Salad for the Red Planet
Good news for aspiring Mars explorers: You’ll be able to grow and munch fresh lettuce during your voyage through space. At the moment, most of the food that astronauts eat on the International Space Station (ISS) is prepared on Earth and sent up in cargo rockets. But during a mission to Mars such resupply flights won’t be possible, and in the three years it will take to make a round trip, Earth-grown produce stored on board will lose some of its nutrients and taste. Previous efforts to grow vegetables in space have been stymied by zero gravity; water sticks to the leaves, for example, rather than dropping down to the roots. But a new analysis of lettuce grown in Veggie, a plant chamber used on the ISS between 2014 and 2016, has found it is as healthful as the stuff grown on terra firma. “This was really good,” co-author Gioia Massa, a NASA plant scientist, tells The New York Times. “There wasn’t anything completely surprising or crazy or weird.” Veggie uses porous ceramic clay to trap water and air around the plant’s roots. One problem it hasn’t solved is how to wash the produce: When ISS astronauts ate their harvest, they cleaned the leaves with sanitizing wipes.
age to the brain, reports The Guardian (U.K.). Researchers examined brain scans of nearly 1,000 people, ages 18 to 88, and found that the rate of damage to neural pathways varied depending on the brain’s main source of energy. Glucose, the sugar broken down from carbohydrates, accelerated the damage; ketones, produced by the liver during low-carb diets, slowed it down. The researchers also found that people can start experiencing damage in their neural pathways as early as their late 40s. “The bad news is that we see the first signs of brain aging much earlier than was previously thought,” says lead author Lilianne Mujica-Parodi, from Stony Brook University in New York. “The good news is that we may be able to prevent or reverse these effects with diet.” A highketone diet is low in carbohydrates and high in fats and proteins; further research is needed to determine whether the possible neurological benefits of such a diet outweigh its impact on heart health.
tory,” says lead author Niels de Winter, from Vrije Universiteit in Brussels. “We can basically look at a day 70 million years ago. It’s pretty amazing.” From their analysis, de Winter and his team concluded that days lasted about 23 hours and 30 minutes in the Cretaceous period. Earth turned faster then than it does today, clocking up to 372 rotations a year rather than 365; over time, friction from ocean tides—which are driven by the gravity of the moon—has steadily slowed the planet’s rotation.