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Introducing
Nautilus Education
The modern world has placed an unprecedented emphasis on
science literacy. But most existing science texts do not emphasize
literacy, and most literary texts don’t have science.
This Nautilus Education text set pamphlet is a beta product
intended to fill this gap. It contains three groups of articles from the
award-winning science magazine, Nautilus, each accompanied by lesson
plans and guides for teachers.
Key science concepts like genetics and astronomy are explored
through narrative story telling and tailor-made artwork, letting science
spill over its usual borders, and waking the imagination and interest of
the student. This kind of literary science classroom material was
designed to helps teachers satisfy the new U.S. common core and
next gen standards but have global application. The relevant standards
are listed in each lesson plan.
Nautilus is looking for partners interested in using and further
developing this kind of content. For more information, please write
to education@nautil.us.
—Michael Segal
Editor-in-Chief
About Nautilus Magazine
Nautilus is a new kind of science magazine. Each monthly issue tackles
a single topic in contemporary science using multiple vantage points,
from biology and physics to culture and philosophy. We are science,
connected.
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Contents
Physics
Biology
4 Astronomy & Space Travel
6 Roadmap to Alpha Centauri
Pick your favorite travel mode—
big, small, dark, or twisted
BY GEORGE MUSSER
12 Chemistry & Fuels
16 You are Made of Waste
Searching for the ultimate example of recycling? Look
in the mirror
BY CURT STAGER
28 Genetics & Human Health
30 Their Giant Steps to a Cure
Battling a rare form of muscular dystrophy,
a family finds an activist leader, and hope
BY JUDE ISABELLA
36 An Unlikely Cure Signals
Hope for Cancer
How “exceptional responders” are revolutionizing
treatment for the deadly disease
BY KAT MCGOWAN
22 Frack’er Up
Natural gas is shaking up the search for
green gasoline.
BY DAVID BIELLO
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Astronomy & Space Travel
How would we travel nearly five light years? This article explores different engineering solutions
to the puzzle of taking a very, very, long trip, intertwining science-fiction goals with real world
solutions. Students will explore fanciful applications of Newton’s second law, and concepts of
momentum, ions, and nuclear fusion.
Lesson Plan
Review vocabulary words in class. Have students read the article and answer the reading comprehension questions
for homework, as well as generate a discussion question of their own. In class, address any conceptual
questions that the class might have. Have students write discussion questions on the board, along with the ones
suggested in this document. Have students break up into small groups, each of which should address one of the
discussion questions. 15 MIN
Dedicate the remaining class time to completing one of the activities. 30-45 MIN
Teacher’s Notes: Roadmap to Alpha Centauri
VOCAB WORDS
Magnetic field: produced by a magnetic material or a
current, a magnetic field will push or pull a moving
charge or magnet that comes in contact with it.
Ion: an atom in which the number of electrons and
protons is unequal—thus, the atom is positive or
negative.
Momentum: the product of the mass and velocity of
an object.
Recoil: the backward momentum from a fired gun.
Plasma: one of the four fundamental states of matter,
composed of ions and electrons.
Nuclear fusion: when two or more clusters of neutrons
and protons collide, forming a new nucleus and
releasing energy.
READING COMPREHENSION
1. What does AU stand for?
2. How fast is Voyager 1 moving in miles per hour?
3. “The engine first strips propellant atoms [typically
xenon] of their outermost electrons.” What
is the charge of a stripped xenon atom?
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4. What concept is at work in the ion drive? (Hint:
what is conserved?)
5. What other travel options work on this principle?
6. How much momentum does an electron fired
from a gun have?
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Why not take a traditional rocket to Alpha
Centauri?
2. Which of the propulsion meturds listed is most
likely to succeed? Would any be used together?
3. Would it be worth going if it took generations?
4. How far away is the next-nearest star?
ACTIVITIES
1. Research and create a brochure or ad enticing
astronauts to make the trip. What would they eat?
What psychological qualities would they need? If
robots were sent, how would they be fixed? What
kind of data could they expect to collect?
WHERE THIS FITS IN THE CURRICULUM
Structure and Properties of Matter (HS-PS1-8) Develop
models to illustrate the changes in the composition
of the nucleus of the atom and the energy released
during the processes of fission, fusion, and radioactive
decay.
Forces and Interactions (HS-PS2-1) Analyze data to support
the claim that Newton’s second law of motion
describes the mathematical relationship among the
net force on a macroscopic object, its mass, and its
acceleration.
Forces and Interactions (HS-PS2-2) Use mathematical
representations to support the claim that the total
momentum of a system of objects is conserved when
there is no net force on the system.
Engineering Design (HS-ETS1-3) Evaluate a solution
to a complex real-world problem based on prioritized
criteria and trade-offs that account for a range
of constraints, including cost, safety, reliability, and
aesthetics, as well as possible social, cultural, and
environmental impacts.
2. Propose another method of traveling to Alpha
Centauri.
ADDITIONAL MULTIMEDIA
1. Voyager 1 Leaves the Solar System
(The Guardian) 1 MIN 45 SEC
A quick explanation of where Voyager 1 is, and
how scientists know its location: http://www.
theguardian.com/science/video/2013/sep/13/
voyager-1-leaves-solar-system-video
2. New Mars Rover Powered by Plutonium
(Space.com) 2 MIN 30 SEC
An introduction to the nuclear battery on
board the Mars Curiosity Rover, and the
advantages of not using solar power (as with
past missions): https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=1JOPW8aAcgEt
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MATTER | TECHNOLOGY
Roadmap to Alpha Centauri
Pick your favorite travel mode—big, small, light, dark, or twisted
BY GEORGE MUSSER
VER SINCE THE DAWN of the space age, a
quixotic subculture of physicists, engineers,
and science-fiction writers have devoted their
lunch hours and weekends to drawing up plans
for starships, propelled by the imperative for humans
to crawl out of our Earthly cradle. For most of that
time, they focused on the physics. Can we really fly to
the stars? Many initially didn’t think so, but now we
know it’s possible. Today, the question is: Will we?
Truth is, we already are flying to the stars, without
really meaning to. The twin Voyager space probes
launched in 1977 have endured long past their original
goal of touring the outer planets and have reached
the boundaries of the sun’s realm. Voyager 1 is 124
astronomical units (AU) away from the sun—that
is, 124 times farther out than Earth—and clocking
3.6 AU per year. Whether it has already exited the
solar system depends on your definition of “solar system,”
but it is certainly way beyond the planets. Its
instruments have witnessed the energetic particles
and magnetic fields of the sun give way to those of
interstellar space—finding, among other things, what
Ralph McNutt, a Voyager team member and planetary
scientist, describes as “weird plasma structures” begging
to be explored. The mysteries encountered by
the Voyagers compel scientists to embark on followup
missions that venture even deeper into the cosmic
woods—out to 200 AU and beyond. But what kind of
spacecraft can get us there?
Going Small: Ion Drives
NASA’s Dawn probe to the asteroid belt has demonstrated
one leading propulsion system: the ion drive.
An ion drive is like a gun that fires atoms rather than
bullets; the ship moves forward on the recoil. The system
includes a tank of propellant, typically xenon, and
a power source, such as solar panels or plutonium batteries.
The engine first strips propellant atoms of their
outermost electrons, giving them a positive electric
charge. Then, on the principle that opposites attract,
ILLUSTRATION BY CHAD HAGEN
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a negatively charged grid draws the atoms toward the
back of the ship. They overshoot the grid and stream
off into space at speeds 10 times faster than chemical
rocket exhaust (and 100 times faster than a bullet).
For a post-Voyager probe, ion engines would fire for 15
years or so and hurl the craft to several times the Voyagers’
speed, so that it could reach a couple of hundred
AU before the people who built it died.
Star flight enthusiasts are also pondering ion drives
for a truly interstellar mission, aiming for Alpha Centauri,
the nearest star system some 300,000 AU away.
Icarus Interstellar, a nonprofit foundation with a mission
to achieve interstellar travel by the end of the century,
has dreamed up Project Tin Tin—a tiny probe
weighing less than 10 kilograms, equipped with a miniaturized
high-performance ion drive. The trip would
still take tens of thousands of years, but the group sees
Tin Tin less as a realistic science mission than as a
technology demonstration.
Going Light: Solar Sails
A solar sail, such as the one used by the Japanese
IKAROS probe to Venus, does away with propellant
and engines altogether. It exploits the physics of
light. Like anything else in motion, a light wave has
momentum and pushes
on whatever surface
it strikes. The force is
feeble, but becomes
noticeable if you have
a large enough surface,
a low mass, and a lot
of time. Sunlight can
accelerate a large sheet
of lightweight material,
such as Kapton, to an
impressive speed. To
reach the velocity needed
to escape the solar
system, the craft would
first swoop toward
the sun, as close as it
dared—inside the orbit
of Mercury—to fill its
sails with lusty sunlight.
Such sail craft could
conceivably make the
crossing to Alpha Centauri in a thousand years. Sails
are limited in speed by how close they can get to the
sun, which, in turn, is limited by the sail material’s
durability. Gregory Matloff, a City University of New
York professor and longtime interstellar travel proponent,
says the most promising potential material is graphene—ultrathin
layers of carbon graphite.
A laser or microwave beam could provide an even
more muscular push. In the mid-1980s, the doyen of
interstellar travel, Robert Forward, suggested piggybacking
on an idea popular at the time: solar-power
satellites, which would collect solar energy in orbit
and beam it down to Earth by means of microwaves.
Before commencing operation, an orbital power station
could pivot and beam its power up rather than
down. A 10-gigawatt station could accelerate an ultralight
sail—a mere 16 grams—to one-fifth the speed of
light within a week. Two decades later, we’d start seeing
live video from Alpha Centauri.
This “Starwisp” scheme has its dubious features—it
would require an enormous lens, and the sail is so fragile
that the beam would be as likely to fry it as to push
it—but it showed that we could reach the stars within
a human lifetime.
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Going Big: Nuclear Rockets
Sails may be able to whisk tiny probes to the stars,
but they can’t handle a human mission; you’d need
a microwave beam consuming thousands of times
more power than the entire world currently generates.
The best-developed scheme for human space travel is
nuclear pulse propulsion, which the government-funded
Project Orion worked on during the 1950s and ’60s.
When you first hear about it, the scheme sounds
unhinged. Load your starship with 300,000 nuclear
bombs, detonate
one every three seconds,
and ride the blast
waves. Though extreme,
it works on the same
basic principle as any
other rocket—namely,
recoil. Instead of shooting
atoms out the back
of the rocket, the nuclear-pulse
system shoots
blobs of plasma, such as
fireballs of tungsten.
You pack a plug of
tungsten along with a
nuclear weapon into a
metal capsule, fire the
capsule out the back of
the ship, and set it off
a short distance away.
In the vacuum of space,
the explosion does less
damage than you might
expect. Vaporized tungsten
hurtles toward the ship, rebounds off a thick
metal plate at the ship’s rear, and shoots into space,
while the ship recoils, thereby moving forward. Giant
shock absorbers lessen the jolt on the crew quarters.
Passengers playing 3-D chess, or doing whatever else
interstellar passengers do, would feel rhythmic thuds
like kids jumping rope in the apartment upstairs.
The ship might reach a tenth the speed of light.
If for some reason—solar explosion, alien invasion—
we really had to get off the planet fast and we didn’t
care about nuking the launch pad, this would be the
way to go. We already have everything we need for
it. “Today the closest technology we have would be
nuclear pulse,” Matloff says. If anything, most people
would be happy to load up all our nukes on a ship and
be rid of them.
Ideally, the bomb blasts would be replaced with controlled
nuclear fusion reactions. That was the approach
suggested by Project Daedalus, a ’70s-era effort to
design a fully equipped robotic interstellar vessel. The
biggest problem was that for every ton of payload,
the ship would have to carry 100 tons of fuel. Such a
behemoth would be the
size of a battleship, with a
length of 200 meters and
a mass of 50,000 tons.
“It was just a huge,
monstrous machine,”
says Kelvin Long, an English
aerospace engineer
and co-founder of Project
Icarus, a modern effort
to update the design.
“But what’s happened
since then, of course, is
microelectronics, miniaturization
of technology,
nanotechnology. All these
developments have led
to a rethinking. Do you
really need these massive
structures?” He says
Project Icarus planned to
unveil the new design in
London in October 2013.
Interstellar designers
have come up with all sorts of ways to shrink the
fuel tank. For instance, the ship could use electric or
magnetic fields to scoop up hydrogen gas from interstellar
space. The hydrogen would then be fed into a
fusion reactor. The faster the ship were to go, the faster
it would scoop—a virtuous cycle that, if maintained,
would propel the ship to nearly the speed of light.
Unfortunately, the scooping system would also produce
drag forces, slowing the ship, and the headwind
of particles would cook the crew with radiation. Also,
pure-hydrogen fusion is inefficient. A fusion-powered
ship probably couldn’t avoid hauling some fuel from
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Going Dark: Scavenging Exotic Matter
Instead of scavenging hydrogen gas, Jia Liu, a physics
graduate student at New York University, has proposed
foraging for dark matter, the invisible exotic
material that astronomers think makes up the bulk
of the galaxy. Particle physicists hypothesize that
dark matter consists of a type of particle called the
neutralino, which has a useful property: When two
neutralinos collide, they annihilate each other in a
blaze of gamma rays. Such reactions could drive a
ship forward. Like the hydrogen scooper, a dark-matter
ship could approach the speed of light. The problem,
though, is that dark matter is dark—meaning it
doesn’t respond to electromagnetic forces. Physicists
know of no way to collect it, let alone channel it to
produce rocket thrust.
If engineers somehow overcame these problems
and built a near-light-speed ship, not just Alpha Centauri
but the entire galaxy would come within range.
In the 1960s astronomer Carl Sagan calculated that, if
you could attain a modest rate of acceleration—about
the same rate a sports car uses—and maintain it long
enough, you’d get so close to the speed of light that
you’d cross the galaxy in just a couple of decades of
shipboard time. As a bonus, that rate would provide a
comfortable level of artificial gravity.
On the downside, hundreds of thousands of years
would pass on Earth in the meantime. By the time you
got back, your entire civilization might have gone ape.
From one perspective, though, this is a good thing. The
tricks relativity plays with time would solve the eternal
problem of too-slow computers. If you want to do
some eons-long calculation, go off and explore some
distant star system and the result will be ready for you
when you return. The starship crews of the future may
not be voyaging for survival, glory, or conquest. They
may be solving puzzles.
Going Warp: Bending Time and Space
With a ship moving at a tenth the speed of light,
humans could migrate to the nearest stars within a
lifetime, but crossing the galaxy would remain a journey
of a million years, and each star system would still
be mostly isolated. To create a galactic version of the
global village, bound together by planes and phones,
you’d need to travel faster than light.
Contrary to popular belief, Einstein’s theory of relativity
does not rule that out completely. According to
the theory, space and time are elastic; what we perceive
as the force of gravity is in fact the warping of space and
time. In principle, you could warp space so severely that
you’d shorten the distance you want to cross, like folding
a rug to bring the two sides closer together. If so, you
could cross any distance instantaneously. You wouldn’t
even notice the acceleration, because the field would
zero out g-forces inside the ship. The view from the ship
windows would be stunning. Stars would change in color
and shift toward the axis of motion.
It seems almost mean-spirited to point out how far
beyond our current technology this idea is. Warp drive
would require a type of material that exerts a gravitational
push rather than a gravitational pull. Such material
contains a negative amount of energy—literally less
than nothing, as if you had a mass of –50 kilograms.
Physicists, inventive types that they are, have imagined
ways to create such energy, but even they throw up their
hands at the amount of negative energy a starship would
need: a few stars’ worth. What is more, the ship would
be impossible to steer, since control signals, which are
restricted to the speed of light, wouldn’t be fast enough
to get from the ship’s bridge to the propulsion system
located on the vessel’s perimeter. (Equipment within
the ship, however, would function just fi
When it comes to starships, it’s best not to get hung up
on details. By the time humanity gets to the point it might
actually build one, our very notions of travel may well
have changed. “Do we need to send full humans?” asks
Long. “Maybe we just need to send embryos, or maybe in
the future, you could completely download yourself into
a computer, and you can remanufacture yourself at the
other end through something similar to 3-D printing.”
Today, a starship seems like the height of futuristic thinking.
Future generations might fi it quaint.
george musser is a writer on physics and cosmology and
author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide To String Theory (Alpha,
2008). He was a senior editor at Scientific American for 14 years
and has won honors such as the American Institute of Physics
Science Writing Award.
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Chemistry & Fuels
The matter in our world is recycled. The pair of articles here explores how elements and atoms
wend their way through space and time. Students will explore how chemical reactions usher elements
through their journeys. You Are Made of Waste illustrates, in five short vignettes, the lives of
the elements that make up our teeth, fi breath, hair, and blood. Frack ‘er Up is an in-depth
look at the botched promise of biofuel—energy from cars made from renewable plant growth.
In the “curriculum” section of the teacher’s notes, you will find information on how these pieces
can help fulfill requirements of the Next Generation Science Standards. Specifically, they make
for entry points to—or a means of reinforcing—lessons on photosynthesis, chemical reactions,
valence electrons, and energy. But more than that, these lessons will connect to the students’ daily
lives, and spark discussion.
Lesson Plan:
Ask students to read one or both of the articles for homework. Briefly introduce or review the vocabulary words
in class. Assign all or a selection of the reading comprehension questions for the students to complete along
with the reading, and ask them to come up with one question for further discussion. (Note that a couple of the
questions for each article are redundant.)
Start class with students raising any technical questions they might have about the readings. Ask them to
contribute their discussion questions, and write these on the board, along with the questions provided in the
teacher’s notes. Ask the students to break into small groups; assign each group to address a question, and
briefly present to the class for further discussion. 30-45 MIN
In the following class time (or another class) have the students complete one or more of the activities in the
teacher’s notes in small groups. 30 MIN
Teacher’s Notes: You Are Made of Waste
VOCAB WORDS
Mass: a physical property that describes an object’s
resistance to force. The mass of an object can be used
to calculate its weight: (mass) x (gravitational force)
= weight.
Carbon: an element found in stars, planets, comets,
as well as in all known living things.
Radioactive decay: the process by which a nucleus
ejects alpha particles, particles of ionizing radiation.
A nucleus that does this is considered “unstable;” a
substance that contains unstable nuclei is considered
“radioactive.” This process usually only occurs in
atoms heavier than iron.
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Fusion: when two or more nuclei collide, fusing to
make a new nucleus and releasing energy. This process
usually only occurs in atoms lighter than iron.
Chemical bond: an attraction between two or more
atoms that allows them to form a substance of definite
chemical composition. Breaking these bonds
requires energy.