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The Night We Landed on Mars

Image credit: NASA/JPL

Exactly forty years ago today I experienced one of the greatest thrills of my life. It was the fulfillment of a childhood dream, the realization of a fantasy that had often drowned out the most tedious moments of my grade school classes. I can trace the roots of these antischolastic reveries to Mars and Beyond, an animated Disney documentary from the mid 1950s that had made Mars both real and alluring in my little brain.

The fantasies reached their zenith, both in grandiosity and implausibility, somewhere around the fifth grade. I imagined a sleek, black, winged spaceship landing in the playground, its crew rescuing me from history lessons to join them as their youngest companion, an essential member of the first team to fly to Mars.

By then I knew the textbook story of Mars. It was the most earthlike of all the other planets. It had an atmosphere, polar ice caps, seasons, and a twenty-four-hour day. Astronomers had seen seasonal waves of darkening spread across its surface -- thought to be a sign of plant life -- and at least one had convinced himself of the reality of a network of artificial Martian canals --evidence of a Martian civilization. Add to this the backdrop of a very real manned space program that would soon send people to the moon, and my astronautical fantasies seem in hindsight more inevitable than delusional. And I had learned enough arithmetic to work out that I would be a grown-up right around the time NASA was ready for Mars.

The lunar landings of the Apollo program came during my high school years, by which time my interests had broadened, the hormones had started to flow, and my hope of going to Mars had already begun to collide with reality. Even so I was enthralled by Apollo, and I was thrilled beyond words when the robotic Mariner 9 spacecraft, the first to orbit Mars, discovered ancient dry river beds on the red planet. But there was only so much that could be learned by an orbiting spacecraft. We had to land on Mars!

We did, and in a way far better than in my childish fantasies, or even in the best of science fiction. Anyone could be part of the crew. We all went together.

I was a student at Caltech at the time, where the Jet Propulsion Lab was running the Viking mission, but it was Caltech's Beckman Auditorium that was my spaceship. On the night of July 19-20, 1976, Beckman was showing a live feed from JPL all night, supplemented with commentary by local scientists.

I would have many sleepless nights during my years at Caltech, but this one was the best by far. There was the thrill and tension of knowing how much was at stake, how many things could go wrong with the landing, and how utterly helpless ground controllers would be during the most critical minutes.

The Viking lander camera worked like a fax machine, slowly scanning the scene in vertical stripes of pixels, and the audience fell silent as we watched the first few stripes being painted on the left edge of the screen. Tens of seconds went by with nothing more, then suddenly another vertical strip of the image appeared, now wide enough to show an unmistakable pebble on sandy Martian soil.

Image credit: NASA

The audience erupted in cheers. Tears streamed down my cheeks. We were on Mars! The Viking lander was alive and well. We knew that in the coming weeks there would be chemical tests of Martian soil for signs of life, but in that moment all we could feel was the pure thrill of being on Mars. The image continued to grow, showing one of the spacecraft's landing pads on the Martian sand.

Image credit: NASA and Roel van der Hoorn

I can't remember how long it took -- at least minutes, maybe an hour -- but a second image followed. It was a stunning panorama of a beautiful and sunny late afternoon on Mars.

Back on Earth, I stumbled out of our spaceship into the gray dawn of a Pasadena morning, my pulse still quickened, my mind expanded, and a lifelong desire finally met.

Happy fortieth anniversary to Viking 1 and to all of the scientists, engineers, politicians and taxpaying citizens who brought it to life.

And, by coincidence, happy forty-seventh to Apollo 11.

Here's a 3-minute video that includes similar reminiscences from Gentry Lee and others from the Viking team:

And here you can watch the entire Mars and Beyond documentary from Disney:

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How Intuitive Eating Helped Me Recover From Orthorexia
Before I begin my preaching session on intuitive eating, I have a question: Was your last year of high school everything you wanted it to be and more? I'm going to take a shot in the dark and say, no.

Unfortunately, life has a way of crushing expectations. The parties were most likely not as exciting or numerous as you thought they would be, and you never imagined your friends wanting to kill each other over a prom date.

These were the average struggles that I heard my friends vent about, over and over. I, on the other hand, suffered from a disorder called orthorexia.

Orthorexia begins as a goal to eat more healthfully, but orthorexics obsess over food quality and purity. For me, this obsession stemmed from my need for control in my life. The thought of college freaked me out, and I turned to my diet for comfort.

I would research foods that boosted metabolism and kept you fuller longer. I would replace vegetable oil with coconut oil, and eat 75% cocoa dark chocolate, all while drinking a hot cup of green tea. I thought I was killin' the game.

Turns out, not so much. I dropped 20 pounds in about a month. However, I still did not catch onto the issue. It took me over 6 months to figure out that I had a problem. My healthy food restrictions were not providing my body with enough calories to survive, even at rest.

This was all before I discovered intuitive eating.

Intuitive eating, in simple terms, is having a positive outlook on food, and how it benefits, rather than harms your body. This approach does not restrict you from eating anything. Instead, you simply become more aware of your body, and what it is telling you.

The main rule is as follows: if you are hungry, eat, and stop eating when you are full. Rather than being disappointed in yourself for eating a cookie, intuitive eating strives to rid your brain of those negative thoughts of certain foods.

I think of intuitive eating as a form of positive psychology, rather than a diet. Why punish yourself for fueling your body? The goal of the practice is to rewire your mind and body so that you can become the healthiest version of yourself.

There are actual principles to intuitive eating, which you can check out here to help you get started.

I did not consciously make the decision to eat intuitively. My body was failing, and I needed to eat a lot in order for it to repair itself. Once my body was getting the nutrients it needed, and I became mentally stable, I was able to change my relationship with food. My personal motto became, "everything in moderation." It was not until recently that I stumbled upon practices like the ones linked above, and realized how similar my new perspective on food was with the intuitive eating lifestyle.

I would be lying if I said I was an intuitive eating expert. I am still learning about the lifestyle myself. Today, I'm as happy and as healthy as I have ever been. I exercise regularly and I eat what I want. No, this does not mean I am taking in 4,000 calories in a day. I still eat well; a lot of fruits, chicken, vegetables, and fish. However, I do not deprive myself of a bacon cheeseburger, or those mighty-fine taquitos. My hope is that your body shaming ends before it ever gets to the point of an eating disorder and that you consider the intuitive eating lifestyle as your jumping off point.

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We're One Step Closer to Mind Reading
This article was originally posted on Inverse.

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By Dyani Sabin

On Tuesday, a team from Johns Hopkins University made some headway in uncovering the parts of the brain involved with making decisions. Published in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, the study is one of the first to image the brains of people making voluntary decisions.

The team performed fMRI scans of 12 participants brains while they looked at a screen. Participants were told to look at a screen with two streams of text, and to switch paying attention from one to the other a few times a minute. Because the decisions made were voluntary, researchers could see what happens in the brain before a person decided to switch streams.

Before an individual decided to view a different stream, the fMRI picked up activity in two parts of the brain associated with attention, memory, and decision-making. Activity in these regions is starting earlier in comparison to previous studies where people are told to switch attention. This suggests that the medial frontal and lateral prefrontal cortexes are likely involved in processing decision-making.'

Witnessing brain activity before an action occurs give researchers the ability to study how the brain processes decisions, says Leon Gmeindl, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins and the lead author on the research. And while it's not quite mind reading, this kind of research has the potential to get us closer by imaging more complicated decision-making tasks.

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Custom Printed Organs

By David W. Niesel and Norbert K Herzog

Arguably, among the most exclusive waiting lists are those for organ transplantation. This is an expensive "do or die" medical procedure with limited availability. In the US, kidney transplant waiting list time wait varies from 5-189 months with only four having times of under twelve months. Consider that every 10 minutes someone is added to an organ waiting list and twenty-one people a day die waiting. Remember one donor can save up to eight lives through multiple organ use. As of 2016, there are 121,527 people on an organ transplant waiting list and in 2015, but only about 15,000 donors. Despite advances in transplantation technology and national efforts to stimulate organ donation, the difference between need and supply remains wide. This gap in the supply and demand for transplantable organs has led to desperate measures to obtain organs. In the Far East, there is a thriving organ black market where some prey on the less fortunate or some reported kidnappings and even murder to obtain them.

There are some alternatives. Researchers have developed ways to use organs from animals for transplantation, called xenotransplantation to reduce the gap in transplantable organs. Several countries including Russia and New Zealand have already approved clinical trials using pig derived cells for treating Type 1 diabetes. However xenotransplantation is controversial. One major concern is the fear that animal viruses could be introduced into humans. Finally and significantly, there are a host of religious, social and ethical issues that will be a challenge to large scale xenotransplantation.

You have likely heard about 3D printing's impact with some calling it the start of a new industrial revolution. 3D printing is a modification of the office inkjet technology but the nozzle moves both back and forth and up and down to deposit plastic or other melted material to form a 3D object. In medicine, 3D printing is important for prosthetics for children where replacement parts can be produced as the child grows. Surgeons have been using this technology to produce working models for reconstructive surgeries. Orthopedists produce working models of fractured bones to optimize the placement of screws and plates before surgery and dentists' offices produce crowns and dentures.

New advances in 3D printing are beginning to produce tissues that could one day be transplanted. Such bioprinting uses the technology to add layers of biocompatible material to make a scaffolding then adds tissue specific cells to grow in and on it. This scaffolding provides the tissue shape and structure based on anatomical location and need. For example, a bioprinted trachea would be printed to the precise dimensions needed. Eventually the biocompatible materials degrade leaving a new tissue. A new bioprinting technology also provides spaces for blood vessels insuring that once implanted, the tissue will receive nutrients and oxygen from blood. Researchers used this technique to print cartilage in the shape of a human ear, muscle and jawbone. Implanted into mice, these engineered tissues remained viable and began to develop a blood supply. While these are first steps, we may look back and characterize these as the "proof of principle" for printing organs for human transplantation. Eventually, this will mean saving lives and creating a limitless supply of life saving organs for transplantation.

Medical Discovery News is hosted by professors Norbert Herzog at Quinnipiac University, and David Niesel of the University of Texas Medical Branch. Learn more at www.medicaldiscoverynews.com.

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The Real-Life Ghostbusters of the Brain
This article was originally posted on Inverse.

By Yasmin Tayag

"In a sense, we are absolutely the ghosts we are sensing," Giulio Rognini, Ph.D., a senior scientist at EPFL's Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, says.

Rognini is part of a team of researchers at Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne that might be best described as the real-life ghostbusters. The team is attempting to understand what makes our brains want to believe that apparitions are ghosts.

While he's more than willing to admit that ghostly sensations are completely real, he'll be the first to point out that they're not actually caused by ghosts. In his work, he's discovered that many such "encounters" are actually caused by a series of brain malfunctions, which trick us into attributing our movements and sensations to someone else.

Rognini's particular line of research focuses on a particular type of ghost encounter referred to by scientists as the feeling of a presence. "Typically, people report the type of apparition that they see," Rognini says. "Our kind of apparition is more the sensation that someone is nearby when no one is actually present." These kinds of encounters are most often reported by people with neurological disorders, like epilepsy and stroke, but they're also common in people who do extreme, exhausting sports, like long-distance cycling or mountain climbing. If ghosts aren't real, then what's triggering these experiences? Rognini and his colleagues -- who specialize in investigating the body's role in subjective experience and self-consciousness -- have spent the last decade looking for the source.

In 2006, Olaf Blanke, Ph.D., Director of the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, was implanting electrodes into the brains of epilepsy patients to investigate the source of the disease. Unexpectedly, he discovered that zapping a specific area of the brain triggered a feeling of a presence in his patients. As he investigated further, he found that the movement of the presence always corresponded to what the patient was doing. If the patient was standing, the presence was standing. If the patient was sitting, the presence was felt as sitting. "There were correspondences between movement and posture between the patient and the presence, showing what we call the sensorimotor aspect of the phenomenon," Rognini explains. "What was happening was that the patient was misattributing his own signals -- his own posture -- to the presence."

In essence, the "ghosts" the patients were sensing were really just echoes of their own movements. When our brains function normally, we have a strong sense of who we are and where we are in space. Processing touch, motor cues, and proprioception -- that is, understanding the stimuli our own bodies produce and perceive -- all goes smoothly, giving us a firm understanding of how our bodies exist in physical space. By studying people whose brains couldn't integrate their body's sensorimotor signals, Rognini and his team concluded that lesions in the parts of the brain crucial to generating the experience of "self" -- the temporoparietal, insular, and frontoparietal cortex regions -- were the root cause of the feeling of a presence.

An engineer by training, Rognini began a follow-up study by devising a robot to trigger the feeling of a presence in healthy patients. As participants manually controlled the robot's movements, the robot, in turn, reproduced those movements on the patient's back, either with or without a small delay. "When there was this small delay, in a way replicating the conflict that is present in neurological patients with brain lesions in areas that integrate body signals, the patient no longer attributes movements and touch to himself," he explains. Unable to figure out where the movements are coming from, the patient has no choice but to attribute them to someone -- or something -- else.

Some of the patients in this study, which was described in a 2014 paper in Current Biology, were too freaked out by the robot's ghostly presence to participate for its entirety and asked to stop the experiment. But the study successfully showed what Rognini was hoping to prove: Ghosts are all in our heads.

"We take for granted that we have a solid representation of our body in space and time," he says. "I think this feeling of a presence study is a nice example of the fact that when you trick your own bodily signals and you trick your brain at interpreting them, then you can have very very weird, strange sensations." His next move will be to test his robots on patients inside an MRI scanner in order to pinpoint the specific parts of the brain that are chasing phantoms.

Of course, Rognini is aware that his model can't explain all of the different ghosts humans have claimed to encounter. "The literature on ghosts and apparitions and hallucinations is huge and also highly influenced by culture," he says, explaining that his experiment provides a scientific account of only a small sliver of the supernatural. Can science suggest an explanation for everything else? Even Michael Shermer, notorious science cynic and founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, has admitted he's been forced to consider the existence of the supernatural. If you ask Rognini, he'll admit that his work only goes so far.

"We cannot, of course, explain out all the apparitions that have been reported."

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Alien-Hunting 19 Years After "Contact"
This article was originally posted on Inverse.

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By Sarah Sloat

One of the most realistic parts of Contact is the blatant sexism that the brilliant young astronomer Eleanor Arroway encounters throughout the 1997 extraterrestrial-hunting film. The rumored inspiration for Arroway -- Jill Tarter -- said in 1999 that author Carl Sagan, who wrote the novel the movie was based off of, "included many of the 'character-building' experiences that are common to women scientists studying and working in a male-dominated profession, so Ellie seems very familiar to me."

"Character-building" in this scenario is being a prominent SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) astronomer who has to deal with backward dudes who think your scientific expertise is laughable science fiction and won't take you seriously because you're a woman. Great.

But for a movie that ends up with our protagonist on an intergalactic pseudo-beach chatting with an alien posing as her father, you may be surprised to know that what Contact nails doesn't stop there. Contact's realism is a reflection of the fact that Sagan knew what he was talking about. Until her breakthrough, Arroway lives a convincing life as a scientist -- working out of the same observatories as real SETI researchers, fighting for funding, and hunting for alien life by listening for radio signals between 1,200 and 3,000 MHz from systematically selected stars.

But what makes Arroway's discovery of alien-transmitted communication from the star Vega awesome material for a Hollywood blockbuster is that it's sold as a fantasy. Sagan knew the real science going on behind the fiction he created, but people who bought movie tickets didn't. People in 1997 didn't believe in SETI initiatives any more than the antagonists Arroway encountered.

If Contact was to get a remake today (but seriously, no) it wouldn't be able to instill the same sense of bewildered wonder. And that is a very good thing, namely because the work that Arroway portrays in the film is finally getting its due as a respectable field of science. Contact has proven to be prescient in 2016 (save for the actual we've-gotten-a-message-from-aliens part).

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Ellie reachers for a cracker-jack compass during her journey to Vega.

Take billionaire Yuri Milner: In Contact, Arroway's work (and eventual voyage to Vega) is saved by the financial intervention of Dr. Hadden Suit, whose wealth seemingly has no bounds. Suit works from the shadows, moving the pieces in Arroway's life, without the public knowing of the alien-hunting science going on behind closed doors. Comparatively, Milner is a real life financier who has made his intentions to help find evidence of extra-terrestrials extremely public.

In 2015, Milner announced his Breakthrough Listen initiative in collaboration with the SETI program at the University of California, Berkeley -- a $100 million project that uses telescopes to listen for extraterrestrial radio signals and search for laser signals. In January, he announced another $100 million dollar project with Breakthrough Starshot, an enterprise that plans to send laser-powered lightsails to the star system Alpha Centauri with the eventual goal of encountering life in deep space. That line, in any other year, would seem straight-up ridiculous.

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A Breakthrough Starshot solar sail.

But things are a bit different in 2016. Arroway probably would not need to patiently break down how radio signals work to suits in the U.S. government when they begin to investigate her work; they'd probably already know what's going on. Just look at the development of the FAST telescope being built in China, which Zheng Xiaonian of the Chinese Academy of Sciences says will have "the potential to search for more strange objects to better understand the origin of the universe and boost the global hunt for extraterrestrial life."

But mainly, a scientist of Arroway's caliber wouldn't have to take the same sort of inane criticism. SETI researchers are increasingly aware that they are no longer fringe weirdos. SETI communications director Seth Shostak told Inverse in January that, "I think there may be truth to SETI being taken more seriously by the public and it may be a consequence of the discovery of exoplanets filtering down to the public."

And while funding for exploratory science continues to be a struggle, SETI has been able to continue -- and even increase -- its programs. While it continues to monitor radio waves, sometimes with the help of public laptops, SETI is also able to use optical instruments to look for lasers and light patterns that could signify the presence of aliens.

In fact, on Thursday, SETI's Institute Director of Research Nathalie Cabrol published a proposal arguing for further developing alien-hunting techniques, specifically through the establishment of Virtual Institute with "new detection strategies."

"To find E.T., we must open our minds beyond a deeply-rooted, Earth-centric perspective, expand our research methods, and deploy new tools," said Cabrol in a press statement. "Never before has so much data been available in so many scientific disciplines to help us grasp the role of probabilistic events in the development of extraterrestrial intelligence. These data tell us that each world is a unique planetary experiment."

Cabrol's words are comparable to that of Arroway's, who praises the "acquisition of technology" as the catalyst for finally making contact probable. The good news for us: Cabrol is real, and one day, contact with aliens might be too.

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Studying impacts of climate change on ecosystem function

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Early morning at the Tutakoke River field camp in the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Researchers from Utah State University are studying how the phenology of sub-Arctic tundra plants and the seasonal arrival of migratory Pacific black brants affects ecosystem functioning at the field site. This photo was taken by Ryan Choi, a Ph.D. candidate of wildlife ecology and a member of a National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported Arctic research project led by Karen Beard of Utah State University. The project is studying how a warming Arctic is affecting the relationships between migratory animals -- in this case Pacific black brants (Branta bernicla nigricans), a species of wild geese -- and the annual cycle of the forage they rely on for energy, nutrition and rearing of young. The study site is located in the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

Image credit: Ryan Choi, Utah State University

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Proposed Kidney Disease XPRIZE Announced at White House Organ Summit

By American Society of Nephrology President Raymond C. Harris, MD, FASN and XPRIZE CEO, Marcus Shingles

Kidney transplantation is the optimal form of therapy for the nearly half million Americans and millions of people around the world suffering from kidney failure. However, the kidney transplant waitlist--approximately 100,000 Americans--is growing, and the average wait time for a transplant is five years. Most will die before their name is ever called.

About 450,000 Americans have failed kidneys and - in the absence of transplant options -- depend on dialysis to live. Dialysis keeps them alive but their quality of life is often dismal, and their life expectancy is often short. At a cost of nearly $35 billion annually--more than the entire budget for the National Institutes of Health--Medicare pays for dialysis for every citizen with kidney failure regardless of age. Despite this remarkable commitment, investment in innovations for kidney treatments has been inadequate for decades.

Unlike kidney transplants, dialysis is not a cure and does not return patients to full health or a normal lifestyle. Patients receiving dialysis endure three to four hour treatment three or more times a week. Their blood is removed, filtered through a machine that clears toxins and waste the kidneys would normally remove, and returned. The process is emotionally exhausting and physically debilitating. Only 1 in 5 patients of working age who are on dialysis have jobs. Approximately half of the dialysis population dies within three years.

Kidney diseases disproportionately affect minority populations. African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans are up to four times more likely to develop kidney failure than Caucasians. African Americans in low income neighborhoods are also 57 percent less likely to make the transplant list than others.

Recognizing that this kidney transplant crisis is largely due to organ shortages, the Obama Administration recently convened the White House Organ Summit. At the Summit, the American Society of Nephrology (ASN) announced its pledge of the first $7 million dollars toward a global prize competition to develop a novel wearable or implantable device that replaces kidney function and improves patient quality of life, in partnership with the XPRIZE Foundation.

ASN and XPRIZE believe we must do better for the millions of people with kidney failure. XPRIZE designs and implements innovative competition models that utilize the unique combination of gamification, crowd-sourcing, incentive prize theory, and exponential technologies to solve the world's grandest challenges. We believe that a global competition will help create a fundamental shift in the way we treat kidney failure by incentivizing the development of a better alternative to dialysis, improving patients' health and the quality of their lives. Research in bioengineering, matrix technology, and cell biology is poised to ignite revolutionary changes in the options clinicians can offer people with kidney diseases. A global prize competition would bring together scientists and innovators to catalyze transformative innovation.

We commend the White House for putting a spotlight on this critical issue, and we call on others to join us in this serious and time-sensitive initiative to help finalize, fund, and execute this competition that can ultimately improve treatment options for kidney failure patients and the clinicians who treat them. Learn more at http://www.xprize.org/prizes/future-prizes/kidney-disease and http://www.asn-online.org/news/2016/0613-organ-summit.aspx.

Visit XPRIZE at xprize.org; follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+; and get our newsletter to stay informed.

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