You’re going to learn about efforts to print astronaut skin in space with their own blood, the mystifying side effects of birth control, and the race to bring soil samples back from Mars!
You’re going to learn about efforts to print astronaut skin in space with their own blood, the mystifying side effects of birth control, and the race to bring soil samples back from Mars!
Blood skin.
Birth control plus extra.
Mars dirt.
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/skin-print-testing-birth-control-race-to-bring-mars-home
[SFX: INTRO MUSIC/WHOOSH]
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back!
NATE: Today, you’ll learn about efforts to print astronaut skin in space with their own blood, the mystifying side effects of birth control, and the race to bring soil samples back from Mars!
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Calli, do you ever wonder what would happen if something went really wrong in space? Like if an astronaut needed a skin graft for a bad burn, had to repair a severely broken bone, or even get an organ working again? Because researchers have, and what they’re finding is pretty interesting.
CALLI: Good news I hope.
NATE: Thankfully yes. These kind of big injuries are a serious issue and have the potential to really affect future space missions where traditional medicine might not be available. But the good news is there might be a fix…3D printing.
CALLI: 3D printing…humans?
NATE: Yes, not whole humans. Researchers are working to create machines that can use biological materials, cells, and supporting materials to create functional living tissues. The best part is we might not have to wait lightyears to have it.
CALLI: What would that be, 3D bioprinting?
NATE: That’s the name! The tech is already being studied and used for applications in regenerative medicine to create transplant tissues and organs.
CALLI: So what, are we about to have a basement industry of people printing kidneys?
NATE: Well that would help with demand on the donor list, but we are still a ways off from home printing. Not to mention cooking up some organs in your basement will probably be illegal. But lab researchers have recently had success in using nutrient rich blood plasma as a sort of ink to “print” tissues like skin.
CALLI: Wait, that has to be a huge plus, if the materials are already coming from the subject, there wouldn’t be any issues with the body rejecting the new tissues or organs.
NATE: Right, that’s a big deal. And there is big potential for sending this technology up to space for astronauts who suffer an injury. That’s the goal of a new project by the European Space Agency. And their hopes don’t end at skin cells. They’re trying to figure out a way they could send all of the parts needed to create bone grafts, and even complete organs.
CALLI: Astronauts growing bones and organs, you just gave me the plot for my next sci-fi story.
NATE: At the moment, it definitely is still at least a bit fictional. Proper, functioning 3D bioprinting tech is still in very early stages on Earth. But tests have already shown some promising results for completing these procedures in low gravity environments.
CALLI: So what’s holding us back? What are the hurdles to going from testing to implementation?
NATE: The main issue is that the plasma researchers are using as the main “ink” to print with can be finicky to work with. Liquids are already tough to manage, but especially so in low gravity environments. Studies have tried to combat this issue by modifying plasma with bio-safe plant materials to thicken it.
CALLI: So make it a bit thicker and it prints easier?
NATE: In theory yes, but everything is complicated by the fact that researchers are working with living tissues that have a lot of variability. There can be abnormalities in growth, and even at its best, and most natural, cells and tissue construction can be tremendously delicate. It creates a lot of technical challenges.
CALLI: Even still, I’m encouraged by these early successes, that’s tremendous!
NATE: It’s really good news. If we’re to keep sending missions further and further out into space, then this tech might be absolutely necessary to ensure the safety of our astronauts. A mission to Mars, or any other interplanetary travel, would take several years in space. And there would be no way to return early if something went wrong, like a bad injury, and with the limited storage and weight requirements, we couldn't exactly bring all the traditional medical equipment needed to operate on severe injuries
CALLI: How will this affect us on earth? I’m already thinking of how handheld power tools and freeze dried foods made their way to earth from the Apollo missions. Will this tech trickle into daily life?
NATE: Absolutely, all these breakthroughs in the pursuit of space exploration are helping us get closer to that organ printing on earth.
CALLI: I love exploring space, even if you don’t put on a space suit, we all benefit from pushing into the cosmos.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Nate, did you know that even though we’ve been using chemical birth control since the 1960s, there is still a ton of debate in the scientific community about its side effects?
NATE: Wait, don’t those work by manipulating hormones, our bodies chemical messengers? That seems pretty important to not know how they’re working.
CALLI: Right? Many hormonal birth control users report changes in their moods after being prescribed the treatment. But scientists have been hard pressed to find a direct link between these contraceptives and altered mental states. But other researchers think we might just have not found that link yet.
NATE: Birth control has always seemed like such a miracle to me, but how exactly does it work?
CALLI: Oral hormonal birth control works by mimicking some aspects of pregnancy. At the end of the normal menstrual cycle, women have hormonal lows that tell the body it's not pregnant, but birth control keeps these hormone levels high to make the body think it's pregnant and keep the ovaries from releasing another egg.
NATE: We mimic the reproductive outcome, to prevent it? Cool. But what happens to the rest of the body when we start altering these hormones?
CALLI: There are many anecdotal reports of conditions like anxiety and depression. So many in fact, scientists started to look for a link soon after hormonal birth control came on the market in the 1960s, And its not so surprising. In other times of big hormonal shifts, like puberty and menopause, these side effects are also common. But even after about 60 years of research, we still haven’t found that link.
NATE: Have we really been looking hard enough?
CALLI: A 2016 study seemed to show a tenuous link between hormonal birth control and increased use of antidepressants, and other researchers from Ohio State looked for a link to depression by analyzing the combined results of 26 studies, but they didn’t find anything.
NATE: Well what about other conditions, like anxiety, are we looking for those?
CALLI: Researchers are hoping to do a more intensive study that looks at depression, anxiety, and other mood changes with hundreds if not thousands of women over the course of months or years, but it’s difficult.
NATE: Why can’t we just launch into that study?
CALLI: Because birth control has some unique challenges. You’d need a placebo group to compare results, but if you tell a group they’re getting birth control, and they aren’t, they could have unwanted pregnancies. And if we got past that, we aren’t really great at quantifying mental health side effects like anxiety, which makes getting consistent results challenging.
NATE: Well scientists are incredible, I’m sure they could find a way to get past these issues.
CALLI: Well some researchers don’t want to answer these questions for fear that they might move us backwards. Since hormonal birth control came around, three times as many women enroll in medical and law school, fewer children grow up in poverty, and it may have helped shrink the wage gap. Researchers are hesitant to find results that might roll back birth control availability and the benefits that followed.
NATE: There has to be a future where we can keep these advantages while also improving the mental health of our society.
CALLI: Absolutely, and moving forward will require more funding, research, and societal commitment.
NATE: While one half of our population bears the consequences, we all benefit. It's time we all start trying to solve the problem.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Calli, did you know that NASA aims to bring soil samples back from Mars by as soon as 2033?
CALLI: Oh that is so exciting! Imagine how much we’ll be able to learn about the red planet. I can’t wait!
NATE: Well, you might not have to, at least not for ten plus years. China recently announced plans to land on Mars, collect dirt and rocks, and return these samples to earth by July, 2031, a full two years before the joint NASA and the European Space Agency mission.
CALLI: Whoa! How did China get such a leap on NASA?
NATE: Well it’s important to first understand how NASA plans to return samples. NASA landed the Perseverance rover on Mars in February 2021. It has been exploring a 28-mile-wide swath of Mars and collecting samples. To get those samples back to Earth, NASA will need to send out another mission with a “fetch” rover to meet up with Perseverance to grab the samples. It’d then put those on a launch vehicle to take them off the planet and into Mars orbit, called a Mars ascent vehicle, or MAV. The MAV will then have to connect with another vehicle to bring the samples all the way back to Earth.
CALLI: That is a lot of moving parts! Is the Chinese mission going to beat us with something simpler?
NATE: Exactly. China's exploration is going to be more streamlined, but to be sure, it will still be a supremely complex mission. The Chinese mission, called Tianwen-3, will orbit Mars then send a lander and ascent vehicle down to the surface of Mars. Unlike NASA’s mission, this mission won’t involve any rovers. Rather, it’ll do surface sampling and drilling wherever it lands, though it might use a four-legged robot to give a bit more range. Then the ascent vehicle will launch the samples back into the orbit of Mars where it will connect back up with the orbiter and a return module. Then the return module can bring them back to Earth. The plan is for the mission to launch in 2028, for the lander to reach the surface of Mars in late 2029, and for the samples to come back to earth in 2031.
CALLI: Has their space agency done anything like this before?
NATE: China recently landed a rover on Mars and back in December 2020, their Chang’e 5 mission landed on the moon, grabbed samples, and brought them back to Earth. Those were the first lunar samples collected from the moon since 1976, when the Soviet Union last brought samples back. And they have plans to bring back samples from an asteroid in 2025 with their mission Tianwen 2.
CALLI: How does NASA feel about all this? I feel like we rarely enjoy getting beaten in these kinds of benchmarks.
NATE: In 2021, NASA leadership and members of the Biden administration said that these Chinese space explorations could be a threat to American interests.
CALLI: That doesn’t really make sense to me. What’s the issue? Why not have more humans exploring space!?
NATE: The concerns are related to that story about satellites being used in warfare that we covered a while back. Increasingly, the US Department of Defense is concerned that Chinese space dominance could make us vulnerable to space-based warfare. And their success at missions like bringing Mars samples back before us, or their hopes for crewed missions to the moon, puts American space superiority in doubt.
CALLI: But aren’t these missions right now just about collecting dirt?
NATE: Sure, but Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin points out that Chinese military doctrine views space as critical to modern warfare. Back in 2013, China tested some anti-satellite technology that caught the attention of the Obama administration. This led the Department of Defense to conduct a “Space Strategic Portfolio Review” to try to figure out how well prepared the US is for any threat from space from China or elsewhere.
CALLI: So, is the US ready?
NATE: In short: no. But if you remember, a few years ago, the Trump administration announced the creation of the Space Force. The DoD believes the Space Force might be best equipped to keep the US safe from any potential attack from another country from space. But even so, the DoD projects the Space Force is still five to ten years away from being an effective defense against anti-satellite technology.
CALLI: Okay, so I want to be excited about Mars soil but I….shouldn't be?
NATE: Oh, no way. It’s very cool! This is a major breakthrough for space travel in general, and while there are some political concerns moving forward, the scientific benefits are undeniable. Plus, if the 1950s and 60s tell us anything, it's that our space program does a lot of its best work under pressure.
CALLI: Well let’s hope space stays peaceful, and we can keep bringing pieces of it home, while sending explorers out!
NATE: And who knows, maybe the competition will encourage NASA to do both faster!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up.
CALLI: New developments in 3D bioprinting could help create a feasible method for astronauts to treat in space injuries via printed bone and skin grafts. The technology is still in the testing phases, but early procedures have shown that this method could be a staple of multi-year space travel.
NATE: Though some studies have suggested that hormonal birth control has no effect on mental state, the prevalence of anecdotal evidence has some doctors wondering what we have missed. For the time being, though, the scientific link remains elusive.
CALLI: The Chinese Space program aims to bring back soil samples from Mars by 2031, two years before NASA plans to do the same. While this is great news for exploring the cosmos, it is raising some concerns at home that the US may be losing superiority in space, and the security that has come with it.