What happens to you in space?

// March 30th, 2010 // 2 Comments » // How Things Work, Just for Fun, Science in the Movies

I have a confession to make. I want to be an astronaut. When I was a kid, I thought it would be SO COOL to be one of the most special people in your field that you’re chosen to represent the world/country and go to the final frontier. “Starman” by Bowie is still one of my favourite songs.

I grew up knowing that if you went to space without a spacesuit, you would explode. Or if not explode, at the very least blood would come exuding from pores in your skin and your eyes would pop and other gruesome things.

I mean, everyone knows you’d explode if you went to space! Except that you don’t.

Nope, you don’t explode, blood doesn’t come through your pores, I don’t even think your eyes would pop.

Don’t get me wrong, space is not a friendly place. If you have a lungful of air, then you might be in trouble. Air will try to move REALLY fast from the high pressure in your lungs to the low pressure in space, causing explosive decompression. If you ever find yourself in space without a suit, you should exhale all the air out of your lungs.

If you do that, your skin does a really good job of keeping the rest of you together. It will keep you in one piece, until you die of lack of oxygen. You might also freeze, or get a really bad sunburn if you get a shot of straight sun. You may also get the bends, caused by nitrogen dissolved in your blood to come out as bubbles – the same thing happens when rising from deep sea diving.

I still remember that scene in Event Horizon when that guy goes into the airlock without a spacesuit and the air starts dropping, and he has to breathe all the air out of his lungs and cover his eyes but blood starts coming out anyway and he gets thrown into space and then rescued! Such a good movie. Seriously. I’ve seen it about twenty times.

Shout out to the physicisits in da house

// November 29th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // How Things Work, Just for Fun

Not for the first time I am posting a rap video. Rap is apparently the best genre of musical art for scientific communication, perhaps because it can handle an excess of long words.

This one is about the Large Hadron Collider, and it is catchy-as! Sadly I am not physics-minded, so I’m still a bit befuzzled about the whole thing.

Nothing like a good rap to wake you up in the morning. It’s definitely better than a kick in the head.

Smelling the Moon

// October 15th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Sex and Reproduction, The Realm of Bizzare

This has always stuck in my mind from a book I read – I think it was The Mists of Avalon (awesome book btw). In it, a pregnant woman swears she can smell moonbeams when she’s pregnant, and they make her feel sick. So today I’m wondering, does pregnancy improve your nose? Can you smell the moon?

Every time I write a post like this I feel like I have to remind everyone that I’m not pregnant. So for the record – no bun in this oven. Just a scholarly curiousity.

Plenty of pregnancy sites out there will tell you that women become more sensitive to smells when they’re pregnant. They say this also occurs during ovulation, and may be due to changes in hormone levels. It may be a factor in morning sickness, as an increased perception of bad smells might make them want to throw up.

Measures of Human Olfactory Perception During Pregnancy by E. Leslie Cameron (full text available for free here) took 60 pregnant women (20 in each trimester), 20 non-pregnant women, and 20 post-partem women and made them scratch and sniff. There were 40 different scratch and sniff cards, with smells including lemon, menthol, grass and turpentine. After scratching, the number of sniffs was recorded by the experimenter as a measure of sensitivity (more sensitive, less sniffing) and the participant had to identify what the smell was, and rate the intensity and pleasantness of the odour.

In addition, before starting the women rated their own sense of smell generally. The results concluded that “consistent with anecdotal reports, nearly two-thirds (61%) of pregnant women indicated that their sense of smell was higher during pregnancy.” Whoop-de-do. But here’s where it gets interesting.

“Although pregnant women rated their sense of smell to be significantly higher than control participants, they were not better at identifying odors.” That said, women in the first trimester did seem to be more sensitive sniffers, because they took less whiffs. Here’s the graph showing the results (the UPSIT score is the “Identify this Smell” test)

What’s really cool is that the women THINK they smell better now they are pregnant, but there’s not the evidence there to say that this is REALLY the case. Is it just that this test wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up the change in smell which seems so noticeable to the smeller, or do they just feel like things smell different now? Is there a change, and does it effect the nose or the brain? Science, alas, is yet to have an answer.

Smelling moonbeams seems a little far-fetched though. But if you’re curious on what the moon smells like, astronauts say it smells like burnt gunpowder. After a moonwalk the dust sticks to their clothes and they say it smells very strong (they’ve even, accidentally I’m sure, tasted some!) Once the dust gets back to Earth it doesn’t smell anymore. Weird, right?