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The smoking gun
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Picnics in space ISS/JSC/NASA
What do astronauts eat? Make your own space food with this cookbook – if you dare
The Astronaut’s Cookbook by Charles T. Bourland and Gregory L. Vogt, Springer, £19.99/$29.95 Reviewed by Jonathan Beard
ASTRONAUTS experience weightlessness, and most of them also lose weight in space. Why? Because they are often nauseous, always busy, and the food on board their capsules, shuttles and space stations doesn’t look, smell or taste like it does on Earth. As a result, NASA has devoted years to creating foods that can travel safely into space and meet astronauts’ nutritional needs while not making a mess of their spacecraft. How about a nice sandwich and a glass of milk? As Charles Bourland, a retired NASA food scientist, and co-author Gregory Vogt explain in The Astronaut’s Cookbook, bread means crumbs, and in zero-g they become air
pollution – not just messy, but inhaled into astronauts’ lungs. Tortillas, therefore, have largely replaced bread in space. Fresh milk is heavy and goes off quickly, so only the powdered stuff flies. Fresh fruit? Astronauts crave it, but ripening fruit is metabolically active, and gives off odours, so the entire craft smells. Some shuttle captains have said “no bananas on my flight”. As for the Russian cosmonauts who have shared the International Space Station with Americans, their favourite fresh foods are onions and garlic, which “have a divisive effect on the crew”. Despite NASA’s years of work on thermoprocessing and freezedrying to create palatable foods with a long shelf-life, the solution is often banal: the vendingmachine industry has the same goal, so many of its items fly. This book is larded with dozens of recipes for space food but most, alas, are unappealing. Enjoy it for the engineering and the anecdotes instead.
Wildlife in the city Coyote at the Kitchen Door by Stephen DeStefano, Harvard University Press, $24.95/£18.95 Reviewed by Gail Vines
SEEN a moose in suburbia? In Massachusetts, just call LART – the large animal response team. Urban ecologist Stephen DeStefano’s day job routinely involves man-handling moose – and deer, beavers and bears – that have ventured into territory now claimed by humans. His fear is that as the human population continues to rise, land once available for wildlife is being commandeered for housing, roads and shopping malls. As our settlements sprawl, wild animals become “pests”. In Coyote at the Kitchen Door, DeStefano challenges that arrogant mindset. He vividly describes the wonder of his encounters with wild animals in wild places, and grippingly conveys why even suburban coyotes deserve respect. “We try to convince ourselves that we can go it alone,” he writes, “yet our continued existence is predicated on sharing the land.”
Ghost in the machine? Fly By Wire by William Langewiesche, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24 (and by Penguin in the UK in February, £8.99) Reviewed by Paul Marks
ONE year ago, a luckless flock of birds snuffed out both engines on a packed Airbus A320 jet, forcing it to ditch in New York’s Hudson river. All on board survived, making a chatshow-circuit hero of pilot Chesley Sullenberger. This book suggests, however,
that Sullenberger’s glide to the water was aided considerably by the unseen hand of Bernard Ziegler, engineer of the A320’s “fly-by-wire” control system. The system intervenes to prevent pilots flying too slowly to maintain lift or at angles that risk a stall. Ziegler’s software ensured the plane behaved safely, “cradling” it onto the water, William Langewiesche argues. It’s an interesting notion in an otherwise fascinating book, but it’s unconvincing. If a motorist swerves to avoid a wayward pedestrian, do you congratulate the author of the power-steering software? I think not.
The smoking gun Smoking Kills by Conrad Keating, Signal Books, £17.99 Reviewed by Priya Shetty
THE notion that smoking kills is something we now know to be true at such a fundamental level that it’s hard to imagine that the link was only definitively proven in 1950. That’s when epidemiologist Richard Doll uncovered an undeniable connection between smoking and skyrocketing rates of lung cancer. As Conrad Keating’s wellcrafted biography of Doll, with its unrestricted personal access to its subject, explains, Doll singlehandedly saved millions of lives with his findings. He also changed the science of epidemiology in the process, by developing techniques that could be applied to chronic as well as infectious disease. Fighting the ludicrously rich tobacco industry was hard enough, yet Doll’s biggest battle was convincing the medical profession. That few people today can light up a cigarette without knowing the risks is testament to Doll’s tenacity in showing that science will win the day. 16 January 2010 | NewScientist | 41
Picnics in space ISS/JSC/NASA
What do astronauts eat? Make your own space food with this cookbook – if you dare
The Astronaut’s Cookbook by Charles T. Bourland and Gregory L. Vogt, Springer, £19.99/$29.95 Reviewed by Jonathan Beard
ASTRONAUTS experience weightlessness, and most of them also lose weight in space. Why? Because they are often nauseous, always busy, and the food on board their capsules, shuttles and space stations doesn’t look, smell or taste like it does on Earth. As a result, NASA has devoted years to creating foods that can travel safely into space and meet astronauts’ nutritional needs while not making a mess of their spacecraft. How about a nice sandwich and a glass of milk? As Charles Bourland, a retired NASA food scientist, and co-author Gregory Vogt explain in The Astronaut’s Cookbook, bread means crumbs, and in zero-g they become air
pollution – not just messy, but inhaled into astronauts’ lungs. Tortillas, therefore, have largely replaced bread in space. Fresh milk is heavy and goes off quickly, so only the powdered stuff flies. Fresh fruit? Astronauts crave it, but ripening fruit is metabolically active, and gives off odours, so the entire craft smells. Some shuttle captains have said “no bananas on my flight”. As for the Russian cosmonauts who have shared the International Space Station with Americans, their favourite fresh foods are onions and garlic, which “have a divisive effect on the crew”. Despite NASA’s years of work on thermoprocessing and freezedrying to create palatable foods with a long shelf-life, the solution is often banal: the vendingmachine industry has the same goal, so many of its items fly. This book is larded with dozens of recipes for space food but most, alas, are unappealing. Enjoy it for the engineering and the anecdotes instead.
Wildlife in the city Coyote at the Kitchen Door by Stephen DeStefano, Harvard University Press, $24.95/£18.95 Reviewed by Gail Vines
SEEN a moose in suburbia? In Massachusetts, just call LART – the large animal response team. Urban ecologist Stephen DeStefano’s day job routinely involves man-handling moose – and deer, beavers and bears – that have ventured into territory now claimed by humans. His fear is that as the human population continues to rise, land once available for wildlife is being commandeered for housing, roads and shopping malls. As our settlements sprawl, wild animals become “pests”. In Coyote at the Kitchen Door, DeStefano challenges that arrogant mindset. He vividly describes the wonder of his encounters with wild animals in wild places, and grippingly conveys why even suburban coyotes deserve respect. “We try to convince ourselves that we can go it alone,” he writes, “yet our continued existence is predicated on sharing the land.”
Ghost in the machine? Fly By Wire by William Langewiesche, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24 (and by Penguin in the UK in February, £8.99) Reviewed by Paul Marks
ONE year ago, a luckless flock of birds snuffed out both engines on a packed Airbus A320 jet, forcing it to ditch in New York’s Hudson river. All on board survived, making a chatshow-circuit hero of pilot Chesley Sullenberger. This book suggests, however,
that Sullenberger’s glide to the water was aided considerably by the unseen hand of Bernard Ziegler, engineer of the A320’s “fly-by-wire” control system. The system intervenes to prevent pilots flying too slowly to maintain lift or at angles that risk a stall. Ziegler’s software ensured the plane behaved safely, “cradling” it onto the water, William Langewiesche argues. It’s an interesting notion in an otherwise fascinating book, but it’s unconvincing. If a motorist swerves to avoid a wayward pedestrian, do you congratulate the author of the power-steering software? I think not.
The smoking gun Smoking Kills by Conrad Keating, Signal Books, £17.99 Reviewed by Priya Shetty
THE notion that smoking kills is something we now know to be true at such a fundamental level that it’s hard to imagine that the link was only definitively proven in 1950. That’s when epidemiologist Richard Doll uncovered an undeniable connection between smoking and skyrocketing rates of lung cancer. As Conrad Keating’s wellcrafted biography of Doll, with its unrestricted personal access to its subject, explains, Doll singlehandedly saved millions of lives with his findings. He also changed the science of epidemiology in the process, by developing techniques that could be applied to chronic as well as infectious disease. Fighting the ludicrously rich tobacco industry was hard enough, yet Doll’s biggest battle was convincing the medical profession. That few people today can light up a cigarette without knowing the risks is testament to Doll’s tenacity in showing that science will win the day. 16 January 2010 | NewScientist | 41