Broken Hearts, Repaired

Earlier this year, I visited Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to report a story for US News & World Report’s Best Hospitals issue. My assignment: meet heart patients, talk to surgeons, observe operations, and then write about it.

The heart-lung machine keeps blood flowing through the body and to the lungs when the heart is stopped during an operation.

The first procedure I watched was an aortic valve replacement. The new, artificial valve was snaked up to the heart through the patient’s femoral artery. It was a tidy operation, done quickly and without complication.

The second procedure was a mitral valve repair. For this, the surgeon opted to use a surgical robot. After the patient’s heart was stopped and her blood safely pumping through the heart-lung machine (left), the surgeon stepped away from the operating table and sat down at a console. Viewing the heart in 3D, he slipped his fingers into the sensitive robotic controls through which he maneuvered remote tools at the operating table. On the OR monitor, I watched as the surgeon, via a set of robot arms, quite literally tugged and cut the patient’s heart strings (chordae tendineae), trimmed the oversized valve, and stitched it all up again.

Here’s a view from the robotic console:


Here’s a view from the table, robotic arms in motion:

The third surgery, a heart transplant, was harrowing to watch and frankly, difficult to stomach. The smells (a sawed-through sternum), sights (an empty chest cavity), and sounds (a beating heart plopped into a plastic bowl) made my knees weak. More than once, I had to sit down to take a deep breath.

During the procedure, I was surprised to see the patient’s heart still beating outside her body for about five minutes after it was removed.

Here’s a video of the beating heart soon after it was removed from the patient:


A few minutes after removal, slowing down:

All surgeries were successful. Patients recovered fully and without complications. If you’re interested in learning more about the patients and procedures, and seeing some amazing photographs by Daryl Peveto, I encourage you to read the story here.

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Meals in Space

Some years ago, I found NASA footage of the urine-recycling system on the International Space Station. I edited it down to keep the good bits and posted the ~2 minute video on YouTube. The part that I really loved about the video was the celebratory meal at the end. It features floating shrimp cocktail and astronauts happily toasting with pouches of freshly recycled urine. Check it out below.

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Good Data

Our goal as HI-SEAS crew is to get good data about food during the mission. So in addition to rehydrating food, cooking meals for six, and cleaning dishes, we will keep tabs on the ingredients we choose, the time it takes to prepare the meal, and the amount of water we use.

There will also be surveys. Daily.  Questions like How hungry were you before you ate? How full to do you feel? What did you eat? How did you like it? What’s your overall mood? And more! Daily. 

Finally, there will be some minimally invasive nose tests because it’s unclear how exactly an astronaut’s sense of smell might affect her feelings about food on long missions. (See nasal airflow tests and especially acoustic rhinomtery). In other words, SO MUCH DATA!

The idea with simulated Mars missions–MDRS, FMARS, Mars500, and now HI-SEAS–is to try to make them as similar as possible and practical to an actual Mars mission. Of course, these simulations are a far cry from the real thing. No arguing that. But the more elements simulated, the better the data. And it’s the data from these simulations that will give an evidence-based foundation for designing actual missions.

With that in mind, one of our jobs on this mission is to work on our own projects. Just as astronauts on Mars would have their own research responsibilities, my crew mates and I are managing our own experiments and projects. Topics include antimicrobial textiles, thermal maps of our habitat, educational outreach, robotic rovers, and remote farming. As the writer-in-residence, I will, of course, be writing. And I’ll also be studying crew sleep quality and lighting design. Details to come…

 

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Why Study Food?

Fast Company has a nice write-up about the HI-SEAS mission and why food matters in space exploration. Jean Hunter, principle investigator for our food study and Cornell professor, explains it well:

“When you eat the same thing over and over again, you get bored by it, [you get] full sooner, and end up eating less. For astronauts who might be somewhere far away from home where there’s not much variety in their lives, getting bored with the food can be really serious,” Hunter tells me. “In space, they’re going to get bored with a lot of things. Having the food be interesting will improve morale, but it will also make them eat more.”

Ultimately, engineers who plan missions to Mars will need to consider the trade-offs between culinary variety and payload weight, between crew productivity and morale and time and water spent cooking and cleaning. The HI-SEAS mission is the first long-term simulated Mars mission specifically designed to study the role of food in human space exploration.

 

 

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Down the Wormhole

For the past couple of years, I’ve been writing short and medium-length features for U.S. News & World Report. These stories aren’t available online, but you can read them in the special “books” U.S. News puts out called “Best Hospitals”, “Secrets of your Brain,” “Amazing Animals,” and “Mysteries of Space.”

One of the stories I wrote for the “Mysteries of Space” issue didn’t end up running because, I believe, neither I nor my editor could explain wormholes simply enough for a general audience. I liked the piece, though, and thought it should have some sort of life beyond the cutting room floor. So I’ve pasted it below. Enjoy!

Down the Wormhole

Consider a trip to the Alpha Centauri star system, about 4.2 light years away in our Milky Way galaxy. You board a ship capable of the speed of Voyager 1, the United States’ deep space probe, launched in 1977 and fastest craft made by man. Traveling at more than 38,000 miles per hour—a small fraction of the speed of light—your descendants would arrive at the nearest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, in about 74,000 years. Even cruising closer to the speed of light, a trip beyond the Milky Way to one of our neighboring galaxies, Andromeda, would take about 2.5-million years.  “We’re trapped in a universe where the speed of light is the speed limit,” says John Cramer, professor of physics at the University of Washington.

That may be the case, but in the 1980’s the late astronomer and science fiction writer Carl Sagan searched for a way to travel through space so that the speed of light didn’t hold astronauts back. He had written a book called Contact (later turned into a movie starring Jodie Foster) in which he proposed a black hole—a dense object with a gravitational grip that nothing can escape—as a portal to another star system. Sagan checked the feasibility of the book’s premise with his friend Kip Thorne, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. To Thorne, the idea was preposterous. The laws of physics forbid it. However, he happily offered a possible alternative: the wormhole.

Continue reading →

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