Flamini is an extreme athlete known for climbing and mountaineering — forever on the lookout for “experiences very few human beings have had.” But for chronobiologists at the universities of Granada, Almería and Murcia, her expedition was an opportunity to monitor the human body unprompted by the usual signals that give structure to our days.

It can often feel like daily life’s alarm clocks, work schedules and appointments are a rigid imposition on an otherwise free-flowing natural world. Yet biology is suffused with similar clocks.

In the 4th century B.C. a ship’s captain under Alexander the Great reported seeing tamarind leaves which closed at night and started to open at sunrise, unfurling themselves toward midday. The 13th century “Noon and Midnight Manual” describes a principle of Chinese traditional medicine whereby qi — the body’s vital force — flows to different organs across twelve two-hour increments, repeating every 24 hours.

In 1729, French scientist Jean-Jacques d’Ortuous de Mairan studied the daily movements of Mimosa pudica leaves, observing that they continued even in complete darkness. Two hundred years later, the German ethologist Ingeborg Beling reported similar cycles in the animal kingdom. Her paper, “On the Time Memory of Bees,” describes the punctuality of swarm behaviors which can be trained to different times of day.

Today we know that the master timekeeper in the human body is in the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN, a cluster of neurons in the hypothalamus that receives input from cells in the retina that are responsive to visible blue light from the sun. That light suppresses melatonin, the sleep hormone, and times the cascade of energizing chemistry that helps us wake up in the morning and kickstart our day.

There is more than one clock, however. Various systems in your body, including the cardiovascular, metabolic, immune and reproductive systems have their own “peripheral clocks,” which cycle through active and resting phases. In fact, the same is true for the trillions of cells and hitchhiking microbes that make us who we are.

The Circadian Revolution

Over the last few years, there has been a groundswell of podcasts, wellness apps and self-improvement social media videos alerting a mass audience to the potential of applying circadian science. It was a slightly non-PC meme in which an anxious party attendee plans to head home “to protect my circadian rhythm” that made me think new, younger audiences were taking note.

We’ve progressed from what was really fringe science in the 1980s “to a truly exquisite mechanistic understanding of how these rhythms are generated,” Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience at the University of Oxford, tells me. Foster’s book “Life Time: The New Science of the Body Clock, and How It Can Revolutionize Your Sleep and Health,” has been a surprise best seller. “It’s very satisfying for me to see how it’s exploded,” he says.

For example, a viral YouTube video entitled “The Optimal Morning Routine – Andrew Huberman” by After Skool animates advice from the wildly popular Stanford professor, who recommends viewing outdoor light within an hour after waking, even if it’s cloudy. This is because light exposure is by far the most powerful way to “entrain” the cybernetic complex of clocks within our bodies.

To borrow an analogy from biochemist Urs Albrecht and colleagues’ “orchestra” model, the SCN is like a musical conductor: when the symphony is playing in unison, the harmonious uplift in focus, memorization, physical performance, immunity and restful sleep is profound.

“In five years of training most medical students won’t hear anything about circadian rhythms or sleep,” Foster tells me. Meanwhile, “if I came up with a drug that halved my chances of stroke, cancer, over a five-year period [just some of the potential benefits of a synchronized circadian system], I’d be off to Stockholm to pick up my Nobel Prize.”

The word circadian — meaning approximately (circa) a day (diem) — was coined by the Romanian-born scientist Franz Halberg, whose laboratory at the University of Minnesota proved that humans operate according to various cycles. There are not just day-long cycles, but also shorter, “ultradian,” and longer, “infradian” cycles.

Halberg showed that human circadian rhythms were endogenous — meaning internally produced — but could be kept in line by what the German biologist Jürgen Aschoff called zeitgeber, literally time-givers, or cues in the environment.

All life on Earth evolved with the influence of the planet’s rotation: around 21 hours when complex life emerged 600 million years ago, slowing gradually — due to gravitational friction from the moon — to 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds today. Every time we fly across the planet, party until dawn, or spend the morning scrolling with the blinds down, we misalign ourselves with what our various organs, hormones and neurophysical processes are preparing for. 

Perils associated with desynchronization may include poor sleep, indigestion, depression and anxiety, lowered fertility, increased risk of injury, heart attack, stroke and heightened vulnerability to germs and viruses. A disrupted circadian rhythm impairs executive function in the brain (things like selective attention, working memory and self-control). It exaggerates glucose intolerance and increases the odds of metabolic syndrome, obesity and Type 2 diabetes, each of which in turn worsens health outcomes. Chronic disruption, as with shift work, may even produce epigenetic changes that may be passed between generations.

Nurses are one of the best-studied professional groups and may have greater risk of breast, endometrial and colorectal cancer. Many cancer-related genes oscillate, switching off and on, under circadian control. As Foster notes in “Life Time,” multiple studies have linked a disrupted circadian system to “an increased susceptibility to cancer development in all key organ systems in humans, including breast, ovarian, lung, pancreatic, prostate, colorectal and endometrial cancers, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL), osteosarcoma, acute myeloid leukemia (AML), head and neck squamous cell carcinoma and hepatocellular carcinoma.” 

There are drugs in development that can “drive” the clock in cancer cells, where circadian disruption has been shown to increase the pace of tumor growth. In cases of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and dementia, the strong links between circadian sleep disorder suggest to Foster that the restoration of sleep-wake circadian rhythm will hopefully slow the diseases’ progression if not ward off their arrival to begin with.

“Because SCRD (Sleep and circadian rhythm disruption) can exacerbate the symptoms of dementia and PD (Parkinson’s disease), it is important to think of SCRD stabilization as a therapeutic target,” he writes.

From the start, chronobiologist Franz Halberg was interested in how heart surgery and cancer treatment received at different times of day might influence outcomes. In other words, he was considering the ways that time — or rather timing — might be thought of as an aspect of healing, a “fourth dimension”, as some refer to it, fundamental to medicine, wellness and peak performance.

Stop All The Clocks

“We’re all so interested in sleep now, but sleep is an output of the circadian clock, and it’s one thing,” says Mickey Beyer-Clausen, cofounder and CEO of Timeshifter, a technology platform that offers personalized behavioral plans to reduce the impact of jet lag and shift work.

“People with jetlag think ‘Oh, I just feel off for a couple of days.’ No. You’ve disrupted every single organ in your body. You’re going to get sick more easily because your immune function is weak, and you’re going to have an upset stomach because you’re eating a steak when it’s 2 a.m. in your biology.”

Timeshifter’s goal is to provide access to advice once reserved for performance athletes and astronauts in the form of apps and partnerships with organizations such as United Airlines and Axiom Space.

You can think about space like “the ultimate business trip,” Beyer-Clausen says. Astronauts “need to hit the ground running. They can’t wait four or five days to get over jet lag.”

Spacewalks, which last up to eight hours, involve seeing sunrise and sunset every 45 minutes, totally disorienting the body’s clocks. That’s why there’s an LED light system that mimics dawn, day and dusk on the ISS.

Timeshifter’s apps suggest windows during which users should sleep, view light, reduce it, ingest caffeine or melatonin, with additional “practicality filters” for unshakeable commitments. In the case of long-haul flights, you “shift” your circadian clock gradually in the days before departure. This is how top-tier athletes, for example, show up ready to compete.

Formula 1 support teams are known to join the drivers in shifting their rhythms days before the race to the time zone of the race. Mars rover crews live on Martian time throughout their missions, with days almost 40 minutes longer than Earth’s, slipping gradually out of kilter with the environment around them. Speaking to reporters after exiting the cave, Beatriz Flamini claimed timelessness was a wonderful experience. “I’m still grieving for the cave,” she told the BBC in a story in June.

Strange findings have emerged from interventions in the mechanics of the body clock. In fact, it’s long been observed that extended wakefulness can temporarily lift depression, and “darkness retreats” are trending, according to the magazine, Glamour. In the absence of external cues, internal synchrony is achieved, though most of us are not extreme mountaineers, and a body out of sync with the world around it is unlikely to thrive.

In 2019 the writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun took part in a trial of “triple chronotherapy,” an experimental treatment focused on individuals with drug-resistant bipolar disorder. According to the doctor who prescribed it, the treatment’s origins can be traced to the 19th century when a German schoolteacher reported she could temporarily cure depression by riding her bike all night. In 1976, Dr. Burkhard Pflug at the University of Tübingen published an experiment with patients undergoing sleep deprivation to alleviate depression. The treatment showed a “marked improvement” in the short term — but relapse was high.

Decades later, a protocol named “triple chronotherapy” was developed by staff at the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, and included lithium, sleep deprivation and timed light exposure. When the regimen was trialed in London in 2019, there was no lithium involved. Instead, patients were required to stay awake all night — under supervision — before sleeping at 5pm the following day.

According to the timetable, in the four days that follow, bedtime is advanced by two hours each evening until it settles into an 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. rhythm. Every morning, at 7 a.m., patients must view bright light. They must wear amber glasses for two hours before bed. This is then followed up with morning bright-light therapy between 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. for six months.

It’s “like Ctrl-Alt-Delete and resets your internal clock,” writes David Veale, the doctor who led the trial in which Colquhoun took part, on his website.

Coloquin wrote in a blog post immediately after treatment: “I have not felt this good in two years and it has transformed every part of my life almost immediately.” When I checked in with them recently, they told me they had not repeated the protocol because “though it worked wonders for me and was very useful in the controlled environment of the trial, to play with my own sleeping patterns unsupervised is something I’ve been reluctant to do, in case it all goes wrong!”

The Great Healer

A 2016 randomized double-blind study found that viewing sunlight for 30 minutes each morning was a more effective treatment for major depression than Prozac alone during the same period. When combined, the treatment was most effective. Outdoor light can range in intensity from 1,000 lux on a cloudy winter day to 100,000 lux in the summer.

By comparison, indoor lights tend to max out in the hundreds. Even the most obscenely over-lit supermarket is unlikely to exceed 1,000 lux. All this means the amount of time we spend outdoors should increase, not decrease, as the days grow shorter in the autumn. 

It’s not just our psychology that is best served by organizing our days, where possible, in alignment with the daily rhythms for which our bodies are primed. There’s increasing evidence that the time of day when we take medicines has a notable influence on their effect.

“We already know of at least two drugs whose administration should be timed,” says Elizabeth Klerman, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School who uses mathematical analysis to understand the interplay between time of day, sleep-wake cycles and biological clocks. “Statins should be given at night and steroids should be given in the morning.”

Cholesterol normally increases at night, between midnight and 6 a.m., so short-acting statins (in the four- to six-hour range) should be taken before bed to align with the night-time production of cholesterol. Cortisol meanwhile rises between 38 and 75 percent within the first hour after waking. Taking Aspirin before bedtime reduces the chance of platelets clumping together to form unwanted blood clots and helps prevent heart attacks and stroke, which are more common in the morning as temperature and blood pressure rise to kick start the day.

After 27 years at Bringham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Klerman began a new role at Massachusetts General Hospital where she works to apply sleep and circadian science across neurology, psychiatry, substance abuse, pediatrics and anesthesia.

When the hospital first began giving staff Covid vaccines in 2021, the hospital recorded the time of day and collected feedback on reported side effects. Two papers she co-authored found antibody production increased when vaccination took place in the afternoon while non-allergic side effects increased between 6 and 11 a.m.

“It’s way more important for people to get vaccinated than to worry about time-of-day effects,” she says, “but maybe these results will be encouraging for those who are worried about side effects or who need to care for a loved one the same day.”

This type of research has huge implications for drug development. Consider the use of rodents as test subjects. Pre-clinical studies use mice for their anatomical, physiological and genetic (99%) similarity to humans. But mice are nocturnal.

A 2020 study described the use of medicines that reduce nerve death in the event of a stroke. It found the treatment most effective when mice were in their sleep phase — which is when labs are open. The results failed to translate to humans until they were given at night. 

“There may be drugs or interventions out there that didn’t work because they were studied at the wrong circadian time,” Klerman tells me. “If you’re a drug company and you can show there’s a time-of-day effect then you only have to test when there’s the biggest effect or smallest side effect.”

In 2017, three scientists, Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young, won the Nobel Prize for their work uncovering the molecular mechanisms that power the circadian clock, a beautiful feedback loop that causes genes to switch on and off as proteins are produced and move around the cell.

Mutations in clock-controlled genes are known to cause enormous problems with appetite, sleep and hormonal regulation. Migraines are often reported at the same time of day and even at the same time of year. Any medicine or remedy must be designed to act when symptoms or risks are likely to be highest.

The skin is our largest organ — an essential weapon in our immune defense — and behaves differently in the daytime when it is braced against UV, bacteria, viruses and pollutants. During the night the skin becomes porous as it undergoes shedding and renewal, making us more vulnerable to invaders.

Another potentially enormous area for application is timed chemotherapy. Because nearly all cells in the human body are driven by 24-hour molecular clocks and control things like detoxification and DNA repair, treatments should be administered at times of day that allow non-cancerous host tissue cells the best chance at recovery. Multiple studies have found that the timing of chemotherapy treatment influences its necessitated dosage, the severity of side effects and the likelihood of relapse.

Yet with healthcare systems already under strain, the needs of doctors and nurses — for example, bright lights for their intricate work — won’t necessarily align with the circadian rhythms of the patients who rely on them. One way around this might be to alter patients’ internal clocks by using plans like those offered by Timeshifter. Another could be timed pumps that automate chemotherapy delivery. 

Chronodesign

At present, most high schools in the U.S., Singapore and Germany commence before 8:30 a.m. despite evidence that later start times increase sleep duration, reduce daytime sleepiness, alleviate depression and improve exam results. Hospitals and nursing homes often require patients to stay indoors without regard for the many ways that timed light exposure and exercise can aid sleep and improve health, especially in patients with dementia.

Yet, despite the wealth of data in the scientific literature suggesting the importance of circadian cycles for human health, one issue, in particular, makes me skeptical of our ability for radical change in line with this new knowledge: daylight saving time.

“We circadian biologists are of a person unanimous that no we shouldn’t have it,” says Russell Foster. Daylight saving time (or DST) has been associated with daytime fatigue, mental health problems and less sleep. More heart attacks, strokes, workplace injuries and even fatal car crashes are reported in the week following the clock’s spring leap forward. 

Even worse, we spend the next six months of the year out of whack with the position of the sun. The argument that this saves energy was disproven long ago, and despite unanimity within science, many countries trundle on without the means to fix this mistake.

Nations that have abolished DST include Iceland, Argentina, Brazil, Kazakhstan and Russia. The EU held a consultation in 2018 which saw the vast majority of its 4.6 million participants vote to end daylight saving time but has yet to implement the change.

Alarmingly, in the U.S., a bill called the “Sunshine Protection Act of 2023” has been proposed that would permanently enshrine daylight saving time rather than standard time, keeping citizens out of step with the sun year-round.

Meanwhile, China remains committed to using a single time zone despite its five geographical time zones spanning 3,100 miles east to west. This means much of the country’s social clock (used to coordinate daily life) corresponds to Beijing’s natural clock — where the sun is at its highest around noon. As a result, in Kashgar, the country’s westernmost city, the sun rises two-and-a-half hours later than it does in Beijing.

Till Roenneberg, a chronobiologist at Ludwig-Maximilian University (LMU) in Munich associated with the concept of “social jet lag,” has studied the single European time zone, which stretches from eastern Poland to western Spain. Until the German occupation of Luxembourg, Belgium and France during World War II, each nation ran on Greenwich Mean Time, a time zone with which they are more closely aligned.

The same is true for Nazi-allied Spain, much of which lies to the west of the UK. Roenneberg found that peoples’ chronotypes — colloquially referred to as the difference between morning larks and night owls — would shift across the countries that employ Central European Time in accordance with the time at which they see dawn light.

In Dan Beuttner’s Blue Zones project, which looks at the places on Earth where people live longest, Beuttner focuses primarily on the positive impact of diet, community and exercise. But it’s also true that people in places like Sardinia, Italy, and Japan’s Okinawa rise with the sun and go to bed not too long after it sets. “They have a very similar schedule every day,” says Timeshifter’s Clausen-Meyer. “There’s no doubt in my mind that diet, exercise and circadian stability are the three pillars of longevity and health.”

It is the morning’s specific wavelength of visible blue light upon which performance, digestion, sleep, mental clarity and longevity hangs (interestingly, the middle hours of the day are considered a circadian “dead zone” without the same power to shift the clock).

If those in authority grasp the power of circadian science to improve our lives, we might expect to see changes in how we design buildings to encourage or block light at different times of day, or labor laws that mandate health-oriented benefits and appropriate compensation for valuable shift workers.

“Tonight I’m on a call to Singapore at 11 p.m. for two hours,” says Clausen-Beyer. “But I know how to deal with it: I’ll wake up at the same time and view sunlight then take a nap later. The world has moved on. We need shift workers. We just need to be aware of the time, it is in our biology, and deal with our circumstances in the best way.”

Because viewing morning light is the most powerful way to entrain our circadian system, Clausen-Beyer ensures his internal clocks remain aligned, despite being temporarily sleep-deprived. A short nap can help and is better than slipping into a new time zone without having gone anywhere.

Over 270 years ago the Swedish botanist Carl Linneas proposed a “flower clock” in which different species would be arranged according to the time of day at which they opened, closed and released their unique scents. Though the plan remains unrealized, various horticulturists have tried to revive it over the years, lured by the dream of ecological synchrony.

This fall Apple Watch users will see the number of hours they spend in daylight incorporated into their health app. Meanwhile, trends suggest that people of all ages are shifting social activities to earlier in the day. As with Linneas’s imagined garden, principles of chronodesign, chronotherapy and chronoethics applied in hospitals, schools, homes and workplaces could offer a universal baseline, more in tune with our biology, to help us orient ourselves.

It’s safe to assume that life will find ways to knock us off schedule — and there are plenty of worthwhile reasons to get a poor night’s sleep — but it will be far easier to get back on track when the built and natural world both know the time.

The post The Rediscovery Of Circadian Rhythms appeared first on NOEMA.

Like Pitch Lake in Trinidad and Tobago, a stand-in for liquid methane reservoirs on Saturn’s moon Titan, or Antarctica’s subglacial Lake Vostok, a proxy for the oceans believed to exist beneath the icy crusts of Europa and Enceladus, the tunnels at Boulby grant access to the subsurface of Mars. It is what space scientists call a “planetary field analog,” a portal that allows them to study distant comets, moons and planets they are unable to visit themselves.

Boulby is an active salt and fertilizer mine. The minerals exhumed here were formed by the evaporation of the Zechstein Sea, an ancient inland body of water inside the supercontinent Pangea, which ranged from modern Britain as far as northern Poland in the late Permian Era, more than 250 million years ago. While the Martian surface has been disfigured by impact gardening (with little atmosphere to burn up incoming rocks), pristine underground evaporites may soon provide us with a record of the planet’s watery past along with any signs it once held life.

When I was a child, growing up a few miles north of Boulby, train wagons full of potash would rumble past on their way to Teesport, from where the potassium-rich minerals would be shipped out to fertilize cropland across the globe. I always wanted to know what else was being unearthed at Boulby, so ahead of my next visit home, I wrote to one of the lab’s senior science technicians. A new set of experiments was being planned, she told me, which is how I found myself at the site entrance early on a cold but clear morning last autumn. After changing into PPE, I was led into a side room for a safety briefing. At 9 a.m. sharp, the lift was scheduled to descend into another world.

Mining And Space

Humanity’s image of the Martian landscape has shifted over time. For the British-German astronomer William Herschel, lecturing the Royal Society in 1784, Mars was a second Earth, a place with “clouds and vapors floating in the atmosphere” and “a situation in many respects similar to our own.” Others, like the American William Henry Pickering, who watched Mars intently from his private observatory in Jamaica, saw Mars as an isolated wilderness, a stormy yet magnificent terrain comparable to the Siberian tundra.

To me, the most memorable vision of Mars was Percival Lowell’s, a zealous and self-funded stargazer who thought he saw signs of an industrial civilization grappling with the loss of its seas by redirecting meltwater from the poles to grow food. “Conditions hold there which would necessitate a much more artificial state of things,” Lowell wrote in 1895. “If cultivation there be, it must be cultivation largely dependent upon a system of irrigation, and therefore much more systematic than any we have as yet been forced to adopt.”

Lowell’s Mars was an automated garden, conceived in an age of grand engineering projects like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Suez Canal. Yet all hope for a botanical Mars — artificial or otherwise — came to an abrupt end when the Mariner 4 spacecraft returned the first up-close images of the planet’s sterile, frozen surface in 1954. Suddenly the only reasonable comparison to be made was with our moon — or with a handful of dead and lifeless places on Earth.

The science carried out at Boulby takes place at the invitation of an Israeli mining concern, ICL Group, which excavates potash, rock salt and polyhalite, a sulfate mineral mined nowhere else that is sold directly to farmers as an organic multi-nutrient fertilizer.

“There’s a synergy between mining and planetary research,” says Charles Cockell, a professor of astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh who has led the MINAR, or “Mine Analog Research” program, at Boulby since 2013. “Miners need mineral detection instruments that are small, lightweight, rugged and low-energy, which is exactly the same qualities you’d want for spacecraft instrumentation.”

After being issued with something called a “self-rescuer,” a fist-sized metal box I was told I could breathe through “for up to two hours” in the event of a carbon monoxide leak, I joined a group of visiting students, scientists, technicians and miners to head for the lift. Everyone was dressed in the same outfit: pumpkin-colored workwear, hard hats, ear protectors, steel-toed boots and shin guards known as “spats.” In addition, the miners clutched red 130-ounce water canteens. The rest of us were given lunches in brown paper bags.

It was cold — and loud — as we passed through a series of airlocks. Chit-chat was silenced by the roar of an enormous fan pumping air through the 620-mile tunnel system, much of which stretches out under the frigid North Sea. “Don’t be daft in the shaft,” a sign warned. “Act your age when in the cage.”

As we fell, suspended by a single black cable, the din began to fade. It was completely dark, so one by one we switched on our headlamps. The rising waves of geothermal heat came as a relief.

Pick Your Question

In much of fiction, as in geology, the progression downward represents a journey back in time, whether through the Earth or a human spine. “Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom,” insists Dr. Bodkin in J. G. Ballard’s classic novel “The Drowned World” (1962), a creative use of analog superimposition in which a climate-changed London is submerged in a Triassic-era lagoon. “The further down the central nervous system you move, from the hind-brain through the medulla into the spinal cord, the further you descend back into the neuronic past.”

Such forays were common in the 19th century, when any cave, fissure or even cellar door might hold the keys to a lost city, mushroom forest or prehistoric ecosystem, sequestered inside a Hollow Earth. “I felt as though I were on some distant planet, Uranus or Neptune, witnessing phenomena quite foreign to my ‘terrestrial’ nature,” reports Axel, the reluctant narrator in the 1864 novel that catalyzed the genre, Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” while gazing at electric storms above a subterranean sea.

The lift takes seven minutes to descend. When you step out onto the powdery ground, the first thing you notice is the heat, which averages 104 degrees Fahrenheit. The second is the taste. 

The saline environment instantly dries up human mouths, but nonhuman life is quite at ease. Extremophile halophiles — or salt-adapted microbes — thrive here in fractures and brine pools, sustained by water from an aquifer above and oils rising from the remains of a Carboniferous forest below.

In his “Principles of Geology” (1830-33), the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell proposed that to comprehend Earth’s deep history, we ought to compare evidence of past events with processes ongoing in the present. In the first half of the 20th century, astronomers and geologists extended this “uniform” view of geophysical processes beyond our atmosphere. Studying impact craters on Earth enabled them to see that the moon was a ledger of past collisions — not the world of gargantuan volcanoes that had been previously assumed.

Once inside the polished, air-conditioned lab, we changed into paper overalls and slippers — the correct attire in which to meet a family of immense yet sensitive machines. 

Less than 5% of the known universe is visible to us. Of what remains, 68% is thought to be dark energy and 27% dark matter — particles that do not emit or reflect light but which clump together to influence how galaxies form.

The search for dark matter at Boulby began in the early 1980s with a single table-top experiment run by a physicist from the University of Sheffield. Forty years later, the huge facility contains a suite of pioneering interceptors — sophisticated “nets” designed to catch antisocial particles if and when they interact with nuclei in a gas-based medium.

To protect the machines from cosmic rays and other disruptive forms of radiation — in addition to more than half a mile of rock above — most are housed inside their very own “castle,” a shield made from metals like aluminum, copper or “ancient lead.” This prized commodity can be acquired by smelting warship cannonballs that have lain on the ocean floor for centuries. Because water is surprisingly effective at blocking radiation, the lead boasts a purity that other metals lack.

“Every year you don’t find dark matter, it’s like you’re eliminating suspects from your crime,” says Sean Paling, a cheerful particle physicist who began his career in medical imaging and is now director and senior scientist at Boulby. “CERN is the most expensive machine humans have ever built, and yet they’re only trying to prove dark matter can exist by cooking it in their own kitchen. We’re trying to prove it does exist and is all around us. I’m biased, of course, but to me this is far more profound.”

In the 1990s, the team at Boulby pioneered a technique to increase the odds of catching rare particle interactions using dense liquid xenon as a scintillating (light-emitting) medium. The method would later be integrated into the most sensitive dark-matter detectors on Earth, like LUX ZEPLIN, better known as LZ, which contains seven tons of liquid xenon and lives about a mile underground in a former gold mine in South Dakota. 

Another experiment currently at Boulby, known unofficially as a “muon tsunami,” looks like little more than a set of strip lights. These plastic tube-shaped detectors are tracking muons — elementary particles that are created when high-energy protons hit the Earth’s atmosphere and pass through the planet at almost the speed of light. Because muons are more likely to stop and decay as they pass through dense matter, detectors can monitor their “flux” to check for fractures hidden within infrastructure or to create x-ray-like maps of hidden places like pyramids or vaults.

A version of the instrument, TS-HKMSDD, is currently installed in the Aqua-Line expressway tunnel under Tokyo Bay, where it monitors the height of the tide for signs of a tsunami. At Boulby, which is much deeper, the team will test whether it can produce an image of the tide — and even individual waves — as water rolls over the beach. 

The first time an analog of a non-Earth environment became a tool for space science was at the moon-like Meteor Crater outside Flagstaff, Arizona. Throughout the 1960s, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey sought new landscapes, from Mexico to Iceland, where exposed strata, impact features, lack of vegetation and, above all, isolation, would prepare astronauts for life in outer space, and to identify what they saw when they got there.

Soon after its inception, NASA began handing out grants for life-detection instruments. One device, developed by a shy Jewish émigré from Berlin named Wolf Vishniac, was cut from the Viking mission due to budget constraints. Determined to prove its usefulness, the “Wolf Trap” was deployed in the Mars-like deserts of East Antarctica by Vishniac himself — then considered uninhabitable. 

The mission cost Vishniac his life. He died trying to recover equipment that had fallen into a crevasse. But when colleagues examined a set of porous sandstone rocks sent to his bereaved wife, they found an army of dazzling blue-green algae taking shelter in the stones.

After the Apollo missions, knowledge of lunar geology improved, and analog sites on Earth were reshuffled and refined. Thanks to spectroscopic remote sensing and data collected during U.S. and Soviet flyby missions in the 60s and 70s, exobiologists and astrobiologists (who study life in the universe) knew they should look for terrestrial regions rich in iron and salt, since both had been detected in abundance on Mars.

“Planets and moons are big places,” says Louisa Preston, an author and astrobiologist at University College London who studies life up close in extreme habitats like Iceland’s notorious Eyjafjallajökull volcano and Hawaii’s Mauna Loa, which erupted last November for the first time since 1984. “We know that, on Mars, we are looking for areas that show signs — morphological or mineralogical — of once having flowing water and sources of energy; on Earth, places such as these support life as we know it.”

Life exists almost everywhere on our planet. Bacteria metabolize in the acidic, iron-rich Rio Tinto in Spain, an analog for waterways on a much younger Mars. Microorganisms teem inside deep-sea hydrothermal vents where no sunlight has ever fallen, and flourish well above the troposphere, higher than commercial airplanes fly — an analog for the temperate realm above Venus’s surface which NASA hopes to study using stratospheric air balloons.

“There’s no environment that’s exactly like Mars or an icy moon,” says Cockell. “Earth has been covered in an oxygenated atmosphere for 2.5 billion years. But if you pick the scientific question right, you’ll always find a site that approximates in some way to an extraterrestrial environment.”

One alternative to using Earth itself as a laboratory is artificial simulation chambers, which are more comfortable for scientists (they’re generally in cities) but can be even more extreme for the microbes under review. 

For example, the German Aerospace Centre has three facilities in Berlin capable of simulating temperature and pressure conditions for Venus and Mercury (900+ degrees Fahrenheit), Mars (-100) and various icy moons (almost zero kelvin, the coldest possible temperature). Yet exploration in the field brings together a range of humans from different scientific backgrounds to a single, unpredictable point — and the arrival of new questions is inevitable.

“For me, natural sites are ideal — you cannot constrain them,” says UCL’s Preston. “It is untargeted research. You don’t always know what you are going to find and have to adapt your own ideas and experimental protocols accordingly — just like we would on an alien world.”

Time Capsule

After lunch in the lab’s mess area, we headed to the Mars Yard, a cavernous expanse where prototype rovers trundle across the dusty floor wielding experimental drills, hammers, cameras and sample bags. Sixth on NASA’s technology readiness scale is the requirement that tools be tested in a “relevant environment” — that is to say, an analog.

“Look there,” says Thasshwin Mathanlal, an engineer from the University of Aberdeen who works with lidar, infrared and complex algorithms to outfit drones and rovers that can swoop into dark places (on Earth or Mars) and make 3D maps without getting lost. “We don’t know exactly what they are — but they’re not manmade,” he says, shining his flashlight on a flat black polygon, implanted on the roof, observing us. The anomalous, curiously well-defined shape is a biosignature: evidence of biological processes taking place here long ago.

A recent paper in the journal Astrobiology found that Deinococcus radiodurans (a microbe known affectionately as “Conan the Bacterium”) can endure up to 28,000 times the gamma and UV radiation that would kill a human. The study also found that Conan could in theory survive dried, frozen and buried below the Martian surface for hundreds of millions of years.

“There’s a program between us and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that I like to think of as microbial forensics,” explains Paling, the lab director. “They basically want to study a range of ‘dead bodies’ of different ages so they know what to look for when they get to Mars.”

One way to do this is by mapping hidden surfaces for traces of biogeomorphology, or landforms created by life, as Mathanlal and others hope to do. Another is to extract fluid inclusions — small drops of liquid trapped inside minerals as they form — in the hope they will contain organic molecules like lipids, fossilized nucleic acids or other signs of past life.

Perched on the San Rafael Swell in southern Utah, the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) is the longest-running Martian analog on Earth, founded by the Mars Society in the early 2000s at a time when NASA seemed to have given up hope of sending humans beyond low-Earth orbit. The site was discovered by scouts working for the director James Cameron, searching for the perfect location to shoot an IMAX Mars movie. 

No human has been to Mars, and yet narratives of planetary exploration are already well established in our culture. While in residence at MDRS, participants experience red Jurassic geology similar to that on Mars, but also simulate being there by donning cumbersome EVA suits and sleeping at close quarters in a two-story habitation unit. 

Travel magazines, science blogs and clickbait farms compile long lists of “amazing places on Earth that look like alien planets,” many of which overlap with the rare elemental, electrochemical and geophysical compositions sought out by astrobiologists to generate biosignatures that will guide the search beyond Earth or to forage samples they can bring back to the lab. This is work at the limits of what we know, and creativity plays an integral role.

“Analogy is useful — but can never give us all the answers,” says Vincent Ialenti, an anthropologist who writes about how humans have used geological analogs to assess sites for burying nuclear waste. “The experience taught me something about optimism versus pessimism of the intellect. Some people are more comfortable making the leap of faith to bridge time and space and pull together two disparate objects.”

The landscape photographer Andrew Studer uses drones to present “otherworldly” locations in the Western U.S. He describes them as “unique places that made me feel like I was visiting an alien planet.” The footage follows a single “astronaut,” a friend of Studer’s in a costume, who appears like the Romantic rückenfigur, or wanderer, in a sublime encounter not so much with an alien planet, but the ongoing process of discovering Earth as just one planet among many.

Astronomers believe there are perhaps 100 billion galaxies in the universe, each containing about a billion trillion stars, many with one or more planets orbiting them. It seems statistically unlikely that ours is the only one that has produced replicating, thinking, dreaming chemistry. And yet as far as we know, we are a sample of one. As our understanding of life on Earth becomes more sophisticated, our chance of finding it elsewhere improves too.

Before heading back to the surface, it was suggested that the students grab a salt crystal as a souvenir. I decided I would like to be included in the fun and began sifting the sandy floor in search of hidden gems. 

As we waited by the lift, a team of miners returned from the rock face, their skin covered in a thick layer of whitish salt, ready to trade places with the upcoming shift. One of the students held up a large translucent stone to be inspected by senior science technician Emma Meehan, a former horse-riding instructor who arrived at Boulby to work part-time as a cleaner and has since risen to become one of the facility’s brightest talents. She took the lamp from her helmet and set the stone on top so that the light shone through. She pointed to three small bubbles suspended in the crystal — 250-million-year-old droplets from a long-dead ancient sea.

It may be a cliché, but returning to the surface really did feel like waking from a dream. It was a beautiful, cloudless day. Everyone laid out their samples on the conference room table and sat around dazed, squinting at each other, before changing back into everyday clothes.

Later, I drove up the coast to Teesside, the once-booming industrial region where I was born. Even in the 1990s, we would occasionally receive instructions to stay home with the windows tightly shut due to a dangerous chemical release or escaped plume of toxic smoke. All through my childhood, the sky at night glowed orange thanks to the flaming towers of the local chemical and steel works, a landscape that inspired the opening scene in (local-born) Ridley Scott’s celebrated sci-fi noir “Blade Runner” (1982). 

Although the heavy manufacturing and processing have largely disappeared, the region is undergoing something of a renaissance, and will soon house a lithium refinery, wind turbine production and possibly a factory that makes small modular nuclear reactors — a future nobody of my father or grandfather’s generation would have predicted.

There’s a cynical view of the search for extraterrestrial life expressed neatly in Stanisław Lem’s “Solaris” (1961) as the “space era’s equivalent of religion: faith disguised as science.” But seeking (and analogy) is fundamental to both science and art, and suggests an openness to new information with the potential to change us beyond recognition. 

There is a NASA poster in Boulby’s Mars Yard that asks, “Life: What is it? Where is it? How can we find it?” The same question could be asked of dark matter. Terrestrial analog sites have already proven that life, once established, can adapt and flourish in the most punishing environments. By exploring its boundary conditions on Earth, we inch ever closer to the thing we’re studying, which is integral to explaining what we are.

The post Searching Earth For Alien Worlds appeared first on NOEMA.

BERLIN — For the past few decades, fears over food security, food safety, the rights of farmers and the environment have fueled a growing consensus that we should all do more to “eat local.”

This development is also being driven by what political scientist Chad Lavin describes in his 2013 book “Eating Anxiety: The Perils of Food Politics,” as fears over multiple collapsing “precious borders” — “borders between the self and the other, borders between states, and borders between the human and the nonhuman.”

The pandemic, Russia’s war in Ukraine and certain climate-oriented policies have stunted global trade, revealed widespread failures within food production and catalyzed dangerous price spikes, leading to the popularity of localism as a solution. But following that impulse is misguided and could wind up being far worse for the planet on the whole.

Transport Is Not The Issue

In restaurants, UN initiatives, multilateral recommendations, corporate campaigns and, above all, food marketing, “local” and “sustainable” have become interchangeable terms. But they are not the same thing.

The decision to eat locally — that is, to embrace a “locavore” diet — would reduce greenhouse gas emissions only if transport accounted for a large share of the emissions generated by food. In the majority of cases, it does not.

Multiple studies put the proportion of emissions generated by transport at just 5-6% of food’s overall total. In the case of beef, it is just 0.5%. Poultry and pork, which generate very little methane, produce fewer emissions than coffee and chocolate. Nuts, meanwhile, can be grown on marginal land, sequestering carbon as they do so and making them carbon negative.

We can use country of origin labels to track “food miles,” but cannot track the means by which those miles were met. More than half of all food is shipped by sea (58.97%) in enormous container vessels that exploit economies of scale to produce radically fewer emissions per mile for every pound of food they ship. Air freight is the most emissions-intensive way to ship food, but accounts for just 0.16% of food transport globally — far less than road (30.97%) and rail (9.9%).

For thousands of years, a stamp or seal that certified the foreign provenance of food was not a warning but a boast. “By the fifth century BC, Celtic princes in the region of France now known as Burgundy were enjoying a glass or two of Greek wine,” notes food historian Rachel Laudan. “Local foods were the lot of the poor who could neither escape the tyranny of local climate and biology nor the monotonous, often precarious, diet it afforded.”

The anthropologist David Wengrow has traced the practice six millennia into the past, as producers sought to capitalize on olive or grape trees grown within a reputable terroir, or to feed the timeless desire for spices, herbs, seeds and fruit that were either unknown or could not be cultivated locally.

In the modern world, country of origin labels were imposed by states in the 19th century to single out products from a rapidly industrializing Germany, of great concern in Britain and France. Today they still enable chauvinism — and are often flat-out misleading. For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture permits beef and pork reared overseas to carry a “Product of USA” label just so long as the meat has been processed or packaged in the U.S.

Scale Matters

The lion’s share of food emissions are generated by land conversion and soil disruption — that is, by the practice of farming itself. When we add to this the methane reactions that take place in cow stomachs and flooded rice paddies, the misapplication of fertilizers and direct emissions from agricultural machines, the damage caused by transport (even when cold storage, logistics and packaging are included) becomes a far smaller aspect of the large task of getting food on everyone’s plates.

Were we to replace global shipping, warehousing and distribution with shorter, individual journeys on local roads, emissions would skyrocket. Imagine every single food item you buy this week needed to be picked up from a different part of the city. Multiply this number by every household in your city and you begin to get the picture. The distributed impact on traffic, air quality and the landscape would be profound.

This cannot happen, however, because most people on Earth live in dense cities whose immediate surroundings are too small, cold, dry, or hot to grow the food they need. We all hope that alternative farming methods will prove far more land-efficient in the long term. Whether you lean towards agroecology and regenerative farming, or precision techniques that use satellites and drones or ferment single-cell proteins indoors, each must be studied for its capacity to produce affordable meals at scale while reducing ecological damage.

One approach that has been researched is organic farming, which struggles with eutrophication (fertilizer runoff into rivers and oceans) as nitrates and phosphates leak uncontrollably from animal manure. The lack of antibiotics, pesticides, and artificial fertilizers on organic farms may be desirable on some fronts, but they are responsible for organic’s lower yields, which means more land is required to produce the same amount of food.

Perfecting one’s own small corner of the planet does not automatically improve the whole and can often lead to a net negative. Policymakers use the concept of “foodsheds” to map the zones within which food is sourced, traded, processed and consumed. But while watersheds may be a logical way to govern rivers (unlike the national boundaries that often cut across them), the only foodshed large enough to support a population heading for 10 billion by 2050 is the planet itself.

Were we to ban international trade and reduce foodsheds to continental scale, less than a third (3.3 billion people) could meet their basic dietary needs — nevermind optimum nutrition. Only 400 million people today would be able to maintain their existing dietary composition within a 100 square kilometer radius; just 10% could access maize and rice.

Anxieties around food can be damaging in other ways. A 2019 report by the Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU) rejected the widespread belief that domestic subsidies were necessary for food security, concluding that the damage wrought by agriculture exceeded the value of the food it produced. FOLU found no cases in which governments used financial instruments to support healthy, sustainable food, instead creating 12 trillion dollars in costs through negative impacts on the climate, human health and development.

The political reasons for this situation are complex, arising from historic fears of famine and the global transition from agricultural society to an industrial one, and yet the chemical calculus is not. Subsidies that support emissions-intensive commodities like meat, dairy and rice increase the rate of emissions. Subsidies that target adverse land use changes, as in the case of cattle, soy and palm oil result in higher emissions. Tariff barriers or protectionist policies that restrict production in more efficient parts of the world also result in higher emissions.

Agrarian Simulations

The drive toward “localization” — eating only seasonal, local foods (swapping where your food is from rather than what you eat) — relies on a fabricated perspective on rural environments. From the time we’re born, we are inundated with children’s books, advertising, documentaries and video games that build a simulated agrarianism around us — one that is not only a gross simplification of food production but may in fact be holding back change. As architect Rem Koolhaas’s decade-long “Countryside” investigation took pains to stress, rural areas today are dominated by “genetic experiment, industrial nostalgia, seasonal immigration, territorial buying sprees, massive subsidies, incidental habitation, tax incentives, political turmoil, digital informers, flex farming, and species homogenisation.” In other words, 97% of Earth’s land (as opposed to the 3% of dense urban space in which most people live) is now “more volatile than the most accelerated city.”

This patchwork of romantic pastoralism has become a veil that frames sun-drenched wheat fields and cud-chewing cattle as a timeless standard rather than a major factor in our present crisis. This continues because we welcome it — and because it deflects attention from political strategies that we know are powerful drivers of rural renewal, pushing the barometer of solutions from the collective to an individual level.

For example, the 2020 OECD report “Rural Well-being: Geography of Opportunities” found that improving communications infrastructure, access to medical treatment, transport and education were all more effective boosters of economic potential in rural areas than the more ambiguous claim that consumer spending will flow outwards and foster long-term growth.

Wherever your own local may be, chances are there will be different kinds of farmers producing different kinds of food somewhere nearby — not only those who have a sizeable, wealthy market to shoulder the “real” cost of their goods, but those who rely on overseas trade to make a living. Why is one more worthy than another?

Products with geographical indications — think Cornish pasties or Worcester sauce, to use two examples from the UK — sell on average around half their stock domestically. The other half goes to the international market. Only a tiny fraction of those sales take place close to where they are produced, though they can bring a tourism boost (once those tourists have encountered the food first overseas).

There’s an important distinction to be made between farmers who benefit from rarefied local products — those who are successful land and business owners — and the often temporary, low-wage agricultural workers who make a living by picking, harvesting and packaging that food. Supporting your “local farmer” may empower the former but makes no guarantees toward the migrant laborers who do much of contemporary farm work.

The imbalance is an historic one. When crops fail, disease cuts down herds of livestock, or fisheries decline, it is rural workers who suffer most — not those in cities whose power, wealth, and connections enable them to overcome the conditions imposed by their immediate environment and call in imports from elsewhere.

The rural affairs journalist and former farmer Sarah Mock has argued that small, local farms have never been successful at producing food either equitably or ecologically, and that in idealizing them we cover up a long history of failure. “To this day, a sacred status is preserved for farmers,” she writes. “In 2021, it would be ludicrous to believe that the child of a software engineer had that work ‘in their blood,’ but we believe it of farm kids.”

She highlights how Adam Calo’s “yeoman myth,” a narrative he says is based on “individual land ownership, single proprietor farming, neoliberal logics of change, and whiteness” has been adopted by governments, nonprofits and the private sector. Mock writes that this narrative is a powerful mythology rooted in the American dream, making small farming “less a viable business plan than a social pacifier.”

In 2019, for example, 84% of earnings on very small farms (which make up around half of the farms in the U.S.) came from off-farm sources like investments, pensions or an outside salary (on large farms just 7% came from outside). Mock also notes how Thomas Jefferson, himself the owner of a 5,000 acre farm, saw “local farms” as a way to quell tensions rather than a tool to feed a growing population.

A Better Response To Disease

Despite the effectiveness of hazard protocols, testing, inspection, sterilization, pasteurization and regulation, high-profile outbreaks regularly strike fear into consumers. While some continue to suspect carcinogenic or other toxic residues lingering on their food, until the 20th century they were basically guaranteed. In 19^th-century Britain, food was regularly adulterated with materials like sawdust and chalk, riddled with insects and lice. Salmonella, typhoid, and cholera were regular specters at a feast (for a startled account of working class food and medicine of the time, read Marx).

The stomach troubles that afflict travelers as they move from parts of the world where food safety standards are enforced to those where they are lax makes a strong case for regulation. A number of everyday veggies, fruit, and legumes — for instance, potatoes, kidney beans, rhubarb — are poisonous without the correct treatment.

Some have noted the efforts of residents in Shanghai to forage local vegetables during harsh lockdowns in the city this year — though we should also note the plea from botanists after people were reported to be falling sick. High-risk foods include raw or undercooked animal products, fresh produce, particularly raw fruits and vegetables, as well as unpasteurized fruit juices and raw sprouts.

Various tracing technologies have been proposed, from blockchain to engineered spores, which will allow authorities to follow a disease outbreak back to its point of origin. But the more effective switch might be political. Rather than consumers shifting their buying patterns toward better regulated foodsheds, a situation that would see wealthy nations turn inwards with environmentally disastrous consequences, they must instead turn outwards and export high-quality food, hygiene protocols, animal vaccines, technology licenses and knowledge from academia and industry, recognizing that the food system is necessarily planetary in scope instead of privatizing innovations that should benefit us all.

Matter And Symbol

The Financial Times recently reported that Denmark will be the first country to develop a state-mandated carbon label for food. It’s a welcome shift quite at odds with the U.S.’s recent addition of a biologically meaningless “bioengineered” sticker, to which water use, land volume and shipping method might also be added.

Given the unique climate, regulatory conditions, and population density at different sites around the globe, it’s perhaps unsurprising that a survey of academic literature on the subject found that “strategically diversifying the food supply via trade rather than by limiting it to local production” was a better approach to food security and lowering emissions.

It can be personally difficult to align trade with something as vital as food. Food is always both matter and symbol. Cooking and eating are basic human rituals that overlay the metabolic burn essential to all life. Clearly, an intelligent balance must be struck between diversifying trade and creating domestic systems capable of plugging shortfalls. But those systems should not be the field-based monocultures that have long dominated farming.

For a limited number of items, in the right context, local will be the smart option. Where it’s possible to make the call, this is no bad thing. But localism, an ideology linked to a romantic view of farming that constricts our imagination and prevents new visions of food production from emerging, prevents us from making this choice.

Appeals to localism are as complicated as appeals to nature — a realm of both sunflowers and anthrax, aspirin and mercury. Food is a core element in identity formation, and when our beliefs about it are challenged by science, economics or simply different tastes, we can feel wounded. The cuisines we create and consume can be a means to define ourselves, our community and nation — but they can also be a means to transcend those things.

Instead of directing people to eat only what is traditional, local and seasonal, we should encourage a widening of the collective palette — both culinary and cultural. Embracing other, newer types of food, produced in as yet unrecognizable ways, will be just as essential to transforming the food system as it was in building the one we have.

The post Against Localism In Food appeared first on NOEMA.