Squirrels could be the key to getting us into deep space

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Squirrels could hold the secret to long-distance spaceflight 

By Lauren Leffer 

Certain species of ground squirrels hibernate underground without any food or water for up to eight months of the year. It’s a super-extreme survival strategy, enabled by a complicated cascade of physiological processes, some of which we understand and many of which scientists are still trying to figure out. Helping them along is funding and interest from heavy hitters in the research world like NASA, the European Space agency, and private aerospace companies, because–since the 1960’s–those with their eyes on the stars have wondered if human hibernation could enable us to travel farther and more safely in space.

Hibernation isn’t just a long nap. It’s closer to death than sleep. While in hibernation torpor, ground squirrels’ endure up to a 95 percent reduction in their metabolic rate. Their heart and respiration rates drop to a few beats and breaths per minute. Their brain waves go flat. Their body temperatures plummet to near freezing for some species (or even below freezing for Arctic ground squirrels). 

Yet amid all of this, the squirrels stay pretty healthy: maintaining muscle mass, reversing pre-hibernation diabetes, experiencing organ regeneration, stalling aging, and undergoing physiological shifts that can ward off things like radiation damage. For these reasons and more, scientists have been studying if we can harness the power of squirrel hibernation for ourselves. It could help propel us to outer reaches of the galaxy. Even if it doesn’t, it’s poised to fuel some big Earth-bound biomedical advances. Listen to learn more about squirrel-sicles, the challenges of long-distance space travel, and the ultimate in restorative rest. Or read all about it in this Popular Science feature article. 

FACT: Tuberculosis helped shape the world as we know it 

By John Green

Tuberculosis has been curable since the 1950s, yet it remains the deadliest infectious disease in the world, killing 1.5 million people each year. That’s largely due to our failure to get treatment to those who need it. I talk all about how tuberculosis shaped the world—and how humanity has allowed it to thrive thanks to injustice and inequity—in my new book “Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of our Deadliest Infection.” On this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing, I share the story of a man who became consumed with finding a cure for consumption. 

In the 18th and 19th centuries, TB thrived in the crowded living and working conditions of industrializing cities, yet people believed it was an inherited disease, even romanticizing it as a mark of beauty and artistic sensitivity. James Watt, famed for his contributions to the steam engine, dedicated years to trying to cure TB after his children became ill with the disease. His failed contraption, which treated TB by pushing carbon dioxide into the lungs to reduce the amount of air there, was closer to viable than you might think: the bacteria that causes TB is highly aerobic, meaning it needs lots of oxygen to survive. Sometimes doctors actually collapse one lung to help patients recover from TB. That was much more common in the early 20th century, but it’s a technique still employed for some treatment-resistant cases of TB today.

Today, despite being curable, TB still kills millions. And recent funding cuts threaten to worsen the spread of drug-resistant TB, raising the specter of a world where the disease regains its early 20th-century deadliness. If you want to learn more, you can find “Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of our Deadliest Infection” anywhere books are sold. 

FACT: If you’re really, really unlucky and then really, really lucky, your brain can turn into glass 

By Rachel Feltman

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, it buried thousands of people in ash, preserving eerie casts of their final moments. But one unfortunate resident may have been preserved in an even more extreme way—by having his brain turn to glass. Researchers recently confirmed that glassy black fragments found in a skull from the eruption are vitrified brain tissue, marking the only known case of an animal’s tissue undergoing this process. It took a perfect storm of extreme heat and rapid cooling to make this happen, and it’s unlikely to have ever happened before—or to ever happen again. Tune into this week’s episode to learn how it all went down! 

The post Squirrels could be the key to getting us into deep space appeared first on Popular Science.