Mars: The Next International Destination

Wouldn't this be cool? My bags are packed!
 

The international community is longing for the next big cooperative goal in space exploration. There have been modest partnerships in space since the 1960s -- growing during the Space Shuttle era -- but the International Space Station was a turning point in international cooperation. It was far from a perfect model, but it pulled the various national space agencies closer together than ever before. For more than two decades this partnership grew, worked out technical and cultural differences, and evolved. These nations have managed to build, assemble and now operate the largest structure ever built in space.

ISS is supposed to operate until at least 2020. However, the time to start planning the next large international space mission is now. That mission should be a human mission to Mars. If we wait until ISS ends, we will have not only wasted a lot of time, but potentially wasted the opportunity to harness the expertise, lessons and unity that ISS brings us in space. If we let go of that unity in purpose, we may not get it back.

An international mission also makes sense from a budgetary perspective. Budget and policy pressures are far greater than they were in the 1990s when ISS was started, and that holds true for both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Dividing the costs will increase the total budget of the mission, but will reduce the cost that each nation will need to contribute. The international mission planners will also have the benefit of two decades of international coordination on ISS, which includes development of procedures, hardware integration and interpersonal/intercultural understanding. Without this foundation created by ISS, starting a new international mission would be far more complicated.

Perhaps the greatest potential benefit of an International effort is mission longevity. Over the past few decades, numerous missions and programs have been cancelled because of budgetary pressure, political wrangling and lack of unity of purpose. If ISS had remained an American-only mission, it almost certainly would have been cancelled back in the 1990s. Because it was based on international agreements and treaties, it was much more difficult to cast away and so the mission endured. A similar structure could be created for a Mars mission -- a structure that will provide assurances that the mission can't be easily cancelled by any nation -- one that would build on the positive and negative lessons of ISS.

In the United States, a human mission to Mars is precisely what the nation needs -- and a majority of U.S. citizens agree. A recent poll sponsored by Explore Mars showed that over 70 percent of Americans believe that humans will land on Mars by the early 2030s and more than 65 percent believe that both human and robotic exploration should be pursued. When the same group of people was asked what percentage of the U.S. federal budget NASA accounts for, the average answer was 2.5 percent -- in reality, NASA accounts for less than half of one percent of federal spending.

Despite the troubling economic and budgetary times, there is clear support in the United States for human Mars exploration. In the same survey, participants favored doubling the NASA budget -- to a full one percent -- which would include a human mission to Mars. It is unclear what the level of support is internationally, but there would likely be solid support if a clear and sustainable mission plan is proposed.

It is time that the international community commits to a new mission -- one that will land humans on Mars by the early 2030s.

How a Cat Walked 200 Miles Home: The Amazing Science of Your Cat’s Inner Compass

When a battered, skinny tortoiseshell cat wandered into a yard in Florida earlier this year, she could have been any other stray, but she was nothing of the kind. She carried an implanted microchip—one put there by a loving owner—and it revealed an intriguing story: the cat belonged to a local family, had been lost on a trip two months earlier, and  had traveled 200 miles (322 km) in that time to arrive back in her hometown. Her journey inspired a spate of articles looking for an explanation for how this one cat, and a few others who’ve made similar trips, managed such impressive feats of navigation. The response from many eminent animal researchers was the same: “No idea.”

Cats’ long-distance travels are relatively rare in the scientific literature, which explains the dearth of answers—at least so far. But that’s not the case for the wanderings of sundry other creatures, especially those that migrate. Such extreme journeys—mapless, compassless, sometimes intercontinental, through places theanimals have never seen before—seem nothing short of miraculous. That’s the kind of mystery that gets scientists moving, and move they have, conducting all manner of experiments over the years—locking animals in planetariums, carrying them around in dark boxes, putting them in wading pools wrapped in magnets, and destroying various bits of anatomy to see which piece was the important one. These experiments have yielded fascinating insights into the animal brain and into a world beyond human sensation.

Part of what navigating animals do is not entirely surprising. Planetarium studies reveal that some animals steer by the stars, an approach that’s comfortingly familiar to Homo sapiens but practiced by organisms as distant as the nocturnal dung beetle, which, as one recent study revealed, can roll its precious gob of poo in a straight line only as long as the Milky Way is in view. One of the most accomplished animal navigation researchers of the twentieth century, naturalist Ronald Lockley, found that captured seabirds released far from their homes could make a beeline back so long as either the sun or the stars were visible; an overcast sky threw them off so much that many never made it back.

But plenty of other navigating animals are using something most humans regularly forget exists: the Earth’s magnetic field. In illustrations, the field is usually depicted as a series of loops that emerge from the south pole and reenter the planet at the north pole, and extend out to the edges of our atmosphere, sort of like a cosmic whisk. Our compass needles are designed to align with the field, and in the last few decades it’s become clear that numerous animals can find their way by feeling some of its various field.

Sea turtles, for example, don’t use the field simply to tell north from south. According to experiments led by Kenneth Lohmann, a professor of biology at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, they are actually born knowing a magnetic map of the ocean. Newly hatched loggerhead turtles in the populations Lohmann studies journey 8,000 miles (12,900 km) from their hatching beaches around the Atlantic Ocean to reach feeding areas, and if they don’t keep right on track, they do not survive. Lohmann learned early on that the turtles could sense the Earth’s magnetism: he found that hatchlings from the Florida coast, which normally swim east in darkness to start their migration, swam the other way when they were put in a magnetic field that reversed north and south. That got Lohmann thinking that the turtles’ long-distance navigation might be linked to their being able to respond to whorls and quirks in the planetary field they encounter along the way.

To study this, he and colleagues collected baby sea turtles a few hours before they would have left the nest on their own and put them in pools surrounded by magnetic coils. The coils were designed to reproduce the Earth’s magnetic field at specific points along the turtles’ migration. Reliably, the young turtles oriented themselves and swam in the direction relative to the magnetic field that, had they been in the open ocean, would have kept them on course. Lohmann has tested this with 8 different locations along their route, and in each case the turtles head in just the direction required to get them to their destination. The turtles may not know where they are in any big-picture way—as Lohmann says, they may not see themselves as blinking spots on a map—but they have inherited a sense that should they feel a particular pull from the magnetic field, well, better take a right.

The list of animals that navigate by magnetism, suspected and confirmed, is long, and includes a few mammals in addition to migrating birds and turtles. But our understanding of the mechanism behind that ability is sketchy: sea turtles tend to be threatened or endangered species, so scientists can study only their behavior, not their brains, and even in animals in which such work is possible, it’s hard to tell what parts of the brain and other physical structures are involved.

Pigeons, one of the most intensively studied animal navigators, show how complex a question this is. One leading theory holds that iron-containing cells in the beak send magnetic information to the brain, since destroying the nerve that carries sensation from beak to brain seems to disrupt pigeons’ navigation. However, last year it emerged that those beak cells are not neurons capable of sending messages, as had been supposed; they appear to be immune cells, throwing the beak theory into confusion. Another school of thought suggests that the magnetic field may be affecting chemical reactions in the birds’ eyes, literally changing the way the world looks when they are oriented in a particular direction. And David Dickmann, a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine whose primary work is on a magical ability we humans often forget we have—our ability to sense gravity and constantly adjust our position to keep our balance—has lately published work showing that pigeons may have a magnetic-field sensor in their inner ears. No one knows yet which of these mechanisms, or what combination of them, is at the root of the pigeon’s powers.

And lest we forget, the magnetic field is far from the only thing out there that navigating animals can sense and humans cannot. The heads of sharks are threaded with jelly-filled tubes, called the ampullae of Lorenzini, that allow them to detect extremely faint electric currents and may help them with navigation. Scents in the air, at concentrations far below human perception, are perceivable to numerous creatures that may use them to steer (in fact, pigeons that cannot smell seem oddly lost, even with their magnetic abilities intact). Bees can see patterns in sunlight invisible to the naked human eye and can use them to find their way.

We can see only the outcomes, never the workings, of whatever evolved systems animals use to orient themselves across hundreds or thousands of miles. But that hasn’t stopped us from working to understand the feats of migrating reptiles, homing pigeons, and even lost pets. With reminders like the odyssey of the Florida housecat, how can we stop?

For Math Education to Profit, Look to the Nonprofits

The convergence in the last 20 years of advancements in computer, cognitive and neurosciences has made game-changing educational programs a possibility. In the area of mathematics education, inventors can now see a path to give teachers powerful yet easy-to-use digital tools to get all students to be proficient in math and even algebra. The breakthroughs go beyond math for math's sake, beyond proficiency on tests, to the fundamental purpose of math education for all students: every person possessing the powerful thinking, analytic and problem-solving skills that mathematical literacy promises. To put a number it, a 2011 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development study estimated that even modestly increased student math skills would add over $40 trillion to the U.S. economy over current students' lifetimes.

But the K-12 education market is a poster child for unhealthy markets. Products are developed to politicized market specifications, which are far below their potential. Digital solutions from the past 30 years have not worked, so expectations are low. Curriculum is treated as a commodity, and not even evaluated. Not only do most educators not seriously expect teacher tools or content to make a game-changing difference, but K-12 purchasers are looking for approaches familiar to what they experienced in school. The market even lacks understanding of the indicators of program quality and effectiveness necessary to meet the market spec of standardized test success; so simple or secondary features hold sway instead.

In this market, I believe the leaders achieving radically higher educational goals are mission-driven, not-for-profit organizations. Nonprofits, almost by definition, need support beyond current market forces. Visionary and savvy business social investments, though relatively small change to billion-dollar businesses, can be and should be vital support for continuous invention and prove-out.

For those visionary businesses and foundations interested in accelerating a quantum leap forward for all teachers and students in K-12 education outcomes (their future workforce/customers), I'd like to suggest that the following considerations are crucial:

• Look for nonprofits pursuing radically different approaches. Digitizing existing content and approaches is just more of the same, even if ported onto a glossy-screened touch-tablet. People are actually inventing new learning tools, content and processes -- like inventing powered flight. Real transformation is going to use teaching and learning models that seem and look and feel radically different from how you learned. Search for that.
• Look for truly scalable approaches. These three questions will help you evaluate a program's scalability:


• Are they applicable to all teachers and students, from gifted to struggling to English learners?


• Are they aimed at the heart of the problem right now: at all schools and teachers and training processes as-is? Think Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston and D.C. public schools.


• Don't just focus on and invest in the fringes of the school market, which will take years if ever to reach the majority of students in the community, and the nation. Each year, 4 million more children are passing through an untransformed pipeline.


• Can they scale up fast and without limit, driven ultimately by non-philanthropic funds? That is, do the economics of the solution enable eventual demand and resources from the main market, i.e. government public schools, to adopt, scale and sustain?

While some nonprofits aimed at breakthrough transformation will be in the early stages of research and invention, you can also look for others with solid evidence that their program delivers results, and that there will be market demand and that it is economically scalable.

There are examples of businesses following all of these principles in their social investment in education. Corporate foundations, CEOs and chairs of Cisco, Broadcom, Emulex, Microsemi, PwC, Bank of America, Chevron and others have come together to support a breakthrough math program using instructional software to tap students' visual reasoning. You would not recognize math taught this way; it is that different.

The lowest performing elementary schools in Orange County were provided grants to launch this math program. Over 80 percent of those schools are now participating. A 45,000-student district serving predominantly economically disadvantaged English learners, Santa Ana Unified, went district-wide and closed its "achievement gap" with the California state average. And the targeted schools at a county-wide level are greatly outpacing similar schools in Academic Performance Index growth. The proven results have attracted district funding at over 1,000 additional sites. Over 500,000 students are being served, and scale-up is economical.

For any company interested in helping education, keep an eye out for the pioneering nonprofits that fit this profile. Your social investment will then be poised to go beyond "help" to transform and scale to millions.