The Bees of the Sea, Tasting Garlic Via Skin, and Probing Alpha Centauri

through your skin. But First, Senior writer Jonathan Strickland explores a space exploration project. So far, humanities voyages have been confined to the Solar System or just beyond it. But a new concept backed by some serious brains, is looking a whole lot farther. What does Stephen Hawking, Mark Zuckerberg, and billionaire Uri Milner have in common? All three want us to send a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri. They're supporting a project called Breakthrough star Shot to achieve that goal.

It's an engineering challenge. Alpha Centauri is four point three seven light years away, which means it takes more than four years for light to travel that distance. We know of nothing in the universe faster than light. In fact, our conventional rockets move slower than a sleep deprived snail. Compared to light, it would take us thirty thousand years to send a rocket to the Alpha Centauri system. The

team behind breakthrough star Shot have a different plan in mind. First, the spacecraft will be tiny, measuring less than four centimeters to a side, with a mass of just a few grams. Essentially, it will be a space faring integrated circuit. Second, it will rely on a light sale and lasers for propulsion. When light bounces off a light sale, it transfers a tiny bit of momentum to the sail. Lasers on Earth will provide trillions of photons, which collectively will provide the

energy to accelerate the spacecraft. Acceleration will be modest but continuous. Eventually the spacecraft will travel at a blistering one hundred billion miles per hour. The team estimates that it would take the spacecraft twenty years to get to Alpha Centauri. If all goes as planned, the star Shot would be able to capture images and send them back to Earth. This could give us a chance to take a closer look at Proxima B, the planet in a habitable zone

orbit around the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri. Another big challenge is figuring out how to keep the spacecraft safe from radiation. Electronics can malfunction in radiation, which can cause extraneous electric charges to build up on a circuit. The team's solution is to apply a voltage across an electric gate to generate a lot of heat in a short time. As the component's heat up and cool down, they release

the electric charge generated by radiation. It may take a few years before the breakthrough star shot spacecraft and the accompanying laser array are ready. Then tack on twenty years to get to the Alpha Centauri system, and another four years and some change for the data to get back to us. That's a lot of weighting, but it's posible that in just over a quarter of a century we may get an up close look at an alien star system.

How cool is that? Next up, editorial director Allison louder Milk and our freelance writer Kate Kirshner raise a stink about garlic. The smell of the stuff really does get into your pores, and it can get in through your pores as well. Anyone who's ever enjoyed a delicious hunk of garlic bread knows that the pleasure lasts beyond the

actual meal, way beyond. Sometimes it seems as though a garlic emeal doesn't just linger in your thoughts, it takes up residence in your pores, and you're not far off. Garlic contains a compound called Allison, which gives the ball of its distinctive smell. Alison, however, is only released when garlic is cut, crushed, or otherwise disturbed. That's why whole heads of garlic don't stink up the entire produce section at your local grocery store. Here's something else you should

know about alison. It's a crazy compound. It acts a it like water thanks to a key oxygen atom, and a bit like oil with its hydrocarbon tails. That means Alison can penetrate human skin in a way that neither oil nor water can. Now, the folks at the American Chemical Society have given us a little party trick to try as a way of explaining why garlic can be so powerful. Here's what you do. Crush or cut half a clove or more of garlic, and then go to

a different room that doesn't smell like garlic. Presumably you have one of those. Put one of your bare feet into a plastic bag with the garlic. Tie up the bag to contain the smell. Now hang out for an hour.

You'll undoubtedly start daydreaming of Italian food soon enough, because you'll start to taste and smell the garlic, not because it's coming out of the bag, but because your souls and your toes have allowed that slippery allison to enter the bloodstream, and you're actually tasting and smelling the garlic through your feet. Bone appetite feet. And if you'd like to see a video of this inaction, check out the

American Chemical Society's YouTube channel. Finally, this week, staff editor Christopher Hasiotis and freelance writer al Ya Hoyt brings the story of the bees of the sea. It turns out that we crustaceans help pollinate underwater flowers. Sea bees looks like Sebastian the Crab was right. There really is a lot going on under the sea, But things sub aquatic aren't always so different from up here on dry land.

Researchers recently discovered that invertebrate animals actively pollinate flowers found on seagrass underneath the surface of the ocean, much like bees do here on land. Before this revelation, published in the General Nature Communications, science thought that pollen was carried plant to plant by water flow alone. These plants flower at night time, but when water flow just isn't happening, as sometimes is the case underwater, tiny crustaceans visit the

plants and help out with the process. These sea bees, as you might call them, may not be holding honey filled hives or ruining picnics as far as we know, but they still perform a vital function to the underwater ecosystem. Think of sea grasses as forming extensive meadows in shallow marine waters. These are amongst the world's most productive ecosystems.

As the researchers outlined in their study, they improve water transparency, stabilize coastlines, store carbon, and provide food and shelter to a diverse community of marine animals. In other words, by aiding the sexual reproduction of these flowers, the invertebrate crustaceans are doing everyone a major underwater solid But how has

it taken us so long to figure this thing out? Well, the scientists deduced that something fishy was going on when they reviewed video of underwater marine activity and noticed that the male pollen bearing plants enjoyed many more visiting crustaceans than the lady counterparts. Armed with this observation, the scientists established two tanks for their experiment, one with only male and female versions of the sea grass the lassia to studentum,

and another with the plants plus these tiny invertebrates. The plants in the animal occupied tank quickly became pollinated, unlike the other tank with plants, no water flow and no animals. This discovery even begat its own new term, zubinthophillis pollination. In Layman's terms, this describes transfer of pollen by invertebrate animals in the benthic zone, which is the community of fauna and flora that call the seabed home. So what's

the takeaway here? This new research shows that underwater crustaceans can serve the same role as fine insects, and it's a good reminder that all life on the planet is interconnected and we're still discovering these systems that keep our world ship shape. That's our show for this week. Thank you so much for tuning in. Further thanks to our audio producer Dylan Fagan and our editorial liaisons Allison and Christopher.

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