Lab Notes: Living with a star

Cannabis Corner: Mayor Bloomberg and dumb and dumber

Living with a star by Travis Metcalfe

THE PARKER SOLAR PROBE was launched in August 2018 and will eventually make an orbit within 4 million miles of the sun.

Just after Christmas 2019, a NASA spacecraft soared past Venus toward the inner solar system, and near the end of January 2020, it passed closer to the sun than any satellite in history. Along the way, it has been measuring the intense radiation, harmful charged particles and dynamic magnetic fields in the solar atmosphere, aiming to unlock the secrets of the matter and energy that flow out and occasionally burst toward the Earth. Scientists at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) in Boulder designed and built some electronics for the mission, which recently sent back exciting new discoveries about our local star.

The Parker Solar Probe was launched in August 2018, and has already had three close encounters with the sun to make unprecedented measurements of the solar wind, a stream of charged particles that flow out into the solar system at speeds ranging from 150 to 450 miles per second. Named after Eugene Parker, a physicist who developed the prevailing theory of the solar wind in the mid-1950s, the spacecraft will gradually get closer to the sun over its sixyear mission.

During its first few orbits, the satellite came within 15 million miles of the sun’s surface, already closer than any previous mission and well inside the orbit of Mercury, the planet closest to the sun. The next two orbits will bring it within 12 million miles, and over the next several years it will step closer to 9, 7, 5, and eventually less than 4 million miles, about five times the sun’s own diameter.

To survive the extreme temperatures that could damage its sensitive instruments, the spacecraft is protected by a carbon-composite shield thicker than the door on an industrial refrigerator. At closest approach, the temperature of the shield is expected to reach nearly 2500 degrees F, and the spacecraft will be moving through the particles and dust in the solar wind at up to 120 miles per second, hundreds of times faster than a bullet.

“You’re sort of flying through this hail-storm at incredible speeds, and the spacecraft has to be designed to survive it,” says David Malaspina, a research scientist at LASP who helped build a signal-processing unit for one of the mission’s instruments. “[Parker] Solar Probe is now the fastest human-made object.”

Malaspina earned a degree in physics from Purdue University in Indiana before coming to Boulder in 2005 to begin his doctoral work building instruments to measure electric fields in space. Toward the end of his studies in 2009, he contributed to a proposal to develop one of the instruments for the Parker Solar Probe. The proposal was selected for funding by NASA, so after finishing his Ph.D in 2010 he was hired on as a

BOULDER WEEKLY I postdoctoral researcher at LASP to help build the FIELDS instrument. “FIELDS measures electric and magnetic fields near the spacecraft,” Malaspina explains. “The piece that we built is sort of like the brains of the instrument; it makes decisions about what data are interesting and what data are not.”

In early December 2019, the mission announced its first results with several scientific papers published in the high-profile journal Nature. The papers analyzed observations from the first two orbits of the spacecraft, which measured previously unknown conditions near the sun and came up with some surprising results. The solar wind near the Earth has been monitored for decades, and is known to be extremely turbulent, like waves on the shoreline of a raging sea. Theoretically, the scientists expected the wind to get more and more turbulent as they approached the sun, but that’s not exactly how it turned out.

“It’s like going toward a hurricane and expecting more turbulent seas the closer you get,” says Malaspina. “What we found was these calm patches of solar wind in between the very turbulent structures.”

These alternating patches of turbulence and calm in the solar wind are not yet completely understood, but they offer a preview of the sur

prises that may be in store for the Parker Solar Probe as it gets even closer to the sun over the coming years. The mission aims to improve scientist’s understanding of the basic physical processes that drive the solar wind, not just the steady background flow but also the violent eruptions that sometimes crash into the protective magnetic field of the Earth, disrupting communications and endangering satellites and astronauts. If scientists can improve their ability to predict this “space weather,” the impacts can be managed and potentially avoided.

“Being able to predict when these things happen, and what direction they will be pointed, is something that will be important for future travel through the solar system,” says Malaspina. “If these types of events were to happen while astronauts are outside the Earth’s atmosphere, they could be badly irradiated.”

As NASA prepares to send crewed missions that return to the moon and eventually travel to Mars, the ability to monitor and ultimately predict the powerful explosions coming from the sun will be essential to keeping astronauts safe. In the meantime, the Parker Solar Probe will provide a broad array of new measurements from an ever-closer perspective to help make such predictions possible. Travis Metcalfe, Ph.D., is a researcher and science communicator based in Boulder. The Lab Notes series is made possible in part by a research grant from the National Science Foundation.

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Bacteria bricks CU researchers develop living building materials that reduce carbon dioxide emissions by Angela K. Evans

Concrete is by far the most utilized building material around the world. But it’s also responsible for 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to Chatham House, an international think tank. Producing cement requires a chemical reaction that releases CO2 in addition to requiring the burning of fossil-fuels for the material’s heating process and mining of its raw materials. It’s estimated that the cement industry would need to decrease its annual emissions by 16% by 2030 in order to meet the reduction goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.

So what if we could create a living building material that could replace cement altogether? That just might be a very real option.

Using sand, water and bacteria, researchers at CU-Boulder, have developed an alternative building material that requires very little energy to produce and even captures CO2 in the process.

“Growing something from carbon dioxide rather than emitting it is particularly exciting,” says structural engineer and CU-Boulder professor, Wil Scrubar, who heads up the University’s Living Materials Laboratory.

There are several green building standard programs and initiatives out there that promote the use of sustainable materials made from biological matter, but Srubar says this new technology takes the concept one step further.

“Ours is the only one that has been shown to stay alive,” he says.

It all starts with a small culture of cynobacteria, as originally suggested by CU’s Jeffrey Cameron, assistant professor in biochemistry. Cameron is coauthor of a study published Jan. 15 in the journal Matter. The study is a product of interdisciplinary research at CU-Boulder that brought together a variety of disciplines from structural engineering to biochemistry to microbiology, Srubar says.

To create the bricks, cynobacteria grows on sunlight, CO2, some water and nutrients. Then the team mixes in some sand and some gelatin, and elevates the temperature, all of which creates calcium carbonate — one of the main ingredients in cement.

“During that process, the bacteria are growing, they’re multiplying, they’re creating the minerals that are being given off to the system and that’s helping to cement everything together and then we can pour that into any shape,” Srubar says.

But that doesn’t mean a house will turn into a skyscraper overnight if built with the new material, he jokes. Once the material takes the desired shape in a mold, researchers can drop the temperature and dehydrate it, causing the material to gel together and stop growing.

“So you can imagine just like putting leftovers into the fridge, when we cool the bacterial culture inside of the brick, the bacteria shutdown. They don’t replicate nearly as fast as they would at the elevated temperature,” he says. “And then, especially when we dry it out, the bacteria metabolisms are inhibited even further than that.” The bacteria remain alive, however, allowing the researches to essentially “resurrect” a brick and begin the multiplication process all over. What’s more, the same process could be used to repair cracks. All it takes, Scurbar says, is a little bit of water, more sand and heat for the bacteria to start growing again.

“We definitely understand the bacteria and we control them and only trigger the growth phase when we want it,” he says.

The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, motivated to find a way to build something out of seemingly nothing in places like deserts, Srubar says. “They’re interested in it for deployment of military installations in those environments.”

But the technology could also be used in other “resource scarce environments,” say, for example, Mars. “When we talk about human settlements on other planets, I don’t think we’ll be trucking bags of cement with us,” he says. “I think we’ll actually be bringing biology with us.” But before it’s sent into space, Srubar says, the material will be best used inside — for insulation, solidifying foundations or sub flooring — due to the controlled humidity of most indoor environments. It could also eventually replace bricks, but that would require something to protect it from the elements, like a stucco exterior.

The living bricks aren’t on the market yet, but could potentially start showing up in buildings in the next five to 10 years, Srubar says, especially, as an alternative to current emission intensive construction materials.

“The demand for carbon storing, or really a carbon neutral building material alternative to something like a mortar or a concrete, is actually quite high.” CU BOULDER COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING & APPLIED SCIENCE

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF ROBERT MARROW

It was during the drive to Moab that Robert Marrow realized he might be making a huge mistake.

Relatively new to trail running, Robert had signed up for the Dead Horse Ultra 50k in October 2019 — his second race of that distance. His first 50k had been in Montana just months prior, and it went well, so he felt ready to tackle another — plus, this one would be at a much lower elevation, so he figured it was well within his reach. Still, he could feel tension building in his chest.

After moving to Colorado from the East Coast, he took up running to help him recover from a skiing injury. He quickly fell in with a group of trail runners, and in the months leading up to the race, he soaked up as much of their advice as he could.

Robert didn’t get a coach, opting instead to use training plans from a few different athletes, all of which had been running for years and had solid, proven routines.

“The weeks leading up to the race, I was pushing myself, adding mileage and weight training,” he says. “I was completely overtrained. I wasn’t listening to my body.”

The morning of the race, everything hurt.

“I was trying to hide the fact that I didn’t feel good. Standing out of bed hurt. Getting off the couch hurt. I didn’t want to admit it. It was fear.” Robert knew he had the capacity to run 31 miles — after all, he’d done it before. The morning of the race, he toed the line with a friend and they set off together at the sound of the gun. But about 25 minutes in, he told his friend to go ahead.

“I started hitting mental walls. After mile three, it was just regret after regret. I was in a dark place.” There were some added pressures, Robert admits. His girlfriend was there, his parents had come out, and he felt he had to finish — partly for them.

“But, I didn’t have it in me.” The scenery kept him going for another 18 miles, but he felt more and more miserable with every step. Robert pulled out at mile 21. “It was the first time I’d failed in running. It was something I’d become pretty cocky about.”

After the race, he thought about selling all his running gear.

“I felt I’d ruined it for myself. I kept looking back at everything I’d done wrong,” he says. “I punished myself.”

• • • • Boulder acupuncturist Ginna Ellis says what happened to Robert is a common phenomenon, heavily influenced by the mega-athletic culture of Boulder.

“You go to a party and everyone there has run a 100-mile race or has done an Ironman, and they do these things casually, so it becomes no big deal,” she explains. “People can make reckless decisions because it’s the norm here.”

Ellis often sees clients fall victim to the “perspective problem,” signing up for a 50- or 100-mile race before they’re ready, and dealing with devastating consequences once it’s over.

“A 100-mile race takes such a toll that it can deplete you in ways that you don’t realize until months afterwards.”

She says overtraining manifests as deep fatigue, with people feeling like they may need to sleep 12 hours every night. Or, mild injuries might take much longer than usual to heal. “There’s a deeper level of depletion that might not rear its head right Overtrained and underprepared A look into Boulder’s perspective problem By Meghan Walker

ULTRA-DISTANCE runner Robert Marrow learned his lessons on overtraining the hard way. Now he’s enjoying life and running more than ever.

away,” Ellis says.

That fatigue, usually obvious by its physical manifestations, also profoundly affects emotional and mental states. Dr. Marek Dvorak is a psychologist in Boulder — he’s seen burnout fatigue often since moving to the area a few years ago.

“The Boulder athlete is very performance-oriented. They tend to have very high standards for themselves and tend to be very harsh on themselves should they not meet those standards,” Dvorak says. “When an athlete doesn’t meet those standards, often this affects their daily functioning, or their mood. They get very discouraged, show signs of depression, frustration or anger.”

Dvorak echoed that it’s a perspective problem; being surrounded by such a high level of athleticism can be inspiring on one hand, but more often than not it can lead a budding athlete to believe they’re ready for huge undertakings. “I think it can be dangerous for someone who comes to Boulder and is less experienced, or who has unrealistic expectations,” he explains. “If you were once a big-time woman or guy in Podunk, USA, and then you come to Boulder, all of a sudden you don’t stand out. You may not garner that same attention and admiration from other people, and that may be difficult to take.”

And then there’s social media. Strava is a fitness app in which users can publicly log their activities; whether they’re running, cycling or swimming. It gives athletes an opportunity to share their results, and often can turn into a highly competitive virtual race.

Robert says his burnout started when he started using Strava. He got sucked into the competitive aspect of the app, always checking how his runs stacked up to the athletes he followed.

“I was comparing myself to people who had been in the sport far longer than me, and who have coaches and dieticians. Essentially, people who know their body and what it can handle. And here I am, 16 months into running, trying to emulate these pro-athletes.”

Often, Dvorak sees athletes conflating identity and results, explaining that when self-identity and notions of self-worth are attached to performance, there are dire consequences. That’s where perspective comes into play: honest self-appraisal and realistic expectations are vital for the hobby or recreational athlete.

However, self-appraisal can be very off sometimes, Dvorak says.

Robert admits his perspective was a little warped by what he was seeing on his trail runs.

“You go out intending to do a small run, like the Sanitas Loop, but in that time you might pass two or three pro-athletes. I’d be looking at them, and thinking, I’m going to catch them — even if that wasn’t the workout I’d planned for myself,” Robert says. “I was just trying to compete.”

Ellis, who has often seen the physical impacts of overtraining as an acupuncturist, says it’s a downward spiral that can sink an athlete quickly. “Overtraining can have these devastating effects. By the time you realize what’s going on, it’s often too late. They think they’re doing everything right and then all of a sudden, they can’t get off the couch for three months.”

When a person trains hard, the impacts aren’t solely physical. Your body doesn’t differentiate between your training load as a stressor, ver

sus your emotional or work stress, she explains. It’s all the same to your body, and can present itself in a number of ways; fatigue, loss of motivation, irritability and sleep loss are all classic signs. And, it’s a moving target — what’s possible for some athletes can be way too much for others.

“Boulder is full of passionate, highly motivated people, which inspires people to do things they

wouldn’t normally think possible,” she says. “I don’t see Boulder as being a hotbed of toxic competitive energy, but it’s a bubble in so many ways — one of them being that everyone is a super athlete, and so you kind of lose perspective.” • • • • Robert’s devastating 50k shook him up — in a good way. It was clear to him that he’d pushed too hard leading up to the Moab race, compromising his mental and physical state to the point at which he hit a wall, head-on.

He took some time off after the race and focused on himself, his relationship and his dogs.

It was the community that brought him back.

Despite all he’d been through with the Moab 50k, Robert has already signed up for two 100-mile races this year: the Leadville Ultra and Bryce Canyon Ultra.

He still has a couple months to change his mind, but says he’s “dangling the carrot.”

However, he’s doing things differently this time: he changed up his training routine, has a friend coaching him, and is focusing on listening to his body more. Social media is now where he goes for injury prevention advice; Strava is now serving as his own personal metric, rather than a source of competitive energy.

“I’m feeling strong and positive recently. I don’t want to burn out again. I want to stay happy and love this sport.”

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Punching up Zoe Rogers wants to give everyone a seat at the table at the debut Boulder Comedy Festival by Caitlin Rockett

This is the first in a series of profiles we’ll be featuring over the coming months in the run up to the Boulder Comedy Festival. W hen Zoe Rogers decided to produce a comedy festival in Boulder, diversity was on her mind — but that was nothing new. Before moving to Boulder with her husband and three children a couple years ago, Rogers cut her teeth in LA’s comedy scene, a “vibrant and varied universe,” as the Los Angeles Times called it in 2017. Coming up through the ranks, Rogers regularly found she was the only woman on a lineup. Rarely did she see comedians of color.

“From a producer standpoint, for 60 to 90 minutes you control what’s being said and the energy that’s being created and the inspiration that could be happening, the representation that could be happening,” Rogers says. “So why are you doing this? If I wanted to hear a bunch of straight white guys I’d watch C-SPAN.”

When Rogers launches the Boulder Comedy Festival June 4-7, she’ll be creating the environment she hoped to find when she started in comedy, an intelligent-but-not-prudish atmosphere, showcasing nationally touring comics, festival winners and local comedians with a focus on women and diversity.

BUILDING CRED

Rogers built her cred on the comedy scene the way everyone does, performing in “itchy, dirty back rooms to like, one drunk person.” That was fine; that’s how every comic finds a voice and works out material. What wasn’t fine was the dearth of variety. Once, after a show with a strong turnout, she suggested to a club owner that she and another female comic whose work he’d expressed enjoying could both fill empty slots in a coming week’s lineup.

“‘It’s not ladies’ night,’” Rogers says he responded.

She kept going, ultimately landing gigs at meccas like the The Comedy Store, Laugh Factory and The Ice House in Los Angeles. She got TV time on NickMom and Disney, and traveled to the UK to perform at Edinburgh Fringe.

With a few years of stand-up under her belt, Rogers began producing her own shows around LA, filling the lineup with voices she felt were under-represented. She made some waves by flipping her experience as a female comic on its head, producing a show called “Token Straight White Dude” featuring — you guessed it — only one man.

“That’s it, no more, because that’s what women hear all the time [in comedy shows],” Rogers says.

The show — held in a private backyard after Rogers says venues refused to host something with such a “divisive” title — even got a mention from right-wing propaganda factory Breitbart, which accused “[social justice warrior] comedians” of ruining comedy with a “new wave of political correctness.”

THE VIEW FROM HERE

If you don’t believe Rogers’ view of the comedic landscape, pros like Tina Fey have gone public with their thoughts. In 2017, Town and Country magazine asked Fey why it was “an amazing time” for women in comedy.

“It’s a terrible time,” Fey replied. “The boys are still getting more money for garbage, while the ladies are hustling and doing amazing work for less.”

“Just because (Tina) Fey is superfamous and Amy Schumer is #5 on the 2017 Forbes list of highest-paid comics and women can now be Ghostbusters does not mean we have achieved full comedy equality,” former stand-up comic Lynn Harris wrote for Time magazine in 2017. “Women comics are still fighting the unfunny fight for equal respect, equal opportunity, equal pay. Which includes fending off harassment that limits their choices and chances and is protected by ‘armies of enablers.’”

Schumer, by the way, is the only female comic to have graced the Forbes list. A comic must earn a minimum of $15 million to make the list. Schumer came in at number 7.

“The lack of inclusion of women on the list isn’t for lack of female comics working,” Newsweek wrote last year. “[In 2018] a number of comedy specials from women were widely praised (and nominated for multiple Emmys), including Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, Ali Wong’s Hard Knock Wife and Tig Notaro’s Happy To Be Here.”

You’ve likely seen one if not all of those specials, and perhaps seen one of their shows live. And yet despite their popularity, their work was never valued as highly — literally — as that of their male peers.

That could be because as recently as 2007, editors at Vanity Fair thought it prudent to run a piece by (the now deceased) Christopher Hitchens called “Why Women Aren’t Funny” that attempted to say it was just a matter of biology — science — 3,000 words of backhanded (not to mention racist, homophobic and body shaming) compliments that reduced women to little more than baby-obsessed caregivers ruled by the phases of the moon.

“In any case, my argument doesn’t say that there are no decent women comedians,” Hitchens acquiesces. “There are more terrible female comedians than there are terrible male comedians, but there are some impressive ladies out there. Most of them, though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three.”

That was 14 years ago, you might say. But unlike Hitchens, the ethos of his article is alive and well, easily found on websites and forums like Breitbart and Men’s Rights on Reddit.

“Funny women are leading by examsee COMEDY FEST Page 22 ON THE BILL: BOULDER COMEDY FESTIVAL. June 4-7, various venues, bouldercomedyfestival.com

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ple,” Tyler Daswick wrote for Relevant magazine last year, outlining how female comics have often had to take behind-thecamera roles to find titanic success like Tina Fey. “How many people are following them?”

Zoe Rogers is looking to find out Boulder’s answer to that question.

PUNCHING UP

Born in New York, the youngest of four children in a “big, loud, Irish family,” Rogers was, in her words, fighting for stage time from birth. Like many kids who came of age in the ’80s, Rogers grew up on a steady diet of HBO comedy specials from George Carlin, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and Ellen Degeneres.

But even though she was raised in the epicenter of comedy, it wasn’t until she and her husband moved to California that she gave stand-up a try.

“I started doing comedy after my son stopped breastfeeding. I felt like he broke up with me,” Rogers jokes. “My friend, who had been doing stand-up comedy, kept telling me to take this comedy class.” She finally did, “and it changed my whole life.”

“I love my kids and I love being a mom, but it is not surprising to anyone that it can be very isolating, like crying on the bathroom floor isolating,” Rogers says. “I can’t speak for everyone, but I had no idea what I was doing. It was like getting your dream job but you had no idea the hours that would be required of you or the fact that people, sometimes strangers, were constantly going to be assessing your performance.”

Rogers felt like she had no one to talk to about the experience, and even if she did, she worried her experience was singular. “And when I took this class that was the first thing I talked about was just how completely crazy the expectations were (on mothers) and the way that the world felt to me since [having children],” she says. “It was the first time that this thing that felt so isolating to me was something that I could connect with other people about it. And instead of it being something that I was crying about on the bathroom floor, it was something that I was connecting and laughing with people about in a theater.”

She built her brand of comedy around motherhood without sacrificing the irreverent takes on life that make great comedy so great.

“You don’t get any formal training for being a parent,” Rogers muses in one of her jokes. “I never got a course on hanging out with 5 year olds, but I’ve hung out with drunk girls, and it’s pretty much the same thing: They make you late for everything, they insist on wearing something ridiculous and the night ends with some kind of drama about a random tiara that no one came in with. And the car ride home is always like, ‘Are we going to McDonald’s?’”

When her family decided to pack up and move to Boulder, Rogers wasted little time getting involved in the local comedy scene. In the spring of 2019 Rogers began hosting Dairy Comedy in the Boe, and by late last year she wondered if she could produce a comedy festival in Boulder. After taking the temperature to see who might be interested, Rogers went all in, securing time and space at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder and Tilt Pinball in Louisville as venues for the four-day festival. She currently has a dozen comedians slated to perform — including Vanessa Gonzales, Heather Pasternak, Kristal Adams, Wally Baram and Tamar Kattan — and is reviewing more applications in the hopes of presenting as many as 20 acts. She’s also still in search of more sponsors and venues.

Rogers hopes to offer sets that present different perspectives on the world without “punching down,” or, as she puts it, “shitting on people.” (Though, if I am to believe the staff at Interrobang — and I don’t — any use of the phrase “punching up” must come from people of the “high-minded, socially liberal persuasion, who hold all of the ‘correct’ opinions, and who are, almost universally, not very funny.”)

If you’re looking for the kind of queerbashing, why-me comedy served up in recent sets by comedians like Louis C.K. and Aziz Ansari, look elsewhere.

“Humor,” as Mary Hirsch once said, “is a rubber sword — it allows you to make a point without drawing blood.”

“I have problems with the punching down theory,” Rogers says. “First, I’m not really on your side if I think you’re kind of a bully. Second, I don’t know anything about you; you’re leaving the stage and I know nothing about you. You haven’t shared anything real or vulnerable about yourself except for the demographics you hate and discriminate against. So I would have rather listened to somebody who’s being real and vulnerable that I could connect with and who didn’t just reinforce a bunch of stereotypes. That’s not new. That’s some old syndicated hate, and I just don’t have time for that.”

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