Curiosity Daily

Mars’ Jezero Crater Was a Lake and AR to Cure Fear of Spiders

Episode Summary

Learn what the Perseverance Rover taught us about Mars’ Jezero Crater; and new exposure therapy using augmented reality. The Perseverance Rover confirms that Mars's Jezero Crater used to be a huge lake by Briana Brownell Rover images confirm Jezero crater is an ancient Martian lake. (2021, October 7). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/930684  Jezero Crater - Perseverance Landing Site. (2020). Nasa.gov. https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/science/landing-site/  ‌Koren, M. (2021, October 7). The Atlantic. The Atlantic; theatlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/10/mars-perseverance-rover-jezero-crater/620332/ ‌ NASA’s Curiosity Rover Captures Shining Clouds on Mars. (2019). NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-curiosity-rover-captures-shining-clouds-on-mars  Augmented Reality (AR) could help people cure their fear of spiders by Steffie Drucker Scared Of Spiders? There’s An App For That. (2021, October 13). Research Digest. https://digest.bps.org.uk/2021/10/13/scared-of-spiders-theres-an-app-for-that/   Zimmer, A., Wang, N., Ibach, M. K., Fehlmann, B., Schicktanz, N. S., Bentz, D., Michael, T., Papassotiropoulos, A., & de Quervain, D. J. F. (2021). Effectiveness of a smartphone-based, augmented reality exposure app to reduce fear of spiders in real-life: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 82, 102442. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2021.102442  Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.

Episode Notes

Learn what the Perseverance Rover taught us about Mars’ Jezero Crater; and new exposure therapy using augmented reality.

The Perseverance Rover confirms that Mars's Jezero Crater used to be a huge lake by Briana Brownell

Augmented Reality (AR) could help people cure their fear of spiders by Steffie Drucker

Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.

 

Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/mars-jezero-crater-was-a-lake-and-ar-to-cure-fear-of-spiders

Episode Transcription

CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. I’m Cody Gough.

ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn what the Perseverance Rover taught us about the Jezero Crater on Mars; and how augmented reality could help people cure their fear of spiders.

CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.

The Perseverance Rover confirms that Mars's Jezero Crater used to be a huge lake by Briana Brownell [Discovery.com followup] (Ashley)

When NASA chose Jezero Crater [JEZ-er-oh] as the landing site for the Perseverance Rover, they did it for a good reason. Scientists had seen hints that this dusty canyon was once a massive lake — and where there was water, there may have been life. Perseverance has been taking pictures of its surroundings since it landed in February, and scientists think that these pictures show conclusive evidence that Jezero Crater was indeed a huge body of water — one with a pretty dramatic past. 

Here’s why scientists thought Jezero might have been a lake. Running water, like in the flow of a river, carries silt along for the ride. When a river meets a lake, all that silt builds up into layers of sediment in a distinctive fan-shape. Scientists recognized this fan-shape in part of the Jezero crater from images captured in orbit around the planet. 

So Perseverance went to investigate.

The new images from Perseverance showed details of the sediment. Because of the layering and the slope of the outcroppings, scientists concluded that they were formed by flowing water, rather than wind or another geological process.  They also found smoothed boulders nearby, inside the crater. They figured that these boulders must have been drawn downstream by strong currents from flash floods, and then smoothed by millennia of underwater erosion. 

Sediments from the ancient lake bed might show evidence of life — maybe even small fossils. Perseverance has 38 empty tubes that it can use to collect samples, which will be cached on the planet for safekeeping. NASA hopes a future mission will be able to bring them back home so that scientists can analyze them in detail. But for now, scientists plan to analyze these samples remotely.

The view on Mars 3.7 billion years ago would have been really different from the dry and dusty crater that Perseverance landed in.  At the time, Mars had an atmosphere, and its temperature was much warmer. And Jezero Crater? It would have been absolutely full of water. 

At some point, there was a dramatic shift in the planet’s climate, and the lake was replaced by a desert. Mars’ atmosphere disappeared and the planet lost its liquid water. Scientists are still trying to figure out exactly what happened. But these new observations will help build the foundation for a comprehensive history of our neighboring planet.

Augmented Reality (AR) could help people cure their fear of spiders by Steffie Drucker (Cody)

There’s an app for everything nowadays, from guitar tuning to faking an excuse to get off the phone. Now, there’s an app to help people confront their fear of spiders.

 

Somewhere between 3 and 15 percent of people develop a phobia over the course of their lives, ranging from clowns and crowds to snakes and spiders. But even though a phobia can make daily living difficult, a lot of people don’t seek help. That’s because the most effective treatment method for phobias is exposure therapy, which is literally facing your fear — and that’s terrifying! No thank you!

 

As a compromise, there’s been a lot of progress made in virtual reality, or VR, exposure therapy. That’s great! But VR headsets are expensive and can come with nausea-inducing side effects, so this type of therapy hasn’t been super successful. Swiss scientists are hopeful that augmented reality, or AR, is a better bet. That’s where digital images are superimposed on real surroundings through your phone’s camera, like they are in Pokémon Go.

These researchers created an app called Phobys [FOH-biss] that exposes arachnophobes to spiders using augmented reality. It starts off with a fear assessment: The app overlays a 3D spider on whatever your phone’s camera is pointing at and it starts to walk around. Afterward, you rate how scared and disgusted you felt. Over time, you complete nine treatment levels that require different interactions with the virtual spider: things like getting close to the spider, superimposing it on your hand, and even walking through a group of spiders. After each level, you rate how much fear and disgust you feel on a scale of 0 to 10. You can only advance to the next level after you’ve achieved a rating of four or below.

 

Researchers ran a two-week clinical trial of the app with 66 participants. Half the group got to use the app and the other half didn’t. They all had some fear of spiders, but about half the group was clinically phobic. Before and after using the app, each participant had to see how close they could get to a real spider in a clear box and then rate their level of fear and disgust. Participants who used the app got much closer to the boxed spider than those that didn’t, and they felt less afraid and disgusted afterward.

 

While AR exposure therapy is probably easier with a spider phobia than it is with, say, a fear of the dentist, the study represents an interesting new path forward for exposure therapy. And if you have a fear of spiders, you might want to try out the Phobys app. The spiders aren’t real, but your relief definitely could be.

RECAP

Let’s recap today’s takeaways

  1. CODY: Scientists now have evidence that Jezero Crater was once a massive lake. Photos taken by the Perseverance Rover showed sediment patterns that suggest they were formed by flowing water, and boulders in the crater appear to have been smoothed by millennia of underwater erosion. This is a good sign that sediment samples might contain evidence of life, even if that life is long gone now. 
    1. While Mars doesn’t have an atmosphere, it does have small wispy clouds made of ice or frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice).  They’re pretty rare, and some of them are similar to the noctilucent clouds sometimes seen on Earth - you can only see them after sunset.
  2. ASHLEY: There’s an augmented reality app designed to cure people’s fear of spiders. It’s called Phobys, and it superimposes a 3D spider on whatever your phone’s camera is viewing — and over nine levels, that experience gets more and more intense. Researchers found that people who used the app felt less afraid and disgusted after encountering a real spider than those who didn’t use the app. That shows promise for augmented reality exposure therapy in the future.
    1. CODY: I want to mention that we do NOT have a business relationship with the Phobys app, they did not sponsor this story or this episode in any way. We only ran the story because, like Ashley said, it’s promising research that expands access to exposure therapy, and it could lead to more research on how we could use AR to help people face other fears. But I also want to mention that the Phobys app doesn’t have stellar reviews on the Google Play store. So I read the reviews, and from what I can tell, there’s a low rating because the app was designed with a very specific audience in mind. The app’s designers have left comments on several reviews saying, quote, “Phobys is designed for people with a high fear of spiders, offering a low-cost option to start or continue facing your fear of spiders,” unquote. So maybe temper your expectations and check it out if spiders are a real problem for you, not just a nuisance.

[ad lib optional] 

ASHLEY: Today’s writers were Briana Brownell and Steffie Drucker. 

CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer. 

ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.

CODY: [AD LIB SOMETHING FUNNY] Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.

ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!