Author: Lois Parshley

The humble ankle has had a remarkable history as an object of fetishization: Think Victorian sexual repression and high heels. Of course, its significance is also practical. Without ankles, there would be no sports or dance. Not only would nobody be able to score a touchdown, we wouldn’t even be able to walk. Here are eight things you may not have known about this basic but crucial joint:

1. THE ANKLE IS COMPOSED OF JUST THREE MAIN BONES.

The true ankle joint is composed of three bones: the tibia, or the inside part of the ankle; the fibula, the outside part of the ankle, and the talus, underneath. These allow the flexion and extension of the foot, letting you make the up and down motions that you require to walk. Below the ankle joint is actually a second joint called the subtalar joint, which allows side-to-side motion of the foot. Altogether, the human foot and ankle contain 26 bones, 33 joints, and more than 100 muscles, tendons, and ligaments.

2. THE ANKLE JOINT IS NOTORIOUSLY WOBBLY.

Despite how often humans are on their feet, the ankle joint is small and unstable in the best of times because of its precarious anatomical structure. Most people will experience a tweaked, twisted or sprained ankle at least once in their lives.

3. ANKLE SPRAINS ARE THE MOST COMMON INJURY IN AMERICA.

When you couple the weak ankle joint with the vigorous activity it’s required to perform, it’s no surprise that ankle sprains account for nearly 2 million injuries every year, or 20 percent of all sports injuries in the United States.

4. NOT ALL OF THESE SPRAINS ARE SPORTS-RELATED.

Researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham reported an estimated 125,355 high heel-related injuries in U.S. Emergency Departments between 2002 and 2012. In 2011 alone, there were a reported 19,000 injuries from high heels. The injury rate was greatest for women in their 20s. Another survey from the College of Podiatry found that most women reported foot pain after one hour and six minutes of wearing high heels, and 20 percent of participants said that they felt pain after just 10 minutes of wear.

5. NEVER JUST “WALK OFF” AN ANKLE SPRAIN.

You can actually do significant damage if you’re walking on an untreated ankle sprain, according to the National Athletic Trainers’ Association. Treatments may range from rest, ice, and ibuprofen to casts, braces, and even surgery. Always seek a doctor’s care if you think you’ve sprained an ankle.

6. THE ANKLE WAS TOO EROTIC FOR PUBLIC VIEWING IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND.

A woman lifting her skirt to show her ankle was considered provocative in Victorian England. This is ironic, given that the Victorians were at the same time producers of copious pornography.

7. “PRETTIEST ANKLE” CONTESTS WERE POPULAR THROUGH THE 1930s.

While the Victorian era repressed women’s displays of their bodies, the 1930s were all about exposing the ankles. In fact, according to Mashable, in the UK “pretty ankle” competitions were popular events until about World War II.

8. YOU MIGHT WANT TO RETHINK AN ANKLE TATTOO.

Because the foot and ankle generally don’t have much fat or flesh, getting a tattoo on this skinny extremity can be extremely painful. Because of how much use your foot and ankle get, they also can take twice as much time to heal as other locations—but it could give you a leg up in an ankle competition.

 
Bird poop has been a favored fertilizer for centuries—and, it turns out, is an excellent preserver of human flesh. These two factors came together in the 19th century as the global trade in guano, the excrement of seabirds (or bats), took off, leading to some unexpected travelers coming along for the ride—and raking in the cash.

Guano contains essential nutrients for plant growth and naturally accumulates near nesting areas. Its Miracle-Gro properties were prized and regulated by the Incas (the word wanu is Quechua in origin), but it wasn’t until 1802 that the European world learned of this resource through the writings of Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who traveled extensively along the west coast of South America.

By the 1840s, Europe and the U.S. were importing guano for fertilizer. When it was discovered the poop could also make gunpowder, a veritable guano mania began. Guano was soon going for about $76 per ton, and the U.S. imported over 100,000 tons of it in 1861 [PDF]. That’s about $250 million in today’s dollars.

In the race to control the world’s guano deposits and secure bird poo futures for its people, the U.S. created the Guano Islands Act in 1856, allowing any U.S. citizen to claim guano-covered islands. Control over guano resources became part of the justification for the Chincha Islands War (1864–1866) between Spain and Peru and Chile, as well as for the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), in which Chile stole Peru’s guano.

In the midst of this fervor for feces, guano miners were hard at work chipping away at the hardened mounds of poo on islands in the Pacific, Caribbean, and Atlantic. Strangely, on some of these islands, among the guano they also found mummified humans.

The most well-known guano mummy is that of Christopher Delano. On the island of Ichaboe, a teeny speck of land off Namibia, a crew of guano miners found a canvas hammock containing a human body under about 6 feet of guano, with a wooden plaque saying “Christopher Delano, 1721.” A cheery pamphlet from 1854 describes his mummified corpse and its travels: “But for the hair and teeth, which were quite perfect, [it] appeared a mass resembling stone, all the natural and component parts, of the body being changed by the process of petrifaction … [and] composed chiefly of lime and ammonia.”

In spite of the quite scientific understanding at the time of both natural and artificial mummification (thanks to early interest in ancient Egypt), even with the knowledge of the formation of adipocere, or “grave wax,” on recently interred corpses, the perception of what guano could do appears to have been wrong. Delano was not “changed into a mass of lime and ammonia.” We know now that in the short term, guano can help seal dead bodies, creating an oxygen-poor and salt-rich environment that is good for preservation. In a warm, arid climate like Namibia, the guano helped dry Delano’s body and shield it from scavengers.

Captain Wethers, who commanded the crew, brought the mummy from Ichaboe to Liverpool, where it traveled to the British Museum. From there, poor Delano went on a tour of Great Britain and Ireland, where he brought in more than $150,000—the equivalent of about $4 million today.

Upon examination of Delano, British and French scientists determined that he was European and not African, and the amount of wear on his teeth suggested he was in his mid to late 30s when he died. His right shoulder is elevated and contracted, and his open mouth revealed “a death of agony” (though it’s not unusual to see a gaping jaw on a mummy). His cause of death? Likely a spear wound to his right shoulder.

The writer of the 1854 pamphlet took liberties with the sparse facts available: “About 1721, the Island of Ichaboe had been the resort of nests of Pirates…. In all human probability, the most satisfactory conjecture that can be arrived at is that the unfortunate Christopher Delano was a Spaniard, joined in some piratical enterprises, and leagued with a gang of desperadoes, from one of whom, while visiting the Island of Ichaboe, he most probably received his death wound in some bacchanalism origies [sic] or sudden quarrel.”

With this amazing manufactured backstory, Delano’s body was brought to Philadelphia and exhibited before being shipped to France by the mid-1860s. Although billed as the “only one in the world” and “the solitary known example in the Universe of its kind,” it was only a matter of time—and feverish digging—before more mummies preserved by bird poop materialized. Just a few years after Delano was discovered, the British ship Octavia also docked in Liverpool with a load of guano—and the mummies of a man, woman, and child from Peru [PDF]. Like Delano, they were eventually exhibited at the British Museum in London.

In 1868, British natural historian Francis Buckland noted that he saw yet another guano mummy in a “penny show” in Edinburgh; according to the show’s handbill, the body was brought from Possession Island off the west coast of Africa by Captain Dunlop’s ship Echo. The mummy was well preserved, with an oaken board that was carved “Peter Creed, 1790.” Buckland spoke with the owner, who reportedly announced that the mummy “is as good as a pension to me,” earning him today’s equivalent of $2000 in under two weeks. The owner was aware of the Delano corpse, which at that point he claimed had disintegrated due to its travels, but mused “he ain’t no use as a scientific mummy now; the more’s the luck for me as long as my Peter Creed holds together.” (Given England’s humidity, though, it is doubtful that his Mr. Creed survived for very long.)

By the early 20th century, the guano trade had tapered off. Industrialized countries found new sources of fertilizer, and it turns out that guano was not a very good source of saltpeter for gunpowder. Many islands and atolls had been completely stripped, but the legacy remains: Many remain in U.S. possession after being claimed for their guano 150 years ago. Seven of these make up the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, the world’s largest marine reserve. As for the islands that produced Delano and Creed, these today support Cape gannets and endangered African penguins, and wildlife conservationists still often visit to monitor these populations.

While guano mummies are occasionally discovered in these areas, today new finds are largely made by archaeologists excavating prehistoric caves sites in arid locations like Nevada, New Mexico, and Durango, Mexico. Still, with the popularity of bat guano as an organic fertilizer on the rise today, it’s likely more poop-preserved mummies may yet turn up.

Few things trigger revulsion like the sight of maggots writhing through rotting food or decomposing road kill. But maggots, which are the larval stage of flies and other related insects, are actually one of nature’s unsung heroes. Along with bacteria and other insects, they quickly break down dead things. Maggots provide other beneficial services as well, from helping solve crimes to healing wounds.

Of course, not all maggots perform such brilliant feats; some, for example, are pests that eat crops. But they don’t deserve the universally bad rap they’ve been given. So the next time your stomach lurches at the sight of maggots squirming, here are 15 examples to help you remember what amazing creatures they actually are.

1. THE LIFE CYCLE OF A MAGGOT IS PRETTY INTENSE.

Flies generally lay their eggs on things that will make a good food source for their offspring, so when maggot larvae hatch they can get to work feasting right away. Over several days they will eat, poop, grow, and sometimes even molt. At that point, the typically creamy colored maggots will pupate, meaning they’ll squirm off to a reasonably dry place, stop moving, and grow a dark shell.

Inside that shell, they transform from a mushy mass to a fully formed insect. In about 10 days, maggots will emerge from the pupal casing as hairy, bug-eyed flies and scamper off to mate, starting the cycle all over again.

2. THEY’RE VORACIOUS EATERS.

They have no legs, but their front ends have mouths with hooks that help them grab at decaying flesh and other delectable food items. Despite their endless appetites, however, they lack a sophisticated digestive system. So as they move through a corpse or rotten food, they secrete fluid containing digestive enzymes to help them dissolve their foul meal.

3. SOME MAGGOTS EAT OTHER MAGGOTS.

In 2013, researchers from the University of Lausanne published a study reporting that fruit fly maggots—normally vegetarians—actually have cannibalistic tendencies. Once a maggot is injured, it’s fair game for a feeding frenzy. Why would a normally vegetarian species do such a thing? Scientists don’t have clear answers yet, but their research studying maggots could help answer basic evolutionary questions about cannibalism.

4. THEY GENERATE A LOT OF HEAT.

Maggots feed in massive groups, and all those digestive juices and movement can really heat up their immediate environment. They deal with this by retreating to cooler spots when the temperature becomes uncomfortably hot. But research suggests that if you put enough maggots in a confined space and wait, eventually the temperature will rise to the point that they’ll start to die—somewhere between 104F° and 122F°.

5. MAGGOTS RESPOND TO LIGHT AND ODORS.

Maggots aren’t the most sophisticated creatures, but research shows some have the ability to smell particular aromas, as well as react to light. Fruit fly maggots can’t see distinct images, but they have eye-like photoreceptors known as Bolwig organs that help them detect brightness. More recently, researchers discovered they also have light-sensing cells along their body. Both help to protect them from too much light, which can be deadly for young fruit flies.

Meanwhile, other researchers have focused on studying maggots’ sense of smell. According to Matthew Cobb, a biologist at the University of Manchester in the UK, maggots have just 21 odor-receptor neurons, compared to 1300 in flies and millions in more complex animals like rats and people. In spite of this, maggots are still able to detect a surprising number of odors.

6. PEOPLE USED TO BELIEVE THAT MAGGOTS SPONTANEOUSLY APPEARED FROM NOTHING.

Science has come a long way since the 18th century. Then, people commonly accepted the theory of spontaneous generation—a belief that life could develop from non-living things, despite the fact that some two centuries earlier, in 1668, Italian physician Francesco Redi conducted a low-tech but effective experiment that showed otherwise. Redi demonstrated that maggots turned into flies, which laid eggs that turned into more maggots. He observed that maggots only appeared on meat that’s left uncovered, allowing flies to lay eggs that later hatched.

7. THEY CAN HELP SOLVE CRIMES.

We all know from our favorite TV shows that establishing the time of death is a fundamental part of a murder investigation. The time of colonization—as in, the moment at which flies arrive and begin feeding and laying eggs in decomposing flesh—helps forensic entomologists more accurately assess time of death.

It only takes a few minutes for some species of flies to begin arriving and laying eggs. So by noting the various species present and studying the age of the maggot offspring squirming around in a body, it’s possible to determine the minimum amount of time that’s passed since death.

8. MAGGOTS CAN ALSO SAVE LIVES.

Surprisingly, some species are quite effective at helping wounds heal and inhibiting infection. So-called maggot debridement therapy isn’t a new technology; it’s been observed for centuries that soldiers injured in battle often healed faster when their wounds were infested with maggots. Orthopedic surgeon William Baer, who had observed this himself in World War I, presented a groundbreaking study in 1929 showing that children with osteomyelitis (bone infection) and soft tissue wounds could be successfully treated with maggot therapy.

During the subsequent decade, thousands of doctors used maggot therapy. But the rise of antibiotics, coupled with challenges in obtaining medical-grade maggots grown in completely sterile conditions, saw the treatment dwindle. That’s changing, however, with the rise of antibiotic resistance and an increased prevalence of chronic diseases like diabetes that lead to non-healing wounds. Today, maggot therapy is making somewhat of a comeback.

9. MEDICAL MAGGOTS ARE AN FDA-APPROVED TREATMENT.

Maggots used in debridement therapy feed exclusively on rotting flesh. They help clear out the dead, bacteria-infested tissue of a wound so that healthy tissue can thrive and the wound can close. They leave healthy flesh alone. But there’s more to it than that. Maggots help curb inflammation by suppressing a part of the body’s immune system response.

Inhibiting the immune system might sound counterintuitive, but it turns out that maggots secrete a fluid capable of breaking down proteins that can trigger an overactive immune response. That overreaction by the immune system can lead to chronic inflammation, which in turn slows down healing and can increase the likelihood of infection.

In 2004, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the use of medical maggots. They are typically placed in small, permeable packages and applied to the wound so that they can do their thing without crawling away (or into the body).

10. MORE TYPICAL USES FOR MAGGOTS INCLUDE HELP WITH COMPOSTING.

If you’ve ever waited too long to take the trash out in the middle of summer, you may have lifted up the lid and been repulsed at the sight of maggots writhing through last week’s leftovers. But they are actually excellent for creating rich, nutrient-laden compost.

Black soldier flies (rising stars of the maggot world—see below) are particularly speedy eaters. They work their way through organic food and animal waste so quickly that bacteria don’t stand a chance. This cuts down on odors produced by bacteria. So, bonus: your compost won’t smell as bad when these maggots are at work en masse.

11. THERE’S MONEY IN MAGGOTS.

From Colorado to South Africa, the maggot market is heating up—and helping to solve the problem of overfishing. Right now, the protein in most feed for commercial chickens, pork, and fish farms comes from ocean fisheries like sardines and herring, many of which are collapsing. That’s a huge problem, because other marine species depend on these tiny fish as their major food source. So instead of making commercial animal feed from fish meal, some forward-looking entrepreneurs are turning to farming maggots.

On a maggot farm, female black soldier flies lay about 500 eggs apiece [PDF]. This produces an army of hungry maggots that eat their way through mounds of food waste. And boy, do they eat fast. Once these plump maggots reach the pupa stage, they can be harvested—crushed, dried, and turned into animal feed. Besides protecting marine life, this keeps more food waste out of landfills, decreasing methane emissions and water pollution.

12. IN SARDINIA, MAGGOT-INFESTED CHEESE IS A DELICACY.

Ever enjoyed a dusting of Pecorino cheese on your pasta? On the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, a sheep cheese called casu marzu starts out in much the same way as Pecorino (a cheese made from sheep’s milk). But then, three weeks into the curing process, the top crust is cut off, and the ripening aroma beckons to “cheese skipper” flies to come and lay their eggs.

A few weeks later, maggots hatch and begin working their way through the stinky cheese. And that’s where the magic—if you can call it that—happens. The maggots break it down with their digestive enzymes, making a special contribution to the cheese’s texture and flavor. And that’s when it’s ready to eat. The flavor of casu marzu has been described as something like a strong gorgonzola or Stilton. The European Union has outlawed it, but a handful of farms on the island still make it in the traditional way.

13. A SCIENTIST RECENTLY MADE A VIDEO OF HIS BOTFLY INFESTATION TO ILLUSTRATE THE INSECT’S LIFECYCLE.

In the tropics of Central and South America, Dermatobia hominis botflies frequently lay their tiny eggs on mosquitos. When a host mosquito lands on a warm human, body heat triggers the eggs to drop onto the skin. After they hatch, the itty bitty larvae worm their way deep under the skin and grow tiny spines that allow them to hang on tight. The parasites also release a painkilling agent to make their presence less noticeable. Sounds fun, doesn’t it?

It gets worse. Harvard entomologist Piotr Naskrecki got infected with botflies while leading a nature photography workshop in Belize. It wasn’t the first time, either, so he knew what to expect. As Naskrecki describes in his blog, he decided to let two of the larvae develop under his skin. He knew in a few weeks the larvae would grow to the size of a peanut, and pop out of his body to continue their transformation as pupae. You know, no big deal.

His reward was getting to photograph and film the invaders as they emerged from his skin, and document their transformation into flies. If your stomach is still feeling steady, you can watch the video here.

14. SOME MAGGOTS HAVE TAILS.

Rat-tailed maggots—how’s that for a name—are capable of surviving in very dirty water, like that found in stagnant ponds, lakes, and drainage areas. They get their name from their very long tails, which are actually a sort of tube that allows them to breathe under water. They are the larval stage of a drone fly, which is also known as the bee fly because of its resemblance to a honey bee.

The larvae’s tough outer covering may help protect them from bacteria present in the dirty water. But recently, scientists have discovered that there’s something else going on: the surface of their bodies is actually covered in nanopillars, spiny projections that make it difficult for bacteria in the water to congregate on the larvae. The researchers theorize that these may inhibit bacterial infection, which would explain why the maggots thrive in stagnant, dirty water where other species cannot.

15. A PARASITIC MAGGOT IS WREAKING HAVOC ON BIRDS IN THE GALAPAGOS.

Not all maggots feed exclusively on dead flesh. In the Galapagos Islands, the larvae of an invasive parasitic fly called Philornis downsi are threatening local bird populations. At least 16 of 20 species endemic to the Galapagos are in trouble because of the fly, including the famed Darwin’s mangrove finch. The flies can lay a couple hundred eggs in a bird nest. When the maggots hatch, they crawl up into baby birds’ orifices and suck their blood. Eventually the chicks die, and the maggots then feed on their corpses.

A team of scientists is working on eradicating P. downsi in the Galapagos by breeding masses of sterile male flies that can be released on the islands. As the sterile males mate with females, the population of flies should begin to drop.

The phrase “mind-body connection” is so overused it sounds like a cliché, yet there’s a significant body of research that shows mental and physical health are in fact deeply intertwined. Despite that, healthcare systems are still slow to integrate mental and physical healthcare in order to provide better patient care. To address this, Swiss psychologists set out to study instances in which specific mental health disorders are followed or accompanied by physical disorders in adolescents. The goal was to determine a causal relationship between them, and if possible, to predict certain physical illnesses by the presence of a mental disorder.

What they found were small—but definite—associations between certain mental and physical disorders. In their paper, published in PLOS One, the authors write, “The most substantial associations with physical diseases preceding mental disorders included those between heart diseases and anxiety disorders, epilepsy and eating disorders, and heart diseases and any mental disorder.”

“To have proof of causality, you have to experimentally manipulate people being physically or mentally sick, which isn’t ethical,” Gunther Meinlschmidt, co-lead author of the study and a professor of psychology at University of Basel, Switzerland tells mental_floss. Since that wasn’t possible, he and the research team, led by Marion Tegethoff, analyzed data from a large co-morbidity survey of 6483 U.S. teenagers, aged 13 to 18.

Using statistical models, they first looked at whether mental disorders predicted physical disease. Indeed, arthritis and digestive disorders were more common after depression in adolescents, while skin disorders seem to follow anxiety disorders. Next, they reversed the variables, to see if physical disease was a better predictor of mental disorders. But those results were statistically very small, suggesting that the physical disorders either follow the mental disorders, or arise at the same time.

More research with larger sample sizes still needs to be done, including recruiting subjects who have both a physical and mental condition. Meinlschmidt plans to “try to understand if someone was treated, say, for epilepsy—does it effect [their] eating disorder?” This will help the team isolate strict causality, he says. However, “With this work, we go beyond mere associations toward these temporal or chronological associations. One indicator increases the confidence that something causal might be going on.”

This research is a necessary first step that “stresses the importance of integrative health care to have close collaboration with a system for treating people with mental disorders and physical illness,” Meinlschmidt says. Up to now, these “two separate worlds are not really working closely together.” His ultimate goal is “to dig deeper into potential mechanisms for developing new interventions.” He hopes his research will bring more integration to two systems and help doctors create more integrated ways of treating a person’s health.

Though they are small, almost everything you do with your legs requires your knees. Their hinging action allows your legs to bend and straighten, which you need for standing, walking, crouching, jumping, and turning. You might know how often you use them, but here are seven fascinating facts about your knees that might surprise you.

1. Babies are born without kneecaps.

Babies’ kneecaps are made up of soft cartilage that hasn’t yet ossified into bones, so their “true” kneecaps don’t show up on x-rays until somewhere between two and six years of age.

2. The knee connects two bones.

Like the old song goes, the knee bone is actually connected to the thighbone, so to speak. More accurately, the knee is the joint where the femur bone of your thigh and the tibia bone of your shin meet, allowing flexion. The knee joint allows your leg to kick and jump, run and leap.

3. You can walk without a kneecap.

Your kneecap, known as the patella, is a small bone that protects your knee joint. If you are so unlucky as to shatter or break your kneecap badly enough, it will most likely have to be surgically removed. In those cases, though, surgeons do not create or install kneecap prostheses—because you can walk without a kneecap. Kneeling, however, may be a challenge without one, requiring protective gear.

4. For such a small part of the body, it’s prone to many problems.

For such a tiny part of the body, the knee is prone to a large variety of aches, pains, and injuries. Even small repetitive strains can cause serious ligament and tendon injuries, such as tearing of the meniscus or chronic inflammation. The autoimmune condition rheumatoid arthritis, and a collagen disorder known as Ehlers-Danlos, both tend to cause tremendous pain in the knee joint.

5. Knees are a favorite of terrorists and crime groups.

Kneecapping is a nasty torture practice used by terrorists and organized crime groups to destroy the kneecaps, either by shooting a knee, or shattering them with a blunt object. The result is not life-threatening, but it’s extremely painful and permanently disabling.

6. Knees are associated with surrender.

The phrase “brought to one’s knees” suggests a position of submission or desperation; to be “cut off at the knees” usually connotes humiliation or surrender. In ancient Greece, the phrase “on the knees of the gods” (theón en gounasi) meant something was beyond human control or knowledge.

7. Shel Silverstein wrote a poem about knees.

The narrator of the kids’ poem “Stop, Thief!” by famous poet Shel Silverstein imagines someone stealing their knees, and asks a policeman for assistance since “my feet and legs just won’t connect.” Guess they hadn’t had their kneecaps removed!

Water has long been the limiting factor for humans in space. But now, NASA is developing a rover that can make water on the Moon. Such a capability will be necessary for any serious attempt at the permanent settlement of Mars, or any other long-term space voyage. If successful, it will inaugurate a new, critical area in space exploration, where resources from other worlds can be harnessed and used.

Presently, everything we use in space is made on Earth. Consider the big, visible parts of human exploration of the solar system, rockets like the Space Launch System (SLS), under construction and set for its maiden voyage in 2018. There’s also the Orion capsule, tested previously and set to fly atop SLS (without astronauts). Then there’s work on habitats: Scientists are currently working on manufacturing artificial habitats for the International Space Station, but soon will be working on one for the Martian surface. A huge part of this kind of pioneering the solar system, however, concerns not just what we bring to other worlds, but what we leave behind. The Lunar Resource Prospector is the first big step in striking that balance.

IN-SITU RESOURCE UTILIZATION

The real problem of colonization is mass. It’s very expensive to send something to space, and the heavier it is, the more it costs. It takes hundreds of kilograms on the launch pad to put a single kilogram on the surface of Mars, and Martian settlers will need many, many metric tons of commodities to survive. Practically speaking, they can’t take everything they will need from Earth. To colonize the solar system, they will have to learn how to use the resources of the solar system.

The good news is that everything in the solar system is a potential resource for settlers. In-situ resource utilization, or ISRU, is the concept of mining resources on other worlds and turning them into useful commodities, as well as recycling waste created on other worlds. (Waste conversion solves two problems: It creates new useful things and eliminates garbage. The ISS dumps its garbage, allowing it to burn up in the atmosphere. But surface dwellers on Mars won’t have such a convenient disposal service.)

Energy is an important part of ISRU, and from a settlement perspective, energy is very cheap. The Sun is a giant fusion reactor in the sky, after all, and to harness it, all pioneers need are a few solar panels that they bring from home. Those panels will provide energy for a very long time—energy that can be used for ISRU.

Mars is the most likely current spot for future human settlement, so consider what resources might be available there: Settlers could extract oxygen from Mars’s soil, known as regolith. Water could be extracted from volatiles in the soil, essentially baking them off. There is also carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere. Combine carbon with electrolyzed water and settlers can make methane, which could be used as fuel.

Settlers won’t need to take building material to Mars; they could easily glue soil together and make bricks. Metals could also be extracted from Martian regolith to build things. Because Mars is rich with carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, settlers could even make plastic. What would they build first? Probably greenhouses, for starters. Growing crops for food will also be useful for water purification and oxygen generation.

For ISRU to be most effective, planning will begin long before humans leave Earth. NASA’s provisional plans see ISRU projects beginning 480 days before astronauts launch. Machines already on Mars will be put to work before settlers even arrive, extracting resources and storing them cryogenically. Water will need to be waiting for humans to drink. Oxygen and inert gasses would need to be ready for instant use in a habitat. An ascent vehicle would be fueled with methane propellant and ready from day one in the event of an emergency.

Even the propellant to get to Mars in the first place could be extracted off-world. The moon’s equatorial region yields an abundance of oxygen, and its poles an abundance of water. Engineers could harness that to make rocket propellant, which would be much cheaper to bring from the Moon than launching it from Earth.

ISRU is an obvious approach to exploration and settlement, but so far, it’s been theoretical: No one has ever tried this on a planetary scale. When we go to Mars, it won’t be for a casual visit, it will be for pioneering. The long-term goal is independence from Earth.

LUNAR RESOURCE PROSPECTOR

One of the first serious ISRU proposals is the Lunar Resource Prospector. The project is in early development and will be NASA’s first soft landing on the Moon since the 1970s. The spacecraft is a small rover, and as its name suggests, it will prospect the lunar surface, studying its composition with an emphasis on finding water.

Scientists will choose its landing site carefully. Potential sites must be in sunlight, as the spacecraft is solar powered, and it must have a direct line of sight for communications with the Earth. (It does not presently use orbital assets as relays.) The terrain must be traversable, and data collected by such spacecraft as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will have to suggest where there is hydrogen present in the subsurface, and where subsurface temperatures support the presence of water. Moreover, the landing site must be close to at least one of the moon’s permanently shadowed regions. (There are areas on the moon that have not seen sunlight in billions of years; water is known to exist in such places.) Moreover, the orbit of the Moon and shifting launch windows on Earth mean that different landing sites must be chosen for different times of the year, and that if a launch slips, a backup landing site is ready to go. Sometimes the prospector will target the north pole of the Moon, and sometimes the south pole.

The lander itself is a pallet design—a flatbed from which the rover would roll once it has landed. It would immediately orient its solar panels toward the sun. Because of the rover’s relatively small size, the sun provides more than enough energy for its operation, especially when compared with Curiosity on Mars, which is big enough that it needs to be powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. “The rover that we’re going to go on is a little bit smaller than a golf cart,” James Smith, lead system engineer of the primary payload for the rover, told mental_floss earlier this year. “It’s not a MSL [Mars Science Laboratory] sized-rover, but it’s much bigger than Pathfinder.”

Once the science mission gets underway, a neutron spectrometer on the rover will look for signatures of hydrogen in the lunar subsurface. (Think of a metal detector, only for hydrogen.) This might originate from water, but might also be found in hydrated minerals, or be solar-implanted hydrogen. A drilling instrument will bring regolith material to the surface for quick inspection by a near infrared spectrometer. “A cool thing about this,” Jacqueline Quinn, an environmental engineer at Kennedy Space Center, told mental_floss, “is that we’re going to get a meter sample, and that’s never been done robotically.”

The instrument can also grab material and deliver it to an onboard oven. The oven is a sealed system, and through heating can drive off the water. A quantifying spectrometer system can determine the precise amount of water present in the lunar dirt. That water is also imaged and those images are sent back to Earth. For the first time, humans will see video of water extracted on another world.

The rover itself is nimble and engineered to traverse up to a 15-degree slope and not tilt over. The moon’s light gravity is an additional engineering challenge. “We have to have equal and opposite forces in one-sixth G,” says Quinn. “We have to have enough mass to counter our drilling—otherwise we’ll do beautiful doughnuts in the surface. We don’t want to do that.”

The Lunar Resource Prospector is designed to be launch-vehicle independent. SLS would be an optimal rocket for the mission, and the timing is just right, but the spacecraft’s “mass to translunar injection” is such that it can fly on anything from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and up. If all goes well, the mission will launch in the 2020s, and we’ll finally get a chance to see what in-situ resource utilization looks like in practice.

 
Thank goodness 2016 is almost over. It’s hard to come across one person who enjoyed much of what the year threw at us—and that’s true of its weather, too. Whether you were baked by extreme heat or drenched by never-ending rains, 2016 was an active, record-breaking year that left few parts of the U.S. untouched by tumult. Here’s a quick look back at how the weather treated us in 2016.

1. 2016 WAS LIKELY THE WARMEST YEAR EVER RECORDED.

The weather is more than what you see in your backyard. We only ever personally experience a small fraction of the weather events that unfold every day around the world, but we’re all impacted by large-scale trends like the record-setting warmth of 2016.

2016 will very likely go down as the warmest year ever recorded, the third such year in a row, topping 2015 as the previous holder of this dubious distinction. NOAA’s year-to-date temperature data for the world through the end of November has 2016 coming in 0.94°C warmer than normal, which almost guarantees that 2016 will come in slightly warmer than 2015’s astounding year-end anomaly of 0.89°C.

Some of this year’s record warmth is attributable to El Niño, the anomalous warming of the ocean water near the equator in the eastern Pacific Ocean, but that doesn’t explain all of it. This year continued an undeniable trend that shows that our atmosphere is warming at a fairly steady pace; in fact, including this year, six of the ten warmest years recorded since 1880 have occurred since 2010. If the warming trend continues in the years ahead, it will likely result in adverse situations like more intense and prolonged droughts in some areas, more frequent flooding due to rising sea levels and heavier rainfall in others, and longer, deadlier heat waves.

2. WE HAVEN’T SEEN MANY RECORD LOWS AS A RESULT.

 
The recent cold snap that froze much of the U.S. in the middle of December felt exceptionally cold—with low temperatures dipping well below zero across many states—but it’s easy to forget that it used to get much colder than that on a pretty regular basis. As a result, this bone-chilling cold didn’t set as many record lows as one would think. That’s not an uncommon situation these days.

Climate Central recently took a look at the ratio of daily record lows to daily record highs and found that the latter significantly outnumbers the former. For every record low we’ve seen in the United States in 2016, there have been at least six record highs. Climate Central notes that the number of record highs and lows should equal out over time in a “stable climate,” but we’re in anything but a stable climate these days. 

3. THE U.S. SUFFERED FROM HISTORIC FLOODS.

On the precipitation side of things, extreme flooding events were by far the largest cause of weather disasters this year in the United States, and there were two particularly devastating flooding events in 2016. The first unfolded across Louisiana in August, the result of a storm system that stalled out over the eastern part of the state and dumped up to 30 inches of rain over a short period of time. The extreme rain led to flooding that caused more than $8.7 billion in damages, killed more than a dozen people, and forced tens of thousands of people out of their homes.

The other flooding disaster was caused by Hurricane Matthew, a powerful storm that grazed the Florida and Georgia coasts before coming ashore in the Carolinas at the beginning of October. The hurricane merged with a frontal system over North Carolina and focused one to two feet of intense rainfall on the eastern part of the state. Much as we saw in Louisiana, the floods claimed thousands of homes and resulted in multiple fatalities.

4. WHERE IT DIDN’T RAIN, IT REALLY DIDN’T RAIN.

 
The split between feast and famine was stark this year. While the West Coast’s drought slowly got a bit better, much of the eastern parts of the United States slipped into a disruptive, and at times, destructive drought. The drought is particularly bad in interior parts of the southeast, where states like Georgia and Alabama have slipped into their worst drought in a decade. The dry earth has led to devastating wildfires that have claimed thousands of homes and killed numerous people. The extreme dryness will likely last through a significant portion of 2017, and affected areas may not see any noticeable relief until next summer’s hurricane season.

5. TORNADO ACTIVITY AND TORNADO DEATHS ARE NEAR RECORD LOWS.

Still, not all of the wacky weather we’ve seen in 2016 was bad. The Storm Prediction Center’s data through the end of December shows that 2016 is very close to the fewest number of tornadoes recorded in one year since 1950. The United States typically sees around a thousand confirmed tornadoes every year, but that activity has been relatively minimal for the past couple of years. Adjusted for inflation—removing false reports and duplicate reports for the same tornado—2016 has seen 897 reported tornadoes through December 19, 2016. That’s significantly lower than the previous low-point of 944.

Tornadoes can grow into violent monsters that destroy entire towns, but these beastly formations are surprisingly fragile. Tornado formation requires precise amounts of wind shear, instability, and moisture—too much or too little of one ingredient will prevent a storm from producing tornadoes. This natural limitation is why only a tiny fraction of thunderstorms ever spawn tornadoes.

The near-record lack of tornadoes so far this year has had the added benefit of resulting in one of the lowest tornado death tolls on record. On average, about 98 people die every year as a direct result of injuries sustained in tornadoes [PDF]. Only 17 people have died as a result of tornadoes so far in 2016, the second-lowest number on record since 1940. Only 1986 saw a lower tornado death toll, when just 15 people were killed.

A few bad days of smog due to a temperature inversion might do you no harm, but long-term exposure to air pollution has now been linked to disease. According to a longitudinal study out of Europe, prolonged exposure to dirty air can lead to an increased risk of hypertension, a condition of chronic high blood pressure that damages your vessels, your heart, and can lead to atherosclerosis (inflammation of the arteries), heart attacks, and strokes.

“This is important because hypertension is the most important risk factor for chronic disease and premature mortality,” lead author Barbara Hoffman, a professor of environmental epidemiology at the Centre for Health and Society at Heinrich-Heine University of Dusseldorf, Germany, tells mental_floss.

Prior research had ascertained that “acute changes in air pollution exposure from day to day could raise your blood pressure” in a transient way—that is to say, your blood pressure would rise, but then return to normal. But it was not known if such long-term exposure could lead to the disease of hypertension. The study, published in European Heart Journal, confirms the link between long-term air pollution and increased risk of hypertension. The risk is comparable to the effect of being overweight, Hoffman says.

Of the 41,072 people who participated in the longitudinal study, none had hypertension when they began, but during the follow-up period—at either five or nine years—15 percent had developed hypertension or were taking blood pressure medications. And for people living in the most polluted areas, for every 5 micrograms per cubic meter of pollutants, the risk of hypertension increased by 22 percent over those living in less polluted areas.

Pollution varies from area to area, of course, depending on where you live, which is why the study looked at five different European countries: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Spain. Using land regression statistical models, scientists collected data from 40 sites three times per year for two weeks each period. “Major constituents of pollution in a city include traffic, industrial activity, parts blown in from long-range transport, a mixture of all kinds of things close to you, such as heating of houses, agriculture, and Earth-crust material,” Hoffman says. Agriculture, for example, accounts for a large amount of “precursor gases” that coagulate in the air and form small particles. Hoffman found that overall, southern Europe had higher levels of pollution than the Scandinavian countries.

Hoffman says pollution is thought to cause hypertension by one (or more) of three ways. First, when you inhale pollution particles, they can lead to “pulmonary inflammation, which gives you systemic inflammation,” says Hoffman. “This damages blood vessels and leads to endothelial dysfunction. Arterial stiffness increases, which affects your blood pressure.”

Second, the particles you inhale find their way onto receptors in your lungs that influence your nervous system, particularly the sympathetic nervous system. “This leads to an increase in heart rate, contraction of blood vessels, and a rise in blood pressure. If this happens chronically, you can develop hypertension,” she explains.

Finally, as the pollutant particles directly enter your bloodstream, your blood vessels are damaged “by inflammation, oxidative stress, and can lead to impaired function of the vessel.”

In Europe, the limit value—or how much pollutants are allowed in the air—is 25 micrograms per meter. In the U.S., that number is only 12. Hoffman says, “Our current limit value doesn’t protect the European population.” Hence, the need for this study. “We wanted to inform the European Government, the E.U., about healthy facts at current levels of air pollution. The individual can hardly control chronic air pollution. That’s something society has to take care of.”

 René Descartes once described the pineal gland as “the principal seat of the soul.” Though medical knowledge has vastly progressed since then, here are a few things you might not have known about this critical organ.

1. IT’S BEEN RECOGNIZED AS IMPORTANT SINCE THE ANCIENT GREEKS.

Though the pineal gland wouldn’t be fully understood until the 20th century, descriptions of its anatomical location are included in the writings of Galen (ca. 130-ca. 210 CE), a Greek doctor and philosopher.

2. ITS SHAPE INFLUENCED ITS NAME.

This itty-bitty little gland, located very deep in the center of the brain, gets its name from its pinecone-like shape, most recently from the French (pinéal, or “like a pinecone”), itself from the Latin for pinecone (pinea). However, at about one-third of an inch long in adults, it’s smaller than your average pinecone.

3. THE PINEAL GLAND IS PART OF YOUR ENDOCRINE SYSTEM.

Though located in your brain, the pineal gland is actually a crucial part of your endocrine system, which regulates major bodily processes such as growth, metabolism, and sexual development through the release and control of hormones.

4. IT CONNECTS THE ENDOCRINE AND NERVOUS SYSTEMS.

The gland translates nerve signals from the sympathetic nervous system into hormone signals.

5. THE PINEAL GLAND WAS LONG CONSIDERED MYSTERIOUS.

Because the pineal gland was the last of the endocrine structures to be discovered, scientists considered it a mysterious organ. Today, we know that unlike much of the rest of the brain, the pineal gland is not isolated from the body by the blood-brain barrier system.

6. DESCARTES WAS WRONG ABOUT ITS RELATIONSHIP TO THE MIND, THE SOUL …

The 16th-century French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes was fascinated with the pineal gland, considering it “the place in which all our thoughts are formed.” Scientists now credit that function to the neocortex.

7. …AND TINY ANIMAL SPIRITS IN THE BRAIN.

Descartes thought that within the pineal gland, tiny animal spirits were like “a very fine wind, or rather a very lively and pure flame,” feeding life into the many small arteries that surround the gland. This was likely due to his abysmal understanding of anatomy and physiology.

8. IT’S BEEN CALLED THE “THIRD EYE.”

The pineal gland was commonly dubbed the “third eye” for many reasons, including its location deep in the center of the brain and its connection to light. Mystic and esoteric spiritual traditions suggest it serves as a metaphysical connection between the physical and spiritual worlds.

9. IN REALITY, IT PRODUCES A SINGLE—BUT KEY—HORMONE.

As scientists have learned more about the functions of the pineal gland, they’ve learned it synthesizes the hormone melatonin from the neurotransmitter serotonin. Melatonin production determines your sleep-wake cycles and is purely determined by the detection of light and dark. The retina sends these signals to a brain region known as the hypothalamus, which passes them on to the pineal gland. The more light your brain detects, the less melatonin it produces, and vice versa. Melatonin levels are highest at night to help us sleep.

10. MELATONIN IS ALSO CRITICALLY INVOLVED IN REPRODUCTION.

Melatonin inhibits the release of pituitary reproductive hormones, known as gonadotropins, from the pituitary gland, affecting male and female reproductive organs. In this way, melatonin—and therefore the pineal gland—regulates sexual development.

Have you ever stared at your weather app in frustration because it’s showing current weather for somewhere dozens of miles from where you live? You’re not alone. Most of us live pretty far from official weather observing stations, which are usually located at airports or National Weather Service offices scattered around the country. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to become an amateur scientist using the smartphone in your pocket or dedicating a tiny part of your yard to science.

1. REPORT WHAT’S HAPPENING TO METEOROLOGISTS.

 
Weather radar is arguably the best piece of technology we have to predict bad storms, but even this advanced life-saving equipment has its limitations. The greatest restraint is that radar can’t see what precipitation reaches the ground. That’s because a radar dish sends out a beam of energy on a slight angle, and combined with the curvature of the earth, the beam climbs higher off the ground the farther away from the dish it travels.

Since the radar can only see what’s happening a few thousand feet above our heads, mPing is an app that lets you help meteorologists “see” what kind of weather is actually reaching the ground. This free app, available for Apple and Android, lets you use your phone’s location feature to report current conditions to meteorologists in real time. If it starts snowing, filing a report with your mPing app will tell meteorologists when snow showing up on the radar is actually reaching the streets. Alerting them if snow changes to freezing rain will help others by allowing scientists to adjust warnings and forecasts accordingly. You can even report tornadoes, hail, and wind damage.

One little app can let you help advance the science of meteorology, and your reports many even help save lives during a severe weather event. 

2. BECOME PART OF A NETWORK OF CITIZEN-RUN WEATHER STATIONS.

 
Having official weather reporting stations spaced out by dozens of miles across the country is fine for tracking temperature trends or overall wind patterns, but it’s not very useful when you want to keep track of heavy rain or heavy snow. Precipitation is extremely localized—we’ve all seen one of those thunderstorms where it’s raining down the street but bone dry where you’re standing. It helps to have lots of high-quality measuring stations to track storms like that.

That’s where CoCoRaHS comes in. Short for Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network, CoCoRaHS is a network of thousands of citizen-run weather observing stations across the United States, Canada, and the Bahamas. Participants in the CoCoRaHS network use official rain gauges and snow rulers to measure precipitation right in their backyard. These gauges are immensely helpful for meteorologists trying to figure out how much snow fell in a certain town or how much rain has fallen over certain areas—a crucial factor in determining how prone an area is to flash flooding in future storms.

Participating in CoCoRaHS isn’t free—you have to purchase an official rain gauge, which costs about $30—but it’s worth it if you’re dedicated to keeping track of the weather for yourself and your neighbors.

3. SET UP A PERSONAL WEATHER STATION.

If you’re really interested in the weather, you can go one step further and purchase your own personal weather station to set up on your property. Most decent personal weather stations go for about $100 and can measure temperature, dew point, wind speed and direction, and automatically measure rainfall. Some personal weather stations allow you to upload the data to the internet in real-time, which is immensely helpful for networks run by organizations like Wunderground and Weatherbug.

The only catch is that you have to have a yard large enough to properly site a weather station. If the station is too close to a building, trees, or fencing, the obstructions will interfere with your measurements and the data won’t be accurate.

4. VOLUNTEER WITH SKYWARN.

If you’ve ever heard reports of severe weather on the news talking about a “trained spotter,” they’re talking about one of the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who have participated in official storm spotter training. SKYWARN is the official weather spotter training program run by the National Weather Service (NWS). The program is a short, free course run by local NWS offices several times every year. It teaches you the basics of spotting severe and hazardous weather, and properly reporting that weather back to the NWS.

SKYWARN spotters are a critical part of the early warning system in the United States. Accurate reports of tornadoes, damaging winds, hail, and flooding sent to the NWS by trained storm spotters have helped meteorologists issue severe weather warnings with enough time to save lives. The program is worth it even if you don’t plan to go out chasing storms on the Plains—severe weather can happen anywhere, and knowing the difference between a harmless cloud and a lethal tornado could save someone’s life.

If you want to participate in SKYWARN training, keep an eye out for announcements from your local NWS office for training days. You can also participate in free online SKYWARN training through the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which runs a treasure trove of online learning modules for everyone from weather enthusiasts to meteorologists brushing up on advanced topics.