@GaryAndShannon - #StrangeScience

and then call it a day. This very specific time emerged from a new nationwide survey that looked at how we nap, what makes some people better nappers than others. It was done by the Green of the Avocado Mattress people and they found that most people aim for about a fifty one minute nap, which means if you go to about a one forty two you wake up at two thirty three. The problem is, most sleep researchers say

that that is too long of a nap. You nap too long, it's going to leave you feeling worse than before you close your eyes. The study found that NAP's

lasting longer than an hour and twenty six minutes. That'd be about thirty five minutes past the perfect length enter what would the researchers would call the danger zone, because if you go about an hour and twenty six minutes, you start to feel groggy, you start to feel disoriented instead of refreshed, and if you're still asleep after that hour and forty four minutes, they said, that's no longer

considered a nap. You've actually dripped it off into a full sleep session at that point, and that that could potentially be more detrimental than just a quick forty thirty or forty minute nap is what they say you should shoot for most days, there is a question about whether or not the human body could survive a trip to Mars.

On March second, twenty sixteen, Sky Kelly came back in a Soyuz spacecraft traveling at about seventeen thousand miles an hour, and as expected, it warmed up the heat shield so much that a bunch of molten pieces of the heat shield actually flew off. Now, the deceleration amounted to about six g's on Scott Kelly and the cosmonauts that were also on board, Mikyle and Sergei, because of course they're named Mikyle and Sergei. The search and rescue team comes in,

they hoist him out. Scott Kelly gives him a thumbs up, and then they grimace as they lower him into a recliner. Because it's just sitting in the middle of nowhere. He lifted a satellite phone to his ear, makes his first call back on Earth. He'd spent more time in space than almost any other person, four missions each longer than the last, totaling five hundred and twenty days almost two years in space. And on this trip he had taken the longest spacelight of any space flight of any American.

And he said as he flew longer, the symptoms of returning to Earth got worse, and after he got back home in Houston, he was nauseated, he was dizzy, his joints ached under the force of gravity. Simply sitting in a chair sometimes felt uncomfortable. And the idea of traveling in space is I wouldn't say it's not meant for human beings, but our body is not built for that sort of a thing. Scott Kelly has a twin brother.

We know him as Mark Kelly is the Arizona Senator before this mission, both of these guys agreed to participate in what they said was a comparative study. Mark was going to stay on Earth the whole time. Scott was going to be on Earth and in space. Because they have the same DNA, it's a rare opportunity for them to figure out what would be the effects, even some psychological effects of long term space missions. So they before Scott went up on the ISS, they do a bunch

of twelve universities eighty researchers. They study them closely than perhaps any other humans in history, and could use, for example, the cognitive testing to show declines in Scot's mental speed and accuracy, the markers of inflammation, and his blood spiked to levels that lab tests had difficulty measuring thousands of percent above normal, suggested an extreme stress response to the

space travel. Fewer than seven hundred people, most of them young fit, most of them male, have gone into space, and they said that the number of people going into space in the next couple of decades could grow exponentially because more and more governments, more and more companies, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin, et cetera, could propel people into space. But there's a bunch of peculiar effects of space travel that are now only being identified and investigated. For example,

latent herpes infections get reactive, certain medications become less effective. Microgravity, which is the near weightlessness that you experience in space, redistributes blood to veins in the head and neck that aren't used to handling that flow. That increases the risk of a clot somewhere in your brain or neck. And Scott Kelly wrote a book, and in this book he said humans can explore more of the universe only if they strengthen the weakest links in the chain that makes

spaceflight possible. And the weakest links in the chain are the human body and the human mind. Right now, the record, by the way, for the longest time in space is held by a Russian cosmonaut, a guy named Valerie Polyyakov, spent about fourteen months in low Earth orbit, relatively protected from the radiation and the communication lags. But only twenty four people have ever exited low Earth orbit, and that was more than fifty years ago for less than two

weeks at a time. Because those guys, you know, they went to the moon. There is a huge study now going on about whether or not the astronauts soon to be Martians at some point could withstand the six or seven month journey in space that it would take for them to get to Mars, and then once they get to Mars, when they come back, that's another six or seven months the other way. Is there a way to speed that up, they don't know. Is there a way to make it easier on the human body, they don't know.

Scott Kelly's been telling the doctors about these mysterious medical issues that have come up, and he doesn't know why that's happened. More importantly, perhaps the people who are studying him don't know why they happened. There were changes in Scott Kelly's genetics because of the time he spent in space. About nine thousand genes, some of which might increase the risk of cancer and immune system problem, have been altered.

They didn't normalize for the most part over the course of a few months, but some continued to show signs of damage, including breaks and even inversions in their DNA. And that's just going into low Earth orbit. Imagine you go completely out of the gravitational pull of the Earth, make your way through space to Mars. They don't know if it's possible or not. All right, We'll keep an eye on the reins all the evacuation warnings and orders that are out there. The John Cobelt Show is coming

up next. If you miss any part of this show, go back and check out the podcast. Anywhere you find your favorite podcast, Just type in Gary and Shannon. We'll see you tomorrow. Stay dry, everybody,