strongly supportive of my comments. One of those readers just sent me an article from The Guardian, "Buenos Aires zoo to close after 140 years: 'Captivity is degrading'".

According to Buenos Aires' mayor the City's zoo, long one of the City's major tourist attractions (although in decline, with accompanying bad publicity) will its move its 2,500 animals to nature reserves; the animals too old or frail to handle relocation will live out their lives on the zoo grounds. The Mayor also announced the planned 2017 transition of the 44-acre site into an eco-park, "a place where children can learn how to take care of and relate with the different species."

Said Mayor Horacio Rodriguez Larreta: "This situation of captivity is degrading for the animals." I applaud such a clear ethical statement.

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Fruit flies adjust to sudden drops in temperature, just keep buzzing about the fruit bowl  
Fruit flies may seem simple, but these common visitors to the fruit bowl can drastically alter their gene expression and metabolism to respond to temperature changes in their environment, an international team of researchers have shown. The finding is important because understanding how insects tolerate changes in temperature is a crucial step in protecting and controlling insects worldwide, say researchers.  
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Solar-Energized Juno To Arrive At Jupiter On Independence Day  
What NASA insisted for decades could not be -- a spacecraft using solar energy rather than nuclear power going beyond the orbit of Mars -- will be proven false on Monday, July 4th, Independence Day, when the solar-energized Juno space probe arrives at Jupiter.

NASA had maintained that to provide on-board power and heat on spacecraft in deep space, plutonium-powered systems were required -- despite the disaster if there were an accident on launch or in a fall back to Earth and the plutonium was released. I broke the story 30 years ago about how the next mission of NASA's ill-fated Challenger shuttle was to involve lofting a plutonium-powered space probe and I have been reporting in articles, books and on television on the nuclear-in-space issue ever since.

If the Challenger accident did not happen in January 1986 but the shuttle exploded on its next scheduled mission, in May 1986, with the plutonium-powered space probe in its cargo bay, the impacts could have been enormous. Plutonium is the most lethal of all radioactive substances.

Still, when NASA re-scheduled the two plutonium-powered missions it had planned for 1986 -- one the Galileo mission to Jupiter -- it not only publicly declared that plutonium systems to provide on-board power for space probes in deep space were necessary but swore to that in court.

Opponents of the Galileo mission brought suit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. in 1989 seeking to stop the nuclear-energized Galileo shot because of its public health danger in the event of an accident, and they pressed NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) on the availability of a safe energy alternative. NASA and DOE officials swore that only nuclear power would do that far out in space, that solar energy could not be harvested beyond the orbit of Mars.

And now comes NASA's own Juno spacecraft energized by solar energy functioning in deep space. Indeed, NASA acknowledges, "This is the first time in history a spacecraft is using solar power so far out in space."

Says Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space: "All during out campaigns to oppose NASA plutonium launches during 1989, 1990 and 1997" -- when NASA launched its Cassini space probe with the most plutonium NASA ever used in a power system on a spacecraft -- "the space agency maintained in court and in the media that solar would not work as an on-board power source in deep space. Then, in part because of grassroots pressure from around the planet, NASA decided to use solar on the deep space Juno mission."

"To this day," Gagnon went on last week, "NASA still maintains that it must use deadly nuclear devices on some of its space missions -- further evidence that the nuclear industry maintains a stranglehold on the space agency. The nuclear industry mistakenly views space as a new market for its toxic product that so many have rejected back here on Earth."

Gagnon added: "We will continue to organize to stop the nuclearization of space -- and we will use NASA's own Juno mission as evidence that the bad seed of nuclear power is not essential for space exploration."

The Global Network -- www.space4peace.org -- established in 1992, is based in Maine.
Juno is not a minor space mission. As NASA states on its Juno mission web page-="The primary scientific goal of the Juno mission is to significantly improve our understanding of the formation, evolution and structure of Jupiter. Concealed beneath a dense cover of clouds, Jupiter, the archetypical 'Giant Planet,' safeguards secrets to the fundamental processes underlying the early formation of our solar system. Present theories of the origin and early evolution of our solar system are currently at an impasse. Juno will provide answers to critical science questions about Jupiter, as well as key information that will dramatically enhance present theories about the early formation of our own solar system."

Juno will, as of Monday, have flown nearly 2 billion miles to reach Jupiter. It was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida on August 5, 2011. It did a "slingshot maneuver" or "flyby" of Earth in October 2013 to increase its velocity. It has been flying at 60,000 miles per hour. It will orbit Jupiter more than 30 times doing scientific observations.

And although sunlight at Jupiter is just four percent of what it is on Earth, Juno's solar panels, manufactured by Spectrolab, a division of Boeing, will be able to continue to harvest solar energy. Its passes will include bringing it closer to Jupiter than any mission before.

On its current "Where is Juno?" page, NASA reports: "The Juno spacecraft is in excellent health and is operating nominally."

The solar energy on 66-foot wide Juno is being generated by three large solar panels. They convert sunlight to electricity at a 28 percent efficiency rate. That's a little over the 25 percent efficiency rate of the better photovoltaic rooftop panels now being widely used for electric power on Earth. The cost of the mission is $1.1 billion.

Says NASA on its website: "To answer our fundamental questions about origins we especially need to know Jupiter's internal structure and global water abundance. Juno will map the internal structure by studying its influence on the planet's gravitational field with unprecedented accuracy. The water abundance will be determined by microwave radiometers that will detect thermal radiation from deep atmospheric layers, a completely new approach. Water ice brought most of the heavy elements to Jupiter. Knowing the water abundance will tell us the original form of that ice and hence help define the conditions and processes in the original cloud of dust and gas that led to the origin of Jupiter. Those same conditions and processes were forming other planets too. Because this enormous planet contains most of the water in the solar system we can expect this investigation to help us understand the origin of the life-giving water on Earth."

At the end of its mission NASA will send Juno diving into Jupiter and it will burn up.
"NASA going green with solar-powered Jupiter probe," was the headline of an Associated Press article in USA Today in 2011. "NASA's upcoming mission to Jupiter can't get much greener than this: a solar-powered, windmill-shaped spacecraft," the story began.

But it wasn't as if solar on Juno was NASA's first choice. The Associated Press piece described Scott Bolton, the principal investigator for the mission for the Southwest Research Institute, a NASA contractor, as maintaining "the choice of solar was a practical one... No plutonium-powered generators were available to him and his San Antonio-based team... so they opted for solar panels rather than develop a new nuclear source." The article quoted Bolton as saying: "It's nice to be green, but it wasn't because we were afraid of plutonium."

As bullish as NASA has been in using nuclear power on space probes, once it was as insistent in utilizing atomic energy to power space satellites, too. Then, in 1964, a satellite with a SNAP-9A plutonium system on board failed to achieve orbit and dropped to Earth, disintegrating as it fell, its plutonium fuel dispersing all over the Earth.

Long linking the SNAP-9A accident to an increase in lung cancer on Earth was the late Dr. John Gofman, an M.D. and Ph.D., discover of several radioactive isotopes who did extensive experiments with plutonium for the Manhattan Project, and was associate director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

With the SNAP-9A accident, NASA switched to using solar energy on satellites. Now all satellites -- and the International Space Station -- are solar powered.

"A Juno success would be a good sign for future solar-powered missions of all types," stated the Associated Press "NASA going green with solar-powered Jupiter probe" article.
Unfortunately, if NASA and the DOE have their way, rational energy decision-making won't necessarily follow a Juno success. "The United States has begun manufacturing nuclear spacecraft fuel for the first time in a generation," reported SpaceNews last month. SpaceNews said the Department of Energy is having its Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory join together to produce plutonium for NASA space missions. Some plutonium has been produced although "full production of the stuff is still seven years or so away," it said.

In space as on Earth, solar power works.

But, says Gagnon, "Just like here on Earth there is a tug-of-war going on between those who wish to promote life-giving solar power and those who want nukes. That same battle for nuclear domination is being taken into the heavens by an industry that wants more profit -- no matter the consequences. The Global Network will continue to organize around the space nuclear power issue by building a global constituency opposed to the risky and unnecessary nukes in space program."

With solar-energized Juno's arrival at Jupiter, this Independence Day should mark a blow for independence from dangerous nuclear power above our heads in space.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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Elizabeth McCulley Gore: Get Smart Fast: Paul Ryan's Energy Plan In 200 Words  
The premise of the document is that energy reform starts with regulatory reform. The plan includes repealing the Clean Power Plan, streamlining permitting and generally reducing the regulatory burden on the energy sector.

Read more: Endangered Species, Paul Ryan, Environment, Clean Power Plan, Regulations, Energy, Politics News

 
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When is an animal a person? Neuroscience tries to set the rules  
Do chimps deserve legal rights? It's a question that advances in neuroscience mean we can no longer ignore  
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Bioethics after Brexit  
It is too soon to know how the crisis that has been created by Britain's vote to leave the European Union will play out. But it is worth considering that the field of bioethics has a grave stake in the outcome. Modern bioethics is to a great extent a product of the liberal international system put in place after World War II.

In 1945 the four Allied states conducted war crimes trials of the Third Reich's surviving political and military leaders. Though some advocated simple executions a decision was made instead to send a message about the post-war rule of law. In spite of widespread doubt that this would be anything but a "show trial" based on victor's justice, several of the defendants were acquitted. Although the other powers did not participate in subsequent trials in Nuremberg, the United States decided it was important to treat other ardent Nazis who were indicted for war crimes in a similar orderly fashion.

The most famous of the other trials was that of 23 Nazi doctors and bureaucrats who were implicated in human experiments in concentration camps. What was expected to be a case that could be completed in a few weeks took months, because the defense argued that there were no internationally recognized rules for the conduct of human experiments. Ultimately the court returned to the grounds for the prosecution case, which was murder and other outrages against human beings, not the violation of research ethics. As a result of the "doctors' case," the judges decided that part of their decision should be a corrective to the apparent absence of international rules. That document has come to be known as the Nuremberg Code.

The Code was only the first in a line of medical ethics documents that have come to be part of the post-war system, including the World Medical Association's code of ethics in 1949 and its Declaration of Helsinki, first promulgated in 1964. The Council on International Organizations of Medical Sciences first adopted its International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects in 1993. In 2005 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights. Other international treaties and conventions bear on bioethics, including the Geneva Convention of 1949 and its annexes, the Biologic and Toxin Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention. The World Trade Organization, whose responsibilities include oversight of intellectual property rights like those involving drugs and devices, is the product of an agreement among 123 countries.

All of these standards and institutions have their faults and limitations. Many ethics-related guidelines are honored more in the breach than the reality and they are liable to be seen as favoring the "haves" over the "have nots." There are no enforcement mechanisms for guidelines like the Declaration of Helsinki and since 2008 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration no longer refers to them. The International Court of Justice in The Hague is plagued by jurisdictional questions and the U.S. has never joined the International Criminal Court. Nonetheless, these arrangements provide some frameworks for questions that involve sovereign states.

The post-war "European project" that is threatened by Brexit, one aimed at preventing repetition of the hundreds of years of bloodshed on the Continent, is of course only one part of the international order. But considering the political, financial, and cultural centrality of Europe it is a critical one. If as appears to be the case, the nationalist and populist sentiments roiling the Northern Hemisphere are implicitly rebellions against not only globalization but also the global elite and "expert" class that have promoted and directed it. That class very much includes the academics, advocates, policy wonks, and regulators who have a hand in bioethics.

One can't say what this all might mean. Over the next months and years the British might find a way to resolve enough of their differences with the EU to remain a quasi-partner and the other members might fend off nationalist movements in their own countries. In that case the crisis might have passed. But if Brexit is the first crack in the liberal international system to be followed by a more general breakdown, some of the central tenets that underlie post-war biomedical ethics might be at risk, including the authority of some of those conventions and institutions and even assumptions about values like universal human equality.

The point is that modern bioethics is very much a creation of the era after World War II, one dominated by the U.S. and Western Europe. As such it is far from immune to the threats to that international system, though the implications may take years to become evident.

(First published on the Hastings Bioethics Forum)

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George Ellery Hale Scientist of the Day George Ellery Hale,...  

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George Ellery Hale Scientist of the Day

George Ellery Hale, an American astrophysicist, was born June 29, 1868.

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Edward Lhuyd Scientist of the Day Edward Lhuyd, a...  

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Edward Lhuyd Scientist of the Day

Edward Lhuyd, a Welsh naturalist, died June 30, 1709, at about age 49 (we don't know his date of birth).

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Why The Haitian Cholera Victims Deserve Their Day In Court  
The battle between victims of the cholera epidemic in Haiti and the United Nations may resemble a classic David and Goliath story, except in this case Goliath hasn't even shown up to fight.

The reason is that the United Nations is granted "immunity from every form of legal process" -- even though public health experts believe UN peacekeeping troops are responsible for the cholera outbreak in Haiti, which has infected more than 750,000 people and killed more than 9,000 since October 2010. (Though a recent paper from Médecins Sans Frontières researchers suggests that there may be "a substantially higher cholera mortality rate than previously reported.")

Nevertheless, on Jan. 9, 2015, US District Court Judge J. Paul Oetken dismissed a class action lawsuit brought by the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. But in March the Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to review the District Court's ruling. The decision of the three judges is pending.

The United Nations should not be able to invoke immunity in order to foreclose on justice. The 1946 convention that granted them immunity also charged them with a responsibility. They aren't to be accountable to no one. Rather, according to the convention, the UN "shall make provisions for appropriate modes of settlement." But the UN has refused to do so in this case.

The United Nations should account for their role in one of the deadliest outbreaks of cholera in recent history. Some argue that time is better spent on halting the epidemic and not trying to point fingers at who started it. But while that trade may satisfy members of elite organizations, it is unlikely to satisfy people like Lisette Paul, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Her brother, Fritznel, became sick while working in the fields. He vomited and had diarrhea for seven days straight until he died. His medical and funeral expenses plunged his family into debt. Soon, they could no longer afford to send his daughter to school. The suffering of Fritznel, Lisette, and those like them shouldn't be pitted against the prevention of future pain. They should have a forum to air their claims and the UN should provide it.

No one doubts that the ongoing cholera epidemic in Haiti is a man-made disaster. The debate is who, or what, was responsible. Cholera is a bacterial infection that causes diarrhea and vomiting and, unstopped, eventually dehydration and sometimes death. People can catch it from contaminated water. But it hadn't been in Haiti for 100 years at least. So how did it wind up there in October 2010?

The short answer is human activity from South Asia. One team of public health experts matched the strain of cholera to a South Asian type. Another made a circumstantial case that the disease came from a camp of UN peacekeeping troops from Nepal. Before the troops were deployed to Haiti, there had been a cholera outbreak in Kathmandu, Nepal. Less than two weeks after the first cases, the Associated Press reported an overflowing septic tank, the "stench of excrement," and "a reeking black flow" from the camp's pipes to the Artibonite River, which 1.5 million Haitians use.



The UN doesn't deny all of these claims. In fact, they rounded up an independent panel that reached many of the same conclusions. They also found that the cholera strain matches the South Asian type and the outbreak happened "as a result of human activity."

But the UN panel report arrives at a different conclusion. Though they agree someone must have brought cholera to Haiti, they say no one should be blamed. This is because, they argue, there was a "confluence of circumstances." These circumstances include the environmental conditions, the role that Haitians played in spreading the disease, an especially deadly strain of cholera, and the country's poor sanitation and water conditions. Indeed, by the time the cholera outbreak hit, a mere 17% of Haitians had access to facilities that separate human waste from human contact.

The "confluence of factors" argument amounts to little more than victim blaming. If only Haiti had better water and sanitation, the argument goes, then cholera would not have spread.

But does that mean someone should be able to leak contaminated raw sewage with impunity? "From a legal perspective that stuff is all totally irrelevant," counters Brian Concannon, the executive director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. "If the UN negligently introduced this disease into an environment they knew was weak, then legally it's still responsible."

Still, this isn't an open-and-shut case. Daniele Lantagne and the rest of the UN panel give two reasons why not. First, there is no hard scientific link between the peacekeepers and the outbreak. Someone else from South Asia could have been in Haiti at the time and, however miniscule the possibility, they could have carried the strain. Second, the introduction of cholera undoubtedly was an accident and not a deliberate act.

But this only raises more questions that the UN should answer. No one argues that the peacekeepers contaminated the water supply on purpose. If they had the disease, they may have had no idea. In fact, it is possible to be totally asymptomatic. But this doesn't answer why they weren't screened for the disease. After all, a cholera outbreak was reported on September 23, 2010, in Kathmandu, which is where the peacekeepers trained for three months. They received a medical examination before traveling to Haiti. Why weren't they tested for cholera? A recent article in PLOS Medicine reports that the rapid diagnostic test only costs $2.54 per person and a single-dose prophylaxis on the higher end runs $1.32 per person.

Even if they were definitively singled out as the cause, it would be unfair to punish the peacekeepers. They weren't experts. Peacekeeping troops are hired out, largely from poor countries, to the UN for $1,028 per soldier per month of duty.

But that doesn't mean no one could have foreseen harm. Just two days after the January 2010 earthquake, the US National Center for Medical Intelligence wrote that it "expects damage to urban water and sewage infrastructure will increase rates of diarrheal disease, possibly to include cholera." Even if an accidental act and a confluence of factors spread cholera, the important ethical questions are when those factors were known, and by whom.

It isn't only outsiders like Brian Concannon and the IJDH who are calling on the UN to hear claims from the victims of cholera. In his first report as the UN's independent expert on the situation of human rights in Haiti, Gustavo Gallón called for a "reparation commission for cholera victims." Given that the UN proclaimed that victims of human rights violations must be able to seek remedies and reparations, Mr. Gallón reminds us, anything less would be hypocritical.

In October 2015, four UN Special Rapporteurs joined Gallón to argue that "the victims of cholera have access to a transparent, independent and impartial mechanism that can review their claims and decide on the merits of those claims in order to ensure adequate reparation, including restitution, compensation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-repetition."

More recently, Jan Eliasson, the Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations, wrote a letter that the "Secretary General and I are fully committed to ensuring that the Organization fulfills its human rights obligations." Yet the letter doesn't mention financial compensation nor does it mention any "transparent, independent and impartial mechanism" to review claims.

One out of every fourteen Haitians has been infected with cholera. They deserve an official forum to examine why this happened and who is responsible. People like Claudine, another client of IJDH, who spent her life savings to bury her father should be made financially whole. As of today, none of this will happen.

This blog originally appeared at PLOS Public Health Perspectives.

Photo Credit: V. cholerae on TCBS. Via Flickr VeeDunn CC BY 2.0.

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Day 300: Virtually There  


Until we get really good at transgressing the laws of physics, we live under the thumb of certain hard facts. One of the hardest is this: we can't physically be in two places at once. Happily, through miracles of modern technology like speakerphones, Skype, and virtual reality, as long as we're on the same planet as an event, we can virtually attend. At least, our likenesses can. Our voices, faces, and/or avatars can appear in our places. Using these work-arounds, our essences can sort of exist in two or more places at once. Virtually near-infinite versions of ourselves, some more robust than others, can experience elements of distant locations and the people -- with a catch.

"Distant" here is "less than or equal to the maximum circumference of the Earth and nearby orbits." This modus operandi does not function at an interplanetary level. In fact, it starts to break down as soon as you get to the Moon. The delay -- 1 second each way -- is barely perceptible, but nonetheless palpable. Send a command -- wait for it, wait for it -- then get a reply. "Hello!"... 1... 2 -- "Hello!" It's ALMOST like being there, but not quite. It's more like awaiting an echo.



The further out we go in the Universe, the more protracted these conversations become. By the time you get to Mars, delay could be as short as 4 minutes -- like being placed "on a brief hold while we find someone to serve you" -- or as long as 20 minutes each way; like Mars is telling you, "Go on a lunch break. Your reply will be waiting when you return."

This is not a complaint by any means. Compared to the good folks running the Juno mission to Jupiter (due to arrive on 7/4!) a call to Mars represents a rapid turn-around. Juno's controllers currently wait 1.5 hours for a reply from their spacecraft. The folks listening to signals from Voyager 1 stay on hold for more than 37 hours. Still, our lag, however tiny on the scale of the solar system, means that we on simulated Mars are never quite there on Earth: for the people we care about, or for ourselves.

To be fair, even when I stayed put on one planet, in the course of more than thirty solar revolutions I missed an event or two. Due to residency training, I was absent during my only sibling's wedding. I missed the funeral of one of my best friends from high school because it occurred on the same day as my cousin's wedding. These circumstances aside, I've made every attempt to be there -- virtually if not physically -- for marriages, births, deaths, anniversaries, chemotherapy, and just about every important happening in the world where my presence could make a difference. That is, until my presence was requested on a different world.

It's been a little over 300 days since I was physically present for anyone back on Earth. Now seems like a good time to acknowledge the things that I have missed.

• Two friends began and completed chemotherapy. Survival looks promising! Good job, guys.
• 
  
• My only niece began school.
• 
  
• A colleague who spent her life removing cancers from women's reproductive systems was forced to stop working... because she has cancer.
• 
  
• My husband's grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, turned 90.
• 
  
• My father was assaulted in his own home and had to undergo surgery to stabilize his arm.
• 
  
• My best friend since childhood had twins (Full-sized twins!)
• 
  
• On Monday, at the age of 88, my beautiful grandmother passed away peacefully in her sleep.

On Earth, we cannot always be there for these moments. Future space explorers will not be there for these moments. As much as we all accept this as part of the job, the fact that we cannot be there however much we wish to be might take a toll on future missions to asteroids, other planets, and other stars.

To mitigate the potential damage from this rift, we've begun studying how our presences back home (and our family's absence in space) can best be substituted. Based our experiences during the last 10 months, I can report that sending videos back-and-forth satisfies some basic needs. We can see and hear people. They can see and hear us. Everyone walks away knowing that everyone else basically OK. What else does one need, really?

Before yesterday, I couldn't have answered that question. Now it's clear that there's something more that we space travelers might need from time to time -- something that regular video cannot supply.



The HI-SEAS crew goes on VR trips in the airlock: one of the few places in the hab where it's large enough (and quiet enough) to set up the system.

The news of my grandmother's passing arrived in the morning via an email from my mother. The crew had a full day of studies ahead (there's really no day off in space). Coincidentally, I was at the helm for that particular day's experiment. So I set to work getting everything ready. When my turn came, I hooked myself up to all of the gadgets and gizmos, started the recorder, and hit "Go" button on the 3D virtual reality system. I had done this before, many times. This time, however, the experience was different.

The city that appeared before me was one in which I used to live. By happenstance, the high-resolution 3D images were taken in the early summertime, which is taking place right now on that continent on Earth. They were taken around the same time of day when I was watching the video in the hab: early afternoon. The images were of places that I had visited frequently. In an unexpected twist, people walking past the camera rig would occasionally stop and peer at it. Sometimes, they would even point and gesture to it. I experienced the satisfying sensation that life was going along back at home just as it should have been -- not without me, but with me present as a sort of spectral spectator. Though you might not expect it, that part of the VR experience -- being noticed by people on Earth -- was the most moving. The visual cues told my brain, if not my mind, that I was home.

Being able to give future space explorers this experience on demand may be critically important. As our crew architect recently pointed out: if this were really Mars, we would have just arrived. Since mankind's smallest target area on Mars is a few kilometers at best, we would have spent much of these last few weeks running around looking for our stuff. Hopefully, we would have found all or most of it by now. Hopefully, all or most of it would be functional (or would be after some intrepid astronaut intervention). Then those first human visitors to Mars may discover, as we have, that missing Earth is not a regular occurrence. Here, the vistas here are grand and strange. We appreciate them for their beauty and oddity. The scenery is more than good enough. No scenery can substitute for people, though: we miss people and their lives, if not life on Earth, persay.



Being gone for three years, not just one, means that each man and woman on that journey will miss everything about people's lives that we've missed, times three. In a way, it's a frustrating experience. There was nothing I could do when my father was attacked. It's also a sort of relief: because I could not be there, a friend of the family stepped up and is living with him now -- done and handled. In that way, being in space is both a sacrifice and a ticket to ride. I told my grandmother that I loved her and thanked her for being in my life over delayed video. That was hard. On the other hand, in my last memory of her, my grandmother is standing by her white sink washing green grapes. She's on her own two feet in her own home. She's smiling. I have that image of her, happy and healthy, because I was here, not there, for the end.

I've come to realize that like most of life, this whole space thing is a give and take. In a recent interview (by delayed audio signal) I was asked, "How are you handling the stress of isolation?" My reply was: "How are you all on Earth handling the stress of waking up every day, getting to work through traffic, racing to get everything done so that you can get the kids to soccer practice or play league volleyball with your friends, then shopping, cooking, and fixing the house?" I seem to recall that on Earth the demands on one's time and the places from which those demands might emanate are nearly limitless. Here, the demands on our bodies and minds are highly limited by the simple fact that we aren't on Earth. Our commute is remarkably short. Though we're busy growing the radishes under LEDs, there is no shopping or insuring to be done, no phones to answer, no snow to shovel off the driveway. I truly believe that the average stress in space and on Earth is equal in magnitude if differently distributed -- with one notable exception.

Difficulty with long distance -- really long distance -- arises when there's a part of our lives that cannot be assigned to someone else, or something particular about Earth that cannot be replicated in space. One of those non-replicable things is being there for your friends and family in their moments of triumph and grief. Another is the sheer mass of humanity. By virtue of infinite diversity in infinite combinations, while on Earth we know that there's someone nearby going through the exact same thing that we are going through. We might not know who they are or where they are, but we know that they are out there: by the dozens if not hundreds or thousands. The five other people here all know what it's like to look for a certain type of volcanic rock while experiencing intermittent radio failure. (Thankfully.) None of them are going through the loss that I'm going through right now. It's me alone. Or rather, it was. In an unexpected moment of relief, I stepped back into a familiar city on Earth and was suddenly surrounded by other people -- people who might be and are experiencing anything, from extreme joy to extreme defeat, loss and gain and everything in between. In spite of the distance, I was virtually there with them and they were there with me -- if only for a moment.

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