What is the strangest thing you have learned this week? Well, anything, we promise that you will have an even stranger answer if you listen Popscihit from podcast.
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Fact: squirrels could hold the secret of long distance space flight
Certain species of terrestrial squirrels hibernate underground Without food or water For up to eight months of the year. It is a super-extreme survival strategy, activated by a complicated cascade of physiological processes, some of which we understand and many of whom are trying to understand. Helping them, the funding and the interest of heavy strikers in the world of research such as NASA, the European space agency and private aerospace companies, because, in the 1960s, the eyes on the stars wondered if human hibernation could allow us to travel further and more safely in space.
Hibernation is not only a long nap. It is closer to death than sleeping. While in the torpor of hibernation, land squirrels persist up to a 95% reduction in their metabolic rate. Their heart and breathing rate fall to a few beats and breaths per minute. Their brain waves become flat. Their body temperatures fall near certain species (or even below freezing for Arctic Earth Squirrels).
However, in the midst of all this, squirrels remain quite healthy: maintaining muscle mass, reverse the diabetes of pre-hibernation, undergoing a regeneration of the organs, blocking aging and undergoing physiological changes which can remove things such as the damage caused by radiation. For these reasons and more, scientists have studied if we can exploit the power of squirrel hibernation for ourselves. This could propel us at the external range of the galaxy. Even if this is not the case, it is ready to fuel large biomedical advances linked to the earth. Listen to learn more about the squirrel-sicles, the challenges of travel in long distance space and the ultimate in restorative rest. Or read everything about it in this Popular science article.
Fact: Tuberculosis has helped shape the world as we know it
By John Green
Tuberculosis has been curable since the 1950s, However, there remains the deadliest infectious disease in the worldKilling 1.5 million people each year. This is largely due to our inability to obtain treatment for those who need it. I am talking about how tuberculosis has shaped the world – and how humanity has allowed it to prosper thanks to injustice and inequalities –In my new book “Everything is tuberculosis: the history and persistence of our deadliest infection.” In the episode of this week of the strangest thing, I share the story of a man who was consumed to find a remedy for consumption.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, tuberculosis prospered in the overcrowded living conditions and work of industrialized cities, but people thought it was a hereditary disease, even romanticing it as a mark of beauty and artistic sensitivity. James Watt, famous for his contributions to the steam machine, years dedicated to trying to heal tuberculosis after his children fell ill with the disease. Her Device failureWho treated tuberculosis by pushing carbon dioxide in the lungs to reduce the amount of air there, was closer to viable than you think: the bacteria that causes tuberculosis is highly aerobic, which means that it needs a lot of oxygen to survive. Sometimes doctors in fact collapse a lung to help patients recover of TB. It was much more common at the beginning of the 20th century, but it is a Technique always used For some cases of tuberculosis resistant to treatment today.
Today, although it is healed, tuberculosis still kills millions. And the recent financing cuts threaten to worsen the spread of drug resistant tuberculosis, increasing the spectrum of a world where the disease regained its mortality at the beginning of the 20th century. If you want to know more, you can find “everything is tuberculosis: the story and the persistence of our deadliest infection” Wherever books are sold.
Made: if you are really, really unlucky and then really, really lucky, your brain can turn into glass
When Mount Vesuve broke out in 79 EC, it buried thousands of people in ashes, preserving strange casts from their last moments. But an unfortunate resident may have been kept in an even more extreme way –By turning your glass brain. Researchers recently confirmed that the vitreous black fragments found in a skull of the eruption are vitrified brain tissue, marking the only known case of fabric of an animal undergoing this process. It took a perfect extreme heat storm and rapid cooling for this to happen, and it is unlikely that this has happened before – or to reproduce. Connect yourself in the episode of this week to find out how everything happened!
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