 Tonight, I'm happy to present Richard Barker, a UW-Madison researcher investigating plant responses to space flight using custom imaging platforms and cloud-based data analysis. He currently is a co-investigator on three NASA grants and has been involved in planning and launching of multiple Astra Botany experiments to the International Space Station. He was selected to be a representative of the American Academy of Science at the Future Leaders in Space Science Congress in Beijing in 2016-17 and is currently co-chair of the NASA Advanced Plant Working Group. He has recently co-founded the Collaborative Science Environment to develop research project educational experiences using recent advances in plant imaging technology. Richard's previous interdisciplinary research programs have tackled real-world issues, such as the future of food and farming. Community engagement and performance art have always been a way of life for Richard, starting in his youth as a fire juggler at music festivals in the UK. This energy and passion was then directed to skateboarding, snowboarding, break dancing, and more. Now he turns his attention to using the journey to Mars to inspire students with tales of Astra Botany and help students network with NASA Space Life Science Research Community. Please help me welcome our speaker, Richard Barker. Could you tell there are lots of made-up words? OK, great. So thanks for the opportunity to come and share the sort of research that we do with you guys. Because the way that you inspire your children helps me because it's actually a couple of parents here in the audience who have had the pleasure of working with me in my lab. And so you'll see some of their kids work in these presentations, in these slides. So OK, I work in UW-Manitun. All good NASA projects, they have to have an acronym. The first one I worked on is TOAST. TOAST stands for Test of Arabidopsis Space Transcriptome. Don't worry, there's no test on this at the end. Arabidopsis is a small, fast-growing model plant. It's great for genetics and molecular biology. And I'll show you its nervous system later. Any neuroscientists in the room? No, ah, done. OK, I love it when I say plants have a nervous system. I might as a neuroscientist here because they squirm. They get uncomfortable. It's really fun. But you'll see, they have this rapid signaling system. It's really similar to a nervous system. So my day-to-day job, when we're not having the rare opportunity of sending plants to space, that we do every two years on average for the last six years, we play a lot of computer games. We take the data from those experiments, and then we process them, we analyze them, we overthink them, and then we try to make them available. And that's why I work with Christian, for example, to local students to make sure they understand the patterns that come out of it and ask them if they have better ways to process it. So it's a collaborative effort. And all that kind of computer programming is summarized with this diagram. OK, cool. If you want to know more about that, on the 10th of November, we'll be presenting on NASA TV as part of the American Society of Gravitational Space Research. And you were to see that kind of computational stuff being demonstrated there live. But that's another talk for another day. So to try to make you guys think that I'm legit, rather than tell you I am, I'm going to let the Big 10 Network summarize our research in one minute. If humanity is to become a multi-planetized species and have people living and working on the moon and on Mars, we need to ensure that we can grow food locally for them. We've had three successful space launches. And with the first lab to say that the plans that we engineered for the space environment grew better than the wild type. Space is a stressful environment because of the lack of gravity. The Gilroy Lab studies how plants grow in space to better understand what it might take to have strong growth and good yields to support astronaut health. A lot of students at the University of Wisconsin have been involved in helping us explore the research that we're doing with NASA. We need to work with engineers and computer programmers to develop new tools in order to create stresses on Earth that replicate the spaceflight environment. This work can be used as a roadmap in the future to accelerate the adaptation of plants to the spaceflight environment. So that's a quick snapshot into our lab. That was all filmed live with students doing real experiments. OK, so Ashreya Botany, what's an Ashreya Botany lab and what is an Ashreya Botanist? So, well, who here's seen the movie, The Martian? Ooh, ooh, ooh. OK, if you haven't, OK, now you do have homework. You have to watch The Martian at some point next week. It's awesome. I'm not going to spoil the plot for you, but it is one of those American Hollywood movies where the American government spends way too much money trying to rescue Matt Damon from a sticky situation he's got himself in. OK, classic formula. But it's brilliant. And the reason I love it so much is because science is actually the star of the show. It's not Matt Damon. It's the way that he uses science to survive in a inhospitable planet. And the best thing about it is the hero of the movie is a botanist, an Ashreya Botanist. So maybe I have a slightly skewed opinion on this movie. But it's really good. OK, so, but Ashreya Botanists, they're real. And one of the earliest Ashreya Botanists actually comes from Wisconsin. This is Ray Wheeler. He used to work at UW Madison. He's now worked at the Kennedy Space Center. And when this graphical artist decided to draw or make a picture for NASA of what a Martian greenhouse would look like, they put him in it. Look, it's him. It really is. So the moral of this thing is we need steam. We need to put the A back in STEM. You need the graphic designers, the visionaries to kind of paint the pictures that inspires the engineers to build the technologies that normal people just don't think of at that moment. Some things are so crazy and far out there that you think it's impossible to get to. But the artists, they can paint the pictures, and that gives us the road maps. So why go out of space? Is it just for inspiration for artists? No, no, I could bore you with the statistics on how useful it is for the US economy. And it'd be even easier to do it with the statistics on the Canadian economy, because the Canadian aerospace industry made this lovely graphic. But I'm not going to, because this face, whenever people talk about socioeconomic impact, you start to fall asleep, please. I do. So instead, I'm going to tell you there's a much better reason to be inspired by space exploration. It is important, because we do invest in it. And that reason is the next generation. Take, for example, Kai Raspussen. He's from Manitou. He worked with us in the Ashley Biology Lab for a while. And he was loving the freedom that we were providing to him. He was learning biology. He was learning genetic engineering. And he turned some of you into, he goes, one day, Richard, I don't think I want to be a genetic engineer. I don't think I want to be a molecular biologist. I want to be a fashion designer and a TV presenter. And we went, go for it. So go check out Ashley Bonnet TV. It's on YouTube, and he's got some lovely little videos in which he interviews myself and my mentor, Simon. And there's even a live footage of when we got our first samples back from the space station. And you could see the local high school rock tree kids getting really excited about the samples coming. So you see, different people get different things from astrobotany. Another person, Natasha, she loved trying to get me organized, got really good at the molecular biology. And she started learning genetic engineering. And now she's at the University of Wash U doing a PhD on plant sensitivity to mechanical signaling. Because in outer space, where there's no gravity, there's many weird stresses. But removal of gravity, that's the removal of a mechanical force, right? Right now, as you guys sit there, there's one G of force acting on your muscles at all time, acting on your bones right now. And your muscles and bones are resisting. Same with the plants outside. They're not with muscles and bones, but their structures are resisting that one G of mechanical force that's always there. So what happens when you remove that? This was a question I've had for many years. I couldn't answer. I asked Natasha, and now she's doing a PhD on it. Hazar. So why look to the stars? Why grow plants in space? Why try and explore the solar system? I say to inspire the next generation. So what is the most exciting journey? Well, I put it to you all, the most exciting journeys is the journey to Mars. And so this is a graphic that was made by NASA showing the various steps currently with the beginning of this journey. We're just down here in lower orbit. But you gave me a pointer. Thank you. I should probably try and use the pointer. OK, cool. I can learn as I go. So we're here currently in low Earth orbit. That's great. The International Space Station gives us a lot of opportunities to learn about how life adapts to the lack of gravity and to the increased amounts of cosmic rays that you encounter as you leave the Earth's protective magnetosphere. But our goal is Mars, and we're going back to the moon as part of Project Artemis. Who's heard of Project Artemis? Yes, yes, come on, you all right? So everybody's heard of Project Apollo, right? Artemis is Apollo's sister. She's the goddess of the moon. And so NASA have stated that they want to send a group of female astronauts to the moon by 2024. This is Project Artemis. There's a wonderful book on the first city on the moon called Artemis. And so the new space race is about going back to the moon. And it's going to be in collaboration with industrial partners such as SpaceX and Blue Origin. And it's going to be in competition with the European Space Agency and other international space agencies. A bit of competition, driving standards. Adam Smith would be proud. OK, so Natasha. Oh, yeah. So yeah, a real direct impact. She's such a great student. She was inspirational. And it's just really great to see how Ashro Bonny can take people off on a journey. Maybe that journey isn't going to take everybody to the red planet, but it will take you to places you've never really jumped off before. Ashro Bonny. OK, cool. So why were NASA interested in our lab and our research? It's not just because we had great students to work with. It's because we had a really interesting mechanism to understand how plants sense their environment. So who here talks to your plants? Anybody? You people? Good, good. Hopefully more of you will at the end of this talk because they do feel that sound that was. OK, so, oops, ladies, let's go back. This video here. So this is the plant's nervous system. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. So we published this in Science Magazine last summer. So this is a plant nervous system. No neuroscientists. This is a plant nervous system being activated by 100 millimolar glutamate. This is a neurotransmitter, a human neurological transmitter activating the plant's electrical signaling system. You can see the time in the top corner. It's pretty fast. So what I'm trying to demonstrate here is when you provide a stimulus, such as heat, cold, mechanical stimulus, pathogens, anything to a leaf or to a surface on a plant, it is capable of sending that signal rapidly throughout the plant. So what happens when you put that plant in microgravity? This system evolved with 1G always acting on it. So we don't actually know what's going to happen when we remove that gravity. But we have some theories. And so we started to test them in the lab. And so we worked with some local students and invented this thing. This is what we call a gravity randomization device or a 3D kind of stuff. So it turns your sample. And so it's constantly changing the gravity vector. We made a custom on which has lights and cameras in the middle. And so NASA are asking us to give this to them. So we have to give it to them because they keep us afloat. So again, the reason this is in here is to show you that UW students can design and build things that NASA themselves can't and really want to get their hands on. And as a result of this, we were able to investigate how plants use gravity to guide themselves. So OK, everybody knows that leaves grow up towards light and roots go down towards water. But when you germinate a seed, if you don't provide a light gradient and you don't provide a water gradient, the roots still know what way is down and the shoots still know what way is up. So that means that in the genome of the plant, there is some genes that encode for proteins that allow the plant to perceive its orientation relative to the gravity vector. And by using this new device developed here at UW, we are able to start to change that system, perturb that system, and understand it better. And use this to generate hypotheses that we can test in space. This is another awesome device that was made by a UW student. So what about when you're going up to microgravity? What about when you're sitting on that rocket and you've also seen those pictures of the astronauts that their face has been pulled back? Well, that's hypergravity. And so you can get hypergravity by flying rockets in the Madison West High School rocketry team. We've been doing that with us for a while. The rockets are intrinsically stochastic. They're kind of hard to reproduce every single time, particularly when you're working with the high school team. But this is the orbit app. This thing is reproducible. The video I showed you there is actually imitating the blue originals. It's awesome, but I want to talk you through it myself. So who here knows about blue origins? No, no, maybe. Give you a right. So maybe some of you here has heard of SpaceX. Maybe if you've heard about that. So blue origins, our SpaceX is a big vibe. So blue origins were made by Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos is the billionaire behind Amazon. So every time you guys buy something from Amazon, you're actually contributing to blue origin. So blue origins created the first rocket that they would take off and land five times. So this rocket goes to the edge of space. Essentially it provides about five minutes of microgravity. So that centrifuge I showed you earlier in the lab made by the local high school students actually can create the same G-forces as this rocket taking off. So thanks to the work of this team, we were able to synthesize, we were able to make a mock launch of this blue origins launch and look at the genetics and look at how the plants would feel. What do you think they did? If you put a plant in a rocket and it takes off, it gets hypergravity, what defense system you can activate? That one, yeah. Like being punched, essentially. And so we had a hypothesis that we'd be activating the mechanical defense system. The students build a device, tested it, got the plant samples, and we showed them activating the mechanical defense system and the pathogen defense system. We then went to NASA and blew origins and we'll be using this next year. We'll be sending some of our stem cells up to the edge of space using this system. And the coolest thing about it is the rockets are recycling. They land themselves. This dramatically reduces the cost of access. In this case, to the edge of space, but we're SpaceX all the way into lower orbit. So we're entering a new era of space exploration. In the last era, rockets were disposable, they're expensive. Now we're entering a new era of recycled rockets so the cost of getting some mass into space has never been so cheap. And so now we have to ensure that the next generation is really imaginative with what they want to do with that. Self-blounding rockets. Science fiction is now a science fact. Okay, cool. Though it does look a bit silly that rocket, doesn't it? So let's put that rocket in perspective because I'm no rocket scientist. I'm a botanist. I love plants. So I actually had to go play Kerbal, the space program so I could speak to my students that did do rocket science. It's a really good game. I managed to crash into the moon, it was brilliant. It's hard, it's really hard. And what you have here are a range of different rockets that are under construction. Saturn V, this is the biggest rocket that took humans to the moon. Here we kind of have this as the Falcon, this is what we've been using to hitch ride to the International Space Station over the last few years. This is the Falcon Heavy. This is on that Elon Musk used to send his Tesla to Mars. And this is what they're building at the moment. The interplanetary transport system. They just did a test flight and was able to take off and land. It looks silver and ours, design's changed a bit. And supposedly even the next four years that we're doing a flyby past the moon with a billionaire art and a collection of outstanding artists from Japan as they go around the moon and back. But the one I'm really excited about is this thing here, is these blue origin ones. Because Jepez also said he wants to create a delivery surface to the moon. Like Amazon's livery to my home, okay. Amazon's livery to the moon, okay. I thought, who would want to do that? Toyota, who drives a Toyota maybe. They have got a lunar rover that they want to send up. They just don't have an aerospace company to deliver their hardware there. So there is an economic opportunity there. And that's the first step on the journey to Mars that I showed you earlier. Whenever you speak to NASA officials, they say we have to get low Earth orbit being supported by private enterprise so that way NASA can continue to lead the way and push the frontiers out beyond the confines of our blue origins. So this is Jepezos, do you know where this is taken? This is the Oshkosh air show. So this was the first one that went all the way up and back. So I missed him, I couldn't see it. Anyway, this is their big rocket factory now next to Kennedy Space Center. Since I last took this photo, they built a second building over there. This is huge, this thing down here is where the trucks go in. See that, that's a lorry, no, a truck, we call them lorries, you call them trucks. Sorry, okay. Okay, so why am I so excited about a lunar delivery system? Okay, I've got some hippie origins. I've got this fascination about having a permaculture system on the moon. Wouldn't it be awesome if we could get dwarf plum trees up there? So one of the major stresses about living in places of reduced gravity such as the moon and low Earth orbit is muscle and bone deterioration. There's lots of evidence on this from the Astronaut Core Research Program. And one of the things my grandmother taught me is that if you eat plums, it's really great at reducing muscle and bone loss as a result of inactivity. So I think it'd be a really great thing to have a permaculture system on the moon with these nice, fresh, locally grown fruits that the astronauts could eat when they get there. I know, I'm eccentric. So why go to the moon? Why put this to you now? The lunar Olympics, wouldn't it be awesome? So we have the summer Olympics, we have the winter Olympics, the next currently we're engaged in the robotic Olympics. You know, with the Jade Rabbit, the Chinese rover that's on the dark side of the moon at the moment. But when humans get there and we have our lunar base, wouldn't it be great if we engaged in the lunar Olympics? And I'll just talk about the few astronauts on the Apollo who practiced jumping and falling over. I think talk about like basketball where you have to get double front flips to get a slam dunk or something like that. Who knows what the next generation of space explorers will invent as the next generation of sports in these reduced environments? And again, as we mentioned earlier, the lunar Olympics has already begun. It's in the robotic stage at the moment. Okay, so when this came out, it's between you and me, right? So this is a cotton plant growing that they said was on the moon. When you dive into all the bottom, the documents that they released, the only images they released were of the ground controls. They haven't actually released any images of the cotton on the moon yet. Conspiracy, conspiracy time. Anyway. Okay, but as I said, so we're going back to the moon. This is the Japanese billionaire who is, so I thought to myself, what are you gonna do on your first flight to the moon? Like as Elon is now currently imagining, he's like, well, my first flight capable of sending stuff to Mars, I'll just send my Tesla car, right? Now the rocket's a bit bigger. We're gonna send some people on, what should we do? So obviously the scientists went, oh, we should go do some fantastic science. We should monitor cosmic rays and something really important. But he's a businessman. He's an entrepreneur who wants to make money. So what did he do? They partnered up and they've got a competition to select about 10 key artists from different fields, architects, painters, musicians, and they're going to be taking them on the journey around the moon and back again. And the goal is them to make works of art on this journey, to inspire a generation. Essentially each one of the pieces they make will be priceless. That's quite a good idea, isn't it? Okay, cool. They wanna land on the moon. So we actually need to build some landing pads for them. The first ones go like, currently we're working with JPL, the Jet Pulsion Laboratory. And if you wanna get like lunar soil samples, lunar regolith, when your lander goes down, it kind of blows away the dust that's there until you get down to the stone below. And so if you wanna get the soil, you have to kind of drive a rover away from your landing vehicle. And currently people like SpaceX haven't been able to test their landing systems on surfaces like that. All their landing surfaces on Earth have been like floating boats or like the land. So they're a bit concerned that they might not be able to deal with this dust thing. I think they'll be fine. But they do, so there is plans to try and somehow build like landing pads for them. But me personally as a scientist, the thing that I'm really excited about, particularly with the goal of going to Mars is the deep space gateway. So Blue Origin, SpaceX, they keep saying we can go direct. We can land on the surface of the Moon direct. We can go direct to Mars. But if you look at Von Braun, like the German rock and scientist who first thought up the Saturn V and first postulated and calculated that humans could go to Mars, in his vision for how to get there, he envisaged having a space station in low Earth orbit, a space station in lunar orbit. He envisaged having lunar mining of the fuel needed for the journey and then giant spaceships going back and forth to another space station situated just on outside Mars orbit. And so that's the exact process that's been designed by the United Space Launch Alliance. That's like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, that old group of locker companies that almost had a monopoly. It wasn't really a monopoly. So we're building the infrastructure to go there the way that Von Braun first imagined. But at the same time, private enterprise is also building a more direct strategy. And so it's really good to have a bit of competition there because you don't know what's the best way to do things. So hedge your bets, right? The reason I love the Deep Space Gateway is not just because it harks back to this old traditional method that was proposed by Von Braun, but it's because it also provides us with an opportunity to do some really cool experiments. So we're starting to understand how life responds to microgravity thanks to the experiments we've been doing on the International Space Station. But cosmic rays, these space cosmic rays, that's the showstopper. And so we definitely need more data and that's so we can understand it better so we can try and come up with countermeasures and provide advice to the astronauts to go on this perilous journey. So the Deep Space Gateway will give us the opportunity to grow plants and other organisms outside the Earth's protective magnetosphere out there in deep space cosmic rays. So this is gonna be a really fantastic opportunity to do some cool new studies and we're hoping they can build a deep space garden in there. That's a different tangent. But I mentioned the goal is Mars and it's sort of outgoing Mars direct. Okay, so when I'm talking about this with Elon Musk, this billionaire entrepreneur who can build self-landing rockets, I probably sound, I don't sound that crazy, do I? But this guy, he's bonkers. So this guy, this is Zubin. Robert Zubin was the guy that actually devised the Mars direct strategy. So Von Braun who came up with the idea of building all this hardware to stop off en route, like he was brilliant and that's why the Apollo program worked. When in the 90s, when George Prasinha came and postulated that we should go to Mars and they came out with this report about how Von Braun described it to do it, Congress just threw in the bin. They said, oh, that's way too expensive. We're never gonna be able to do that. And this guy went, that's crazy. You don't wanna build all that infrastructure. You wanna go Mars direct. You wanna live off the land. I've actually seen some videos of him actually shouting at Congress, getting really angry. He looks completely bonkers. I'm not saying shouting at Congress isn't a good thing. So we probably need to do it more now. But when he was going to Mars and shouting at Congress, he did seem crazy. But now we have Elon Musk on board. And so I'm really excited by the next generation of space exploration. But we have to be careful because now we're walking a fine line between science fiction and science reality. We don't wanna fall off that. So for example, when we get to Mars, a lot of people in science fiction talk about terraforming Mars. Well, it's not gonna look like that. I'm sorry. Planetary ecosystem synthesis is actually a really interesting concept that's been used as a teaching tool in Madison, Wisconsin for many decades, in which you can use the concept of terraforming another planet to talk about how humans can influence planetary ecosystems and how they cause them to change over time. So you can start to teach them the important mathematical components and environmental components that are required to understand the border impacts of climate change and CO2 in the atmosphere without terrifying people about planet Earth becoming inhospitable. So what is this future agro ecosystem when these extraterrestrial environments gonna look like? And again, this is where we look, these are where we look to the graphic designers. We go, what should it look like? This, how do we imagine it? Greenhouses on Mars. But the reality is a little bit more simple for now. So this is the here and now. This is the veggie growth system. This is what we got to use on our last experiment on the International Space Station. It was developed in Madison, Wisconsin, in Middleton at Orbitech. And it's quite simple, really. It's got some bath curtains and purple lights. Notice there's no green lights. Can you think why? So on the space station, energy is premium. Like they get all the energy from the solar panels and such. So they don't want to waste energy on green. So the plants only really need the purple and the blue to photosynthesize and grow. And so the so far, all the plant growth experiments have been done just using purple light. I say so far, because last week, I was speaking to my friend Joy at the Kennedy Space Center and she showed me a photo of a current experiment that's on right now and they're actually testing the green lights as well. So last week, I wouldn't have said that. Until now, it's always just been purple. And this is the perfect, this is a crop. So who here likes eating their salad? Yes. Yay, right? This is our Regis letters. You can see the red pigment coming. That's anthocyanins. Anthocyanins are really good for you. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir, but you know, colorful food is really good for you. But now imagine you're like 200 miles up. The only light green and blue you just get is just looking down at Earth. You're in this small, dank, smelly, dirty place with some people you hardly know and there's no up or down. Now imagine looking at that plant. You've just eaten for like last few months like dry tin food or whatever. You've been adding water to rehydrate it. And then you have a fresh leafy green right there in front of you. Does it look a little bit more appetizing now? According to the Ash and Watts, it does. So this is changing the environment. So in order to go to these alien environments, we can build habitats that can keep humans alive and we can build habitats that can keep plants as we know it alive. But anyone who's tried to build an environment and sustain an environment knows it's difficult to maintain that kind of natural homeostasis. Things often have booms and busts and all this kind of stuff. So we're coming at it from a biological perspective and we're saying maybe we should look at the plants and not just look at the environment. Maybe there's like a synergy between the two. Perhaps we can ensure we have the right varieties or enhanced varieties to go with this correct environment or enhanced augmented alien environment. And so this is how they're doing it at the Kennedy Space Center. This is how they're doing it in Hollywood. This is where, again, if you haven't seen the Martian, I'm sorry, but you probably already know he grows potatoes, right? So here he is growing potatoes. There's something impossible at the beginning of the movie and there's something impossible at the end, so I'm not gonna ruin it for you. But there's this bit in the middle that no one else notices, which really bugs me as a plant scientist. So here he is with the Martian soil and he's just about to put the potatoes in it to grow his dinner. But he doesn't wash the soil. People go, what? It turns out Mars is a really salty planet. If you've got no magnetosphere and you've got a nice watery ocean-filled planet and you have these solar winds coming past, stripping that water away and some of it like seeping down and in, essentially what you're gonna do is end up with a crust of salt. And not just normal salt. Soldiers then had millions of years of UV light bombarding it to make it like super toxic salt. So if he was gonna do that, he would have to wash the soil. Just needs a bit of water, but they don't show it in the movie. Details, that's the details. So, but this is how NASA is, I'm looking at getting a healthy, nutritious food for astronauts to eat in on long distance, deep space missions. And that is through wonderful leafy greens like this. Who's ever grown bok choy? Maybe you've eaten it, right? Have you ever seen this purple version? No, I haven't, but I want it now, don't you? Doesn't that look gorgeous? Tastes great, kind of a bit bitter. I like my bitter. I'm really good for you. Okay, so there's a bit of the background. So we're into understanding the environments the plants grow in and we're into the nutritional component. But ultimately, we're intro-stressed in blue skies research. We really wanna understand like fundamentally how and why the plants are responding without really trying to apply it. Who, have you heard of blue skies research before? So intrinsically, it doesn't matter why the sky is blue. The person that worked out that the fraction of light through the atmosphere was causing it to diffract the different amounts and blue can burn down more so we can see it. The person that worked that out didn't get rich and didn't really help anyone at that moment. But hundreds of years later, that knowledge led to the development of optics and telescopes and which led to lasers, which cured cancers and it's all kinds of countless benefits for humanity. So blue sky sciences, sciences designed to not necessarily have an immediate product at that moment but to lay the foundation for other people later on to potentially do something useful with it. So this particular project is an example of that. Just wanted to tell you through a quick example. So this is our next project that we're gonna launch to the space station. This is called TikTok. So I mentioned that all good NASA projects have to have a good acronym. Yeah, right. There's a theme here. So TikTok stands for targeting improved cotton through orbital cultivation. So who here likes cotton? I hope so, because this room would be a very different place if we didn't have any cotton in here. So cotton is an incredibly thirsty plant. We use it up. Have you seen the photos of the aerial sea disappearing over the last few decades because of irresponsible irrigation in some of the regions that were once part of the USSR? So it's a very visual reminder that we do, we have the capacity to change our ecosystems if we don't look at the bigger impact. And cotton is a very thirsty plant and a very valuable plant. There's two things combined can have negative consequences. So we started looking at technologies that can help them be less thirsty, essentially. We developed a method to generally engineer the plants to be resistant to drought and salinity. As salinity is important, if you're gonna go and plant some Mars and it's also pretty important for the future of food and farming. And so we got support from Target to some experiments to investigate it, these lines, because we then had the theory that maybe these plants that are better for growing in agriculture on Earth, maybe they'd be better for growing in agriculture in space. So we grew these plants and we did the classic test. Who does time lapse photography? I love time lapse photography. You've all got smartphones. Okay, not today, maybe tomorrow at some point. Do time lapse of the sun rising or sun setting out of your window? It's awesome. And so that's what I started doing. I started practicing time lapse photography and I started doing it with plants and then I started changing the environment around the plants to see what they do. So this is a plant I've turned on its side and I've turned it 90 degrees and I just like to watch its root bend down. This is a cotton plant. So when we looked at this alteration that would introduce into this cotton that makes it resistant to salinity and drought, it turned out it changes the speed of reorientation. It changes the plant's capacity to perceive and respond to the change of its orientation relative to the gravity vector. So we believe these plants will grow different in the space life environment but we don't know what they're gonna do. So we have to invent a method to grow them. This is the method we invented. So this is, we experimented in our lab. We're now working with a local Wisconsin startup to build custom tools that can be sent to the space station. I don't know if that's exciting now to be honest. Now look at it again, that's terrible. And then we start training people how to use them. Okay, cool. So this is an example of that. So that project ended abruptly because we were meant to launch it like in about a month but we've just been delayed. So TikTok is gonna be launched in March next year on my birthday if all goes to plan. So in the process of doing that, in the process of preparing for that space life experiment, we developed some new technology. And so as part of the Wisconsin idea, we thought it'd be a good idea to share that technology and train some local students. So this is a class that we worked with in Carthage College and this is the hardware that we developed. This is a time-lapse photography box which has a location where petri dishes can be inserted and we can put plants, little seedlings inside there and we can do time-lapse photography of them growing over time. And we can use software to quantify their growth rates and it was great, it worked. Yeah, these students, they built their own. We gave them designs. So as a part of an interdisciplinary project, we had biologists and engineers working together to build devices and test them, essentially like biomedical engineering just without the branding. And then they presented it at local conferences. So again, using kind of like space exploration to develop new technologies, providing those new technologies to students and having them test those technologies and then present them in their own way at their own conferences. It was a really awesome experience. And one of them turned to me and was like, Richard, you know that gravity stuff that you're doing is all good and well, but what about if we put the plants in a disco? What? Yeah, like I realized I could program the software, the lighting to do a disco mode. What would happen? So we put the plant in a disco and it turns out it does exactly what you and I do. It dances. The music's not playing, okay? I'm just kidding, it's not. It should have run DMC or something awesome playing, right? But again, the moral of this story here is we can provide these students with these tools, these new methods, these ideas about spaceflight search, but they always come up with something better, a slightly different way to use it, which shows you something arguably way more interesting and they're now working out how to turn this into an experiment, but anyway, so we did it again and then again and then again because that's all we do as scientists, right? Repeat to sec is what we see, is that reproducible? That's the nature of science. So this is that video, this is a gravatropism assay. So previously I showed you the same thing with a cotton plant. This is now be done with Arabidopsis dalyana, a full small, fast-going plant. Here you can see after turning it 90 degrees as root bends down and it shoots, bends up. And so we started working with some local computer programmers to use software to directly automate the measurements. Historically, I would go in with a ruler and like a point square and I like measure the tip angles and the speed of growth, bit slow, a bit old fashioned, right? But now with computer software, the lighting's not great, but there's a little red line at the bottom of the roots and a little green line at the top and that shows you where the software is, it looks really clear here. It shows you where it's detecting it and measuring it automated. So now our goal over the next year is to try and get these technologies like both the hardware and the software into local schools to kind of create a distributed research network to try and get local school children doing some experiments with us because there's so many ideas that are coming down from the space station, we can't deal them all ourselves. So we think this is a great opportunity for a citizen science project. If you'd like to know more about that, check out our website, Cozy Cloud, something to do on the side. Cozy's standing for the collaborative science environment. Cloud, because the cloud is where we share all of our data of each other. Can you imagine, the first time we started working with NASA, they said, ah, we need this big set of data for me, it's like 50 gigabytes. Like, can you just post us a hard drive? I was like, post you a hard drive, no, no, it's all in the cloud now, it's all in the cloud. And that's why we need help from computer programmers. Thank you. Sorry, another parent in the audience. So I'm a botanist, can you tell? I love plants, can you tell? It's actually kind of sad, I have to torch them every day for my living. But I think in the long run it'll be good for them. And so it seems kind of crazy for me to spend all my time programming computers. And so this is why I felt so lucky to bump into Christian. And he's been helping me take some of the data that we've been generating and make it accessible by helping write some codes, which I'll terrify you with now, okay? So to access the genetic data that we get back from the space station, you need to be able to read that. Don't worry if you can't, it's not easy. Christian makes it look easy, I must say, we did well. So what we've been able to do is take the data from the space station, push it through codes with the assistance of some bright young stars, and then basically present it in a format which is human readable. And we've done it a few times, we did it with plants, we did it with our own experiment, that toast project I mentioned earlier. And then NASA really liked the way we did it. And so they said, can you do it again? And so we did it, we then gathered together all of the plant genetic data and we put it all in one place. And we connected it together in a relational database. So anyone can go in there and start poking around. If you wanna check out our website, astrobonnie.com has the data there. It's part of a citizen science project. We believe that the data generated by experiments on the International Space Station is everybody's data. The problem is a lot of it is hidden behind code like that. And so we're trying to remove that code barrier, make it accessible so that students who may be interested in it from a biological perspective like myself can access the genetics without having to get bogged down in the code. And so I could go into details and say, this is awesome, but again, you just have to check out the website. They're just figures. So this is the final figure from the academic paper that we're submitting this week. So as a scientist, we get judged in a few different ways. One of those ways is by peer review articles submission. So this may look like a relatively simple diagram, but it was years in the making and I can't wait to send it off, so I never have to look at it again. Only human, right? But it's putting the humanity back in the science that really makes it worthwhile. And I think that's one of the final concepts I'm gonna leave with. So when I was looking at this genetic data from our first experiment on the space station, we came up with a theory. And I believed it because I'd done the stats on it. And I had to convince people it was true. And I was finding it hard to convince myself because I'm a scientist. You can never definitively prove anything if you're a scientist. You understand there's always this realm of mystery and probability that some people don't have to worry about, but as scientists we do. And so I thought, what if we provide the same data to someone else, a new fresh mind that hasn't been tainted with all of my preconceived notions and incorrect, whatever, and see they came up with the same conclusion. So this was like the first test of the toast formula, the toast system. And these three lovely students, Ben and Abigail, they were a group of, there's those 10 students. Two of the 10 students in the Oregon High School chose to use our project as their senior thesis. The other ones didn't, their loss. And they went in and they looked at these datasets and they analyzed them and they came to the same conclusion. I was so pleased. Like they wrote it up better, but we'll brush it under the carpet. And so I actually had to suppress their report. I was gonna get scooped by the students I was teaching. So the more the stories, in the older days there was this paradigm, it's publish or perish. There was this thing that was saying you've gotta keep your cards against your chest and don't tell anyone. And you've gotta be the first person to publish that or they're gonna be the people working and you're gonna be the person unemployed. And that paradigm doesn't exist anymore. That is so last decade. Now it's share and thrive. By sharing these data, I was able to, but with these students, I was able to gain faith in my interpretation of these data. By sharing these data, I was able to impress NASA enough to get another contract to not only do it with all the plant data, but now we're doing it with all kingdoms. So if you go to our new website, we'd not only have all the plant genetic data, we also have mice, rats, human stem cells, drosophila. We have all the different major model organisms. We've linked all their genetics via orthology like genetic relationships between genes. And then we've linked them to the actual spaceflight data and removed all the code so anyone can go in and start pointing and clicking. And over the next few months, we'll be developing some user protocols and testing it in a school class near you. So I don't really have like an ending because I tend to have these like hesitations that just go on and on and on and on and on and on with more slides so I can stop at any time or pivot and ask if any of you guys have any questions. Earlier this year, PBS did a special on astronaut Kelly's year in space. And after I got done watching that, I was sort of depressed in a way because of the physical problems that he had after one year. And I'm thinking, you know, we're talking about producing food and so on for astronauts, but I'm worried about a multi-year journey and the impact on their physical well-being. Do you, how do you kind of put that in perspective, I guess? You've hit the nail on the head. That's exactly why we are working China and interrogate how life responds to these environments because of these concerns. The journey to Mars is possibly one of the most exciting and dangerous adventures humanity's ever gonna go on. The moment when they get there is gonna be stressful. It's gonna be high impact. It's going to be dangerous. And what we really wanna do is ensure that when they get there, they have all their faculties, their corpus mentis. They can do everything they need to do so they can act just like on that first landing on the moon. The computer's failed but the astronauts on board had their faculties and they were able to land safely. So on the whole, the Kelly twin study wasn't too terrifying though. I wish they'd controlled his brother's diet on the ground. When you look at the microbiomes, they're completely different. And of course they are, they need completely different things. So the experiment could have been a bit more controlled. But when we do inhabit the moon and live there for longer, one of the things we're gonna do is we're gonna do what mammals have always done. That's dig. The reason the dinosaurs aren't the dominant planet on the species is because they don't live in boroughs. Mammals survived that KT event because they were able to dig down on the ground and come out once the planet stabilized again. So when we go to potentially colonize the moon and Mars and my asteroids, we'll be digging in and we're getting underground to protect us from that really major issue which is the cosmic race. The microgravity, this exercise, that's good. I did hear this one physicist talk about accelerating with one G the whole half the way to Mars and then flipping the spaceship around and decelerating one G in order to create like a G force like that's similar to Earth. You have to be pretty accurate so you don't miss the target. But it sounds plausible. It's very difficult. I'm just wondering how the astronauts that are currently on the space station, what are they eating and how are they getting the food that they're eating? Lots of dehydrated things. It depends, different astronauts have different requests and requirements. The most impressive one of the batch was when the first female Italian astronaut went up. Her name will lose me right now but she was going up and people were worried because the Italians are famous for their appreciation of coffee. One of the major things about flavor is smell and liquids on the space station are not allowed to just like float around because you don't want the water floaking into a circuit and frying it. So she wasn't able essentially to have like an open cup of coffee. So if she'd be trying to sip coffee from a plastic bag through a straw and so this research I knew from the University of Oregon realized that he had an opportunity to overcome this issue and help her smell the coffee so she could enjoy all of the aroma and all the flavor that's coming from that because there's a real psychological component to flavor. Like one of the reasons you get happy each day is because you encounter all these different flavors and so when these astronauts are doing these risky things we want to ensure that they remain psychologically stable by providing them with a normal kind of endorphins that they would get from sipping on a nice flavorful cup of coffee. And so what they did was they designed a really special shaped mug which had certain curves and which allows the water to guide via capillary action because think about water in microgravity, okay? It's not just gonna come splashing down. Think about what force is gonna act on it. Water has like cohesion, adhesion, so it's sticky, it sticks to itself and it sticks to other surfaces. So when water's moving around in a microgravity environment it kind of moves along like capillary lines and so essentially they created a structure in this mug that would draw the water to the mouth via capillary and she was able to use it and sip coffee next to the window looking down at Earth admiring its taste and its smell. How does the data that you gather, does that correlate or affect anything as far as the ecological impact on Earth as far as like farming and all that? It's a great question from a couple of perspectives. So in the early video at the beginning I alluded to the Big Ten video. I alluded to engineering plants to be resistant to the major stress of the space environment. That is essentially is drowning, is flooding. So the plants create a region of localized hypoxia. They use up the oxygen that's next to them. If you were a mouse or a human and you used up the oxygen that's next to you, you would move, the plants can't do that. So as the plants use up the oxygen that's around them on Earth, convection, convective mixing of gases would just bring in more oxygen and that just doesn't happen in microgravity. So the plants start to drown. So we engineered the plants to be resistant to this form of hypoxia and then we put them up there and they grew better. So we're now testing that on Earth and it turns out the same varieties that we engineered to be resistant to spaceflight are actually resistant to flooding on Earth. And if you look at the local climate patterns in Wisconsin at the moment towards the end of the summer, I'm not sure if you can notice there's bigger extreme weather events, i.e. the rainstorms are more intense and depositing more water. Many reasons for this you could postulate. And essentially it's in the NOAA data. You can see it's a clear trend and it's been continuing over the last 30 years and it's predicted to continue. So one of the future stresses that farmers are gonna encounter in Wisconsin is water logging of their crops. And coincidentally the technology developed to understand more about the spaceflight environment and to test some theories that we had about hypoxia up there actually provided a mechanism to provide a resistance of our crops to that flooding here on Earth. The other question that you alluded to was about ecology. So we're actually really intrigued by the movement of organisms between celestial bodies, between like space stations and Earths and planets and such. And so we managed to get a collaboration with a group called, I'm not lying, the Interplanetary Protection Team. Yes, it's real. When these people told me this was their group name, I said, hey, do you guys have like a cape and where you're underway on the outside? They just looked to me blank. They didn't get the joke. True. So now we have this collaboration with the Interplanetary Protection Team and we have a project called Mango. Yeah, it's an acronym. And so essentially in the near future, we'll be putting the microbiome of the space station on our website, making it accessible with lesson plans for children so people can understand the microbes that live up there. So when we started investigating the microbes on the space station, we looked at the dining room table, mainly because all the other places had weird space-related names that made no sense to me, like the copula. It's called a window. Why do you call it the copula? Anyway, but the dining room table had a clear name on the space station. And so we looked at it and we looked at the microbes that were there. And then we used the standardized tools that our collaborators at the European Biophematics Institute used to quantify different types of microbes that were there. 66% were unknown. 66% were unable to assign to known microbes on Earth because they've been up there for so long. Mutations have got in there. We weren't able to deduce what they were. So genetic drift, evolution up there, is probably going on. And hopefully a few years from now, when we write a research paper on it, we'll be able to remove the word probably. We'll be able to say how genetic drift is occurring up there, how succession is occurring up there, and what that could mean for life. Our friends at the Interparenter Protection Team, they're really interested about stuff that comes back from the moon. So when all the moonwalks came back, they all got separated away and checked to see there was no lunar parasites that were coming down. And it's the same group that get to monitor the rovers, the Martian rovers, before they go over to the red planet. So we are really cognizant about the movement of organisms between these different alien environments. And anywhere like humans go, they take other organisms with them. Whenever humans explorers went to the South Pole, they took plants with them. When they took those plants, they didn't realize it, but they were taking a load of microbes in that soil. And so now when we go out across a different ocean, a bigger ocean, we'll be taking other microbes with us, and so we need to be aware of what we take. Where are the tomatoes? Where are the tomatoes? We'll have a conversation about that later. Do you have another question over here? I love tomatoes, yes. Dr. Warsaw, appreciative that you're here tonight. And how will we get the water to Mars out of Mars to grow those potatoes? So we will mine it. The current working hypothesis, most people say, is the best way is that we get the moon base and then we mine water on the moon. We can split some of that for rocket fuel and some of that we can keep. We're going to need to take hydrogen with us, two Mars. So the first settlers that go to Mars, the first explorers that go to Mars, there will already be a spaceship waiting for them. The Mars Direct Formula, one rocket, goes, it lands, and then has a thing called a moxie. A moxie is a device that uses chemistry that was invented 100 years ago back in the Victorian era, where essentially it takes CO2 out of the air and splits it and releases oxygen. That's one of your two components of rocket fuel. So you make half most of your rocket fuel by splitting the CO2 that's already in the Martian atmosphere. When you go there, you then need to take a bit of hydrogen with you. And that hydrogen could come from Earth, but it's cheaper if you get it from the moon. There are water deposits on Mars, so you could also split those and get the hydrogen out of that for your return ship rocket fuel. But let's face it, you'd rather give that water to your plants so you could grow them, so you could eat them. So we'll live off the land. As Zubrin, the crazy guy from earlier said, we'll live off the land with the resources that are there. And we just want to make sure we have the right seeds with us so that they can prosper. My question relates to what plants have been tested in space and have you found variations in how well some of those plants grow? That's an excellent question. Yeah, there's been a lot. Missouna was actually a fantastic one. It's one of my favorites. If you haven't grown Missouna, you really should. It's lovely. You can cut and come again. That's why it's such a good space crop. You can cut a few leaves. You can eat them, spring back, and keep going. It gets this lovely purple pigment really quickly and really easily, so it's really healthy for you, too. And that was flown by JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency, and that responded in the way that all of our models based on a rabidopsis would predict because it's in the same family, Brassacaceae. Recently, an unpublished study from my former lab, they recently grew brachypodium distation. You've all heard of brachypodium distation, haven't you? It's a close relative of rice and wheat. It's a model grass, and it has lots of natural diversity in response to flooding. One of the things they did, they sent up a few different varieties, a few different natural ecotypes, different varieties of this grass that evolved in different places on Earth, and some of those varieties, they actually got bigger in the space-side environment, and some of them got smaller. What we see now is that there is natural variation in biology. Some things will perceive the environment around them and think, this is stressful. I'm going to stay small, and I'm going to sit it out until the stress is gone. Some organisms will say, oh, this is a stressful environment. I'm going to grow fast. I'm going to flower. I'm going to set seed before I die. This is best illustrated in rice, in rice paddy fields. You see this dichotomy a lot in Asian paddy fields where you have either the sit-out and weight methodology or the bolt and keep your head above the water table. So, looking at those monocots, those grasses in the space-side environment, we see that natural diversity, so we know we can select according to that. Wheat has also been grown up on the space-station. It's been grown a few times. Peas, the Russian space agency grew peas up there from seed to seed. But Arabidopsis, oh, fern. Fern spores were grown up there to look at... So ferns are really interesting because they're this... they're further back along the efflutionary tree. They're like pre-angiosperms, flowering plants. But when we're looking at these early spores that can grow into whole plants, there's this really early stage when you hydrate them, when they develop polarity based on a gravity vector on Earth. And so they try to do that in space. So ferns have been growing up there too. But Arabidopsis, Aliana, is the predominant workhorse. There's been many studies on that. So we've been not just examining the plant as a whole, but examining its roots, its shoots, its roots' tips, all the different organs separately because they all perceive different aspects of the environment. So it's great questions. Any other questions? Follow-up, Jack? It's a well-known fact that trees, especially, will take in carbon dioxide and release it back as oxygen. Would something like this have any benefit in space? And then the experiments have been done in that regard? That reminds me, there was an experiment where they grew little pine trees. The reason they didn't come to my mind immediately is because I'm a geneticist. So I've been doing a meta-analysis of all the genetics. The people that grew the pine trees didn't deposit any genetic data. They just looked at the size and shape. So that's why I didn't have it at the forefront of my mind. But they did grow some pine trees up there. What they did, they looked at the bark and the stems to look at the lignin. And they showed that without gravity there was a stretching that was occurring. And lignin is really important, like paper and stuff. So trees are really interesting. But if you hit on a really important point there, and that is the concept of a biogenetive life-support system, we have to write it into every grant we ever write. Plants are part of a biogenetive life-support system. So let me give you an example of this. The Chinese Lunar Palace. I mentioned it a couple of years ago. I went to China to go visit the Chinese Space Agency. And they showed us the Lunar Palace. Essentially, they have a goal of landing basically three mini submarines on the moon, just kind of linked together. Two of them will be used to grow plants and worm meal, I think, is, and some other things to eat and produce oxygen and filter water. And the third thing will be where the three taikonauts will live, Chinese astronauts. And so within that system, what is the optimum plant to have? And that is actually an ongoing study. Whether it's bamboo or whether it's mizuna, time will tell. That was one of the really fascinating things that came from that study. When they started it, things weren't going right. They looked at the trajectories, looked at how much food and drink and water and oxygen these taikonauts were using. They weren't going to finish the one-year plan that they had because they wanted to show that it could work without any inputs. So what did they do? They took out the male taikonauts, one by one, and replaced them with female taikonauts. And they were able to then complete the experiment successfully. So the current working plan from those, the Chinese space agency people I spoke to said that their space base is going to have female taikonauts, not male ones. A year later NASA announced Project Artemis. All right. Thank you all so much for coming and thank you, Richard. We will be back in May and hope to see you all here.