Featured Program
NOVA scienceNOW
Stories from the frontlines of science, technology and medicine.
Airs Tuesday, July 28 at 9 PM on CPTV
On this week's episode...
The Dinosaur Plague: Renowned paleontologist George Poinar — whose study of extinct creatures exquisitely preserved in amber partly inspired Jurassic Park — has announced his discovery of multiple clues to parasitic pandemics that could have been just as instrumental in wiping out the dinosaurs as the hypothesized asteroid impact.
Northern Lights: The northern lights are glorious, but like many beautiful things, they hold a mystery: What causes them? Finding the answer is not just an exercise in satisfying scientific curiosity. The dance of the northern lights masks a growing danger, since the most energetic displays are associated with violent space weather — the energetic flow of radiation, magnetic fields and charged particles from the sun. These storms can disable satellites or even kill astronauts who happen to be in deep space. And given our increasing reliance on space-based technologies, we need to learn to predict space weather just as we can forecast Earth weather. But the pressure is on — in the next few years, there’s a storm brewing, which will mark the peak in the sun’s 11-year cycle of maximum activity.
Marathon Mouse: Exercise in a Pill?: Ron Evans at the Salk Institute is running mice ragged. He’s trying to figure out how to improve their endurance in a lasting way — a feat not yet achieved by the many available performance-enhancing drugs. Recently, Evans’ team showed that by modifying a master control gene that increases the production of fat-burning slow-twitch muscle fibers, they could enable mice to run twice as long as their unmodified siblings. He called these genetically modified mice “marathon mice,” since they could run such long distances. Now, Evans has found two drugs that have the same increased endurance effect. One of the drugs even allowed mice to run 44 percent longer than normal mice, without any previous exercise. Both drugs have been approved by the FDA for other uses, raising the specter of abuse: In fact, Evans’ lab developed a blood and urine test for the International Olympics Committee to detect these drugs in athletes. But those who stand to benefit most from these drugs might not be athletes at all. They are people with little to no muscle mass: for example, kids with muscular dystrophy or the frail elderly who don’t have the option of hopping on a treadmill to build strength and endurance.
Rocket Scientist Franklin Chang-Diaz (profile): “Like many other children, when Sputnik was launched I was a boy imagining that I could go to space, too. It was a dream that stayed with me,” says Franklin Chang-Diaz. The son a Spanish Costa Rican mother and a Chinese and Costa Rican father, Chang-Diaz became the first astronaut who was a naturalized citizen. He also holds the record for the most space flights — and he’s designed a revolutionary new rocket that just might power a new generation of space explorers. Before and between space flights, Chang-Diaz has spent the better part of his adult life conceiving, designing and perfecting the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR), a plasma-based propulsion system that he hopes will become the next generation rocket technology to boost the International Space Station and to propel the shuttle’s successor, the Crew Exploration Vehicle, to the moon and Mars. After 30 years in the making, the rocket has finally reached Technology Readiness Level 6 (TRL6) — the stage of development that precedes a flight test. Chang-Diaz expects VASIMR to be tested on the International Space Station as early as 2011.
