Our third print issue features Catherine Lacey on worthless pictures; Elif Batuman on Miranda July; Chris Kraus on girlhood; the drawings of Daniel Johnston; poems by Ariana Reines and Eileen Myles; and dispatches on undersea rifts, baby-making on Mars, and climbing Stone Mountain. 

—alongside pieces by Emily Raboteau, Marcus J. Moore, and Catherine Lacey; poems by Eileen Myles, Ariana Reines, and Brandon Kilbourne; and drawings by Daniel Johnston.

The year was 1982, and Jeffrey Alberts needed to get into the Soviet Union. He couldn’t fly there from America. President Reagan had escalated the Cold War; direct flights between the two countries had been halted the year before. Alberts was instructed to fly to London by a man named Richard Keefe. 

“I met Dick for the very first time, face to face, according to his instructions, in front of Barclays Bank in Heathrow Airport,” Alberts recently recounted. “He would be the guy wearing a Russian hat.”

And Alberts? He was the tall guy with wild hair and a goatee. If you are picturing Alberts as a spy, maybe a hero from a le Carré novel, I’ll tell you that he is a hero, but of a different stripe. A professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, he had—at his fellow scientist Keefe’s behest—become an integral part of a high-stakes NASA mission. To complete his objective, Alberts needed to get into the Soviet Union and send 10 pregnant white Wistar rats into low Earth orbit on board the Soviet spacecraft Kosmos 1514.

Against formidable odds—the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, and even rogue monkeys—Alberts and his colleagues forged a rare scientific collaboration. Together, from the United States and the former Soviet Union, they carried out research that is now fundamental to our understanding of whether human life can be sustained beyond our planet Earth. They were the first scientists to study pregnant mammals in space.

These days, conversations about humans moving off Earth tend to revolve around a pair of billionaires—Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. On January 16, 2025, Musk's SpaceX conducted the seventh test flight of Starship—a skyscraper of a rocket, the largest ever built, designed to carry humans to Mars. SpaceX plans to launch thousands of Starship rockets in the coming decades. On the very same day, 15 hours earlier, Bezos’s Blue Origin launched New Glenn—a smaller, yet still massive spacecraft designed to carry both people and cargo into orbit. While Musk envisions a future on Mars, Bezos imagines humans living in giant space stations orbiting Earth.

Their escapades and rivalry tend to dominate the airwaves, but the tech moguls are not the only ones preparing to take us off-planet. NASA is working to build a lunar outpost (while also proposing, as Musk and Bezos both do, that we 

for resources). NASA’s Artemis Base Camp—named after Apollo’s twin sister and goddess of the Moon—will feature a network of landing pads, roads, sheds, and acorn-shaped habitats, all 3-D-printed by robots using Moon dust. Construction hasn’t begun yet, but blueprints are in progress with viability tests underway. The Artemis Program was launched in 2019, during the first Trump presidency, and both Musk and Bezos hold contracts to transport astronauts to the lunar surface.

With Trump back in the White House, there are signs that the United States—while not abandoning plans for the Moon—is shifting its priority toward sending humans to Mars. Trump could change course at any moment, but NASA has been preparing for this goal, too. On July 6 of 2024, a crew of four volunteers concluded a 378-day stay in “Mars Dune Alpha,” an isolated 1,700-square-foot 3-D-printed habitat designed to help us prepare for life on the Red Planet. Two more such simulations are in the works.

The United States is not alone in its space ambitions, and political tensions here on Earth are playing out above us. China and Russia are collaborating on a lunar base, which they plan to complete by the mid-2030s. China is also preparing to send crewed missions to Mars, signaling its intent to challenge the United States for dominion in deep space.

Moving to Mars may strike you as fanciful—for who would choose to live in the discomfort of outer space? But consider this: In 2013, when the Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp offered four volunteers one-way tickets to Mars—albeit through his ill-fated and widely criticized Mars One project—202,586 people from more than 140 countries applied.

Humanity has entered a new era of space exploration. This time, we don't just want to visit, we want to stay. From Musk and Bezos to former NASA administrator Michael Griffin and the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, advocates for moving off-planet increasingly frame the need to migrate as imperative to our survival, key to withstanding existential threats and building long-term resilience. But if getting to space will be a feat of engineering, staying there will be a feat of biology. 

We’ll need to conceive and raise children away from Earth. Mothers and their young—not towering rockets—will bear the most weight of our space dreams. It’s through them that humanity will transform into a multi-planetary species. And for all the excitement about venturing into space, we know astonishingly little about how life there will affect pregnancies or child development—and, by extension, the future evolution of our species. 

Whether space can actually save us remains far from certain.

As an evolutionary biologist, I find the prospect of humans moving off-Earth both thrilling and terrifying. Few behaviors have shaped our evolution as profoundly as migration, and not since the first group of adventurous humans—

—left Africa nearly two million years ago has any human made such a bold move. 

 eventually followed, migrating out of Africa. We spread through Europe and Asia, interbreeding with other human groups—which increased our genetic diversity—and adapted to varied environments. This is how modern 

 became who we are today. When we leave our planet—say for Mars—we will enter a radically new world, where adapting to less gravity will rank amongst our greatest challenges. Our biological and behavioral flexibility will be pushed to its limits, forcing a new phase of evolution with unpredictable consequences.

have extraordinary flexibility when we are young, and evolution occurs through changes in development—starting in the embryo, long before birth. The environment of space will trigger a cascade of shifts—from our cells all the way to our culture—leading to new developmental outcomes. Some individuals might develop denser bones, others enhanced balance or behaviors better suited to surviving the planet-wide dust storms of Mars, where technological mastery may become as crucial as physiological adaptation. Traits that improve survival and reproduction on the Red Planet will spread through the population by means of natural selection, as those better adapted to the new circumstances will be more likely to survive and bear children

 Their children will, in turn, be shaped by similar evolutionary forces.

But there's more to this story: an expectant mother, though increasingly treated by U.S. laws as a vessel for her fetus, isn’t merely that. Humans are part of a group of eutherian—colloquially called placental—mammals. Among our fellow animals in this group are rats, bats, pets like cats and dogs, farm animals, elephants, shrews, whales, and even armadillos. What unites us is how our mothers nourish us in the womb: through the placenta, which forms where the embryo attaches to the uterus. The placenta is a shared organ, composed of tissues from both mother and fetus. It produces hormones that affect both. Through the placenta, the two work as one unit, with intertwined cardiovascular, pulmonary, immune, and metabolic functions. Pregnancy transforms a mother’s physiology in ways that support her survival and that of her unborn child. In strict scientific terms, neither the fetus nor the mother is a traditional biological "individual"—they are a fused entity.

The daily rhythms of a mother’s life shape the senses of her fetus. Her speech, laughter, moods, heartbeat, the foods she eats, and even her breathing can be felt inside the womb. When she walks—an act that requires gravity—her fetus feels the changing pressure and hears the rhythm of her footsteps. It experiences shifts in spatial orientation and balance—vestibular shifts. These experiences mold the sensorimotor capabilities of the fetus. Environmental factors that alter the mother’s behavior or physiology—like, for example, dwelling in outer space—will inevitably alter her fetus.

After birth, mammalian mothers remain of paramount importance. A baby depends on its mother for survival and well-being, and other caregivers play crucial roles, too. Early care—whether from the mother or other adults—regulates the expression of hundreds of genes in a child through epigenetic modifications. When caregivers are under extreme stress, they may struggle to meet the child's needs, leading to neglect that can cause lifelong biological and behavioral challenges—and not just through epigenetic changes. The child may develop psychiatric disorders, have reduced brain volume and sensorimotor impairments, and, in extreme cases, suffer DNA damage. The unforgiving environment of space could amplify these harmful effects in a growing population, diminishing overall survival and reproductive fitness.

“Development is the artist; natural selection, the curator,” the biologist Scott Gilbert reminds us. After many rounds of selection—which we too often reduce to the cliché “survival of the fittest”—the brains, bodies, and behaviors of those who prevail will be transformed. And they may become something else entirely: 

But before we get to any of these daunting unknowns, there are concrete questions with more immediate urgency. For example: Can mammalian pregnancies, including ours, even progress in outer space? Can fetuses develop without Earth's gravity? And if so, how might the unique conditions of space alter our basic sensorimotor abilities? If we plan to move away from Earth, we need answers. We need to know if we can adapt to vastly different worlds.

It was these very questions of life—and life beyond Earth—that took Jeffrey Alberts, 43 years ago, to Heathrow Airport to scan the crowds for a furry Russian hat by Barclays Bank. The experiments that grew from this meeting provide some of the only answers we have.

Alberts’s encounter with space biology—the study of how living beings adapt to outer space—was serendipitous. In the late 1970s, during his early years as a professor at Indiana, Alberts recalls being "totally indifferent to all of this stuff." But a master's student in his department—a Trekkie—had developed a passion for space science. Alberts encouraged her to follow her heart, and she followed it to Texas—attending what he thought was a “crazy-sounding” conference on how altered gravity affects animals.

One night, not long after his student attended the conference, Alberts was working late in his office when the phone unexpectedly rang. It was Richard Keefe, a neuroanatomist from Case Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine. Keefe had been working with NASA for several years and had learned of Alberts’s expertise in rodent sensory development from his student at the Texas conference.

The Russians were planning to send pregnant rats into space, Keefe explained. A select group of American scientists would work with NASA and be granted access to these animals. Would Alberts be interested in studying how rats develop in microgravity? "I just said yes," Alberts recalled, when I reached him via Zoom at his office in Bloomington. "It sounded like something I could do, and it was certainly exotic."

Over the next two years, Alberts and Keefe spoke regularly by phone, and under Keefe’s guidance, Alberts developed prototypes for experimental equipment in line with NASA’s specifications. He rigged cages to monitor the pregnant rats—the 

—after their trip to space and designed a series of tests to study the sensorimotor functioning of their pups, who would be born back on Earth after their prenatal stint in orbit. He devised thin mercury-filled tubes to wrap around the bellies of the pink, hairless rat pups who, at birth, are the size of a human pinkie finger. The tubes would stretch and compress with each breath the pups took, tracing their respiration. He had tests to tell how well the pups could roll over from back to belly—"righting" themselves—on a solid surface, a measure of their tactile and vestibular abilities. A similar test in water would eliminate the feedback of touch, isolating their sense of balance and spatial orientation. There were devices that emitted puffs of odor while monitoring the pups’ sniff rates. He had hearing tests, too, and optokinetic drums—rotating instruments often used to test vision in humans.

The sensory systems of birds and mammals—ours included—become functional in a fixed order: touch comes first, followed by the vestibular system (our motion sensor that detects acceleration, head movement, and spatial orientation to help us maintain posture and balance), then the chemical senses (smell and taste), hearing, and finally sight. In most species, the tactile, vestibular, and chemical senses come online in utero. Human fetuses can hear in the womb, but vision develops largely after birth. In rats, both hearing and sight develop postnatally. Despite these differences in timing across species, the study of space-exposed pregnant rats and their progeny would offer insights into how human sensory development might be altered beyond Earth.

In 1981, Alberts took his wares to NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California—where he caught the space bug. “It turns out I like big things," he recalled, with a hearty laugh, “...and NASA is full of gigantic things.” Walking down the sidewalks, Alberts saw pressure tanks so large that the bolts holding them down were wider than his arms—the arms of a six-foot-one man—could reach around. There was the world’s largest wind tunnel, where rockets were tested to ensure they didn’t break apart while propelling through the atmosphere on their way to outer space. He saw centrifuges designed to test astronauts’ tolerance to accelerations greater than those experienced in Earth’s gravity—a kind of salad spinner for humans.

Alberts was dazzled. The equipment, the launches, the very dream of going to space—they were all gigantic.

We take gravity for granted. After all, we've never known life without it. Gravity is a fundamental force of nature. It sculpts galaxies. It warps space and time. It holds the universe together. Gravity also gives Earth her spherical shape. It is needed for rain to fall, for soil to drain, for heat to spread, for air and water to separate. Gravity gives weight to all things—animate and inanimate—and keeps us all from floating off into space.

Throughout the roughly four billion years of biological evolution on our planet, gravity—its intensity and direction—has remained constant. It's the only environmental parameter to have done so. Earth’s temperature, atmosphere, and sea level, for instance, have all fluctuated dramatically. Plant sensitivity to the Earth's gravitational pull—

—is what makes their roots grow downward and stems grow upward. When the first sea creatures crawled onto land some 390 million years ago, their bodies and brains had to adapt to a new gravitational load. Similarly, adaptation to Earth's 1-G environment has influenced our body shape, muscle tone, locomotion, and even brain structure.

While each planet, moon, and asteroid has its own gravitational pull, the intensities vary. The Moon's gravity is roughly 17 percent of ours, making movements feel much lighter for astronauts who walk on its surface. Mars, currently considered the most viable option for human habitation, has approximately 38 percent of Earth's surface gravity. Europa, a moon of Jupiter and another top contender for human settlement, has only around 13 percent of our gravity.

Jeff Bezos hopes to sidestep the problem of lower gravitational forces by building floating colonies with artificial gravity. He draws inspiration from Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill's 1976 book 

The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space

, in which O’Neill proposed that Earth-like gravity could be generated by the centrifugal force of counter-rotating cylinders, each about 20 miles long and four miles in diameter: a machine whose inner surface would roughly equal the size of the city of Los Angeles, upon which millions of people could dwell.

O’Neill cylinders have become a popular motif in science fiction. At the end of the movie 

, for example, Matthew McConaughey’s character finds himself in a hospital inside a cylinder orbiting Saturn. As he looks out the window of his ground-floor room, we see his incredulous gaze shift upward—from a baseball field to concave farms to inverted houses overhead.

Seductive though this idea may be, it has garnered less popular support than settling Mars—largely due to the immense engineering and financial challenges involved in building and maintaining such structures. Many view Mars as offering a more “natural,” if still daunting, second home for humanity.

While today’s discussions—at least in the United States—center on 

 humans might settle in space, the Russians, as far back as the 1960s, were asking a more fundamental question:

 Earth’s life forms can survive and reproduce over multiple generations without Earth’s gravity. From the earliest days of space biology, they were studying the reproduction and development of both plants and animals in microgravity. They were visionaries, says Alberts.

If getting to space is a feat of engineering, staying there will be a feat of biology.

When Alberts and Keefe boarded a Japan Airlines flight in London, bound for Moscow, their destination was the Institute of Biomedical Problems—the Soviet space biology institute. There, together with a team from NASA, they would negotiate the protocols for sending pregnant mammals into space for the very first time. Back then, it was science—not colonization—that motivated their efforts.

For Alberts, the U.S.S.R. itself became a part of space biology’s allure. “That brought its own total intrigue, crazy mystery, and romance about it,” he recalls. “It was behind the Iron Curtain, and it was dark and gray—literally. There was no food, and it was very harsh conditions, and they were doing this exotic space experiment at the same time. It was an alternative universe.”

Scientific collaboration aside, political tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were high. The NASA scientists, some of whom had been coming to Moscow for years, learned to gauge just how high the tensions were based on where they were housed. Of his first trip in 1982, Alberts said, “The hotel they put us in was far away from everything and very, very isolated.” A van was sent to escort the group to the Institute of Biomedical Problems, about a 20-minute drive from Red Square.

Expecting the grandeur of NASA, Alberts was surprised by what he saw. “The Institute was just these drab Soviet buildings,” he told me, reminiscent of housing developments across the Eastern Bloc. Inside, the common toilet everyone used had long since lost its seat, and in lieu of toilet paper, there were newspaper squares, cut up and stacked in a little pile.

“And yet they were doing the most extravagant scientific experiments,” Alberts said. “They were hosting nine nations on these flights, and it was all being run out of this very, very, very plain place. It was always a reminder of how determined they were.”

The satellite that would carry the pregnant rats into space was designated Kosmos 1514. It was the seventh in a series of biosatellites launched by the Russians as part of their Bion Program, established in 1966. Biosatellites, which typically fly without a human crew, are designed to carry plants and animals to space and back, in order to study how spaceflight affects their biology and behavior. This one, Kosmos 1514, was a roughly two-foot-wide spherical metal capsule with a large observation window in the center, a flat cylindrical service module on one end, and a conical propulsion module on the other.

When it began, the Bion program was solely a Soviet endeavor. But by the mid-1970s, Bion had evolved into a truly international collaboration, with scientists from countries as geographically and politically diverse as the United States, France, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, China, and the former German Democratic Republic placing their biological payloads on the Soviet-funded and -operated Kosmos satellites. Collectively, the Bion missions offered—and continue to offer—the single largest source of data on how living beings function in microgravity.

Microgravity, the Bion scientists had discovered by 1982, affects fully developed and developing beings differently, with varied outcomes based on both the organism and its developmental stage. In general, the plants fared better than animals. In the absence of gravity, it turned out, plants can rely on other environmental cues—such as light—to orient and guide their growth. With the right kind of grow-chamber to mitigate the indirect effects of microgravity—for instance, the lack of natural convection, and therefore limited oxygen flow—the plants developed much as they did on Earth, but produced fewer viable seeds in space.

In contrast, fungi—neither plant nor animal, and belonging to their own kingdom—fared poorly in microgravity. They returned oddly shaped, with atrophied stems and enlarged heads. Among the animals, frogs and fish hatched successfully, but upon returning to Earth, they were found to swim atypically—an indication of altered vestibular function. Flour beetles and fruit flies also reproduced in space, but the young flies were hyperactive and died early.

In 1979, 60 quail eggs were sent into low Earth orbit on a Kosmos satellite for 18 and a half days. They were damaged on reentry into Earth's atmosphere by an incubator malfunction, but dissections revealed that embryonic development had proceeded in microgravity. Experiments on subsequent flights confirmed this, but the chicks that hatched in space developed severe abnormalities. Emily Morey-Holton, a scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, reported that when released from the palm of the cosmonaut, "the bird first flapped its wings for orientation and began to spin like a ballerina, then kicked its legs, causing it to tumble." It struggled to fly and could barely perch long enough to peck at its food.

On that same Kosmos flight in 1979, the Russians made their first attempt to study mammalian reproduction by trying to mate rats while in orbit. Sadly, the rats did not mate, and the reasons remain unclear. Kosmos 1514, the mission Alberts was recruited to join, was a direct follow-up to this experiment. Instead of mating rats in space, the scientists planned to send already-pregnant dams who were roughly 60 percent through their pregnancies.

Kosmos 1514 was set to launch in December 1983. Now that the project had been green-lit, the scientist who’d brought Alberts to NASA, Richard Keefe, was no longer involved. Alberts was to work with Luba Serova, a Russian space biologist in charge of the Soviet side of their study. In earlier Kosmos missions, the Soviets had handled all the core parts of the operation: They recovered the animals, performed the dissections, and then passed the specimens to the Americans during a ceremonial “sharing of the tissue” meeting. But Alberts needed to study live rats, so the protocol had to be changed. “I was the first American to work shoulder to shoulder with Soviet scientists with living specimens,” Alberts explained. It was a big deal.

Alberts still speaks of Serova with great affection. “She's a total hero,” he told me. “She held these two sides together through all the political turmoil and extraordinary circumstances.” Serova was sharp and energetic, her hair a striking shade of orange-red—a color Alberts often noticed on the streets of Moscow, and understood more as the result of limited dye options than as a particular fashion. "She tended to sound like she was shouting when she would speak," he recalled, "barking commands in Russian." She worked brutally hard, often pushing herself to the point of total exhaustion. He sensed her home life was difficult. She lived with her mother and husband, and at the end of a long day of lab work (and a long commute home), Serova would do the housework. At times, he would see her eating scraps of food straight off a cast-iron pan that she had brought to work. Times were tough in the U.S.S.R.

Their collaboration got off to a good start. Alberts shipped 21 large crates of equipment from Bloomington to Moscow in preparation for the launch of Kosmos 1514. But then in September, just three months before the launch date, the Soviet military mistook a South Korean airliner for an American spy plane and shot it down over the Sea of Japan off of Siberia. All 269 people aboard died. Reagan cut off relations with the Soviet Union.

Federal projects between the two countries were to be shut down, putting Alberts’s years of work at risk. But an analysis of ongoing partnerships, conducted by the State Department, determined that this life science collaboration between the two countries wasn’t just rare; it was one of a kind. In a bureaucratic sleight of hand, federal authorities reclassified the experiment from “international cooperation” to an “interagency agreement,” thus bypassing the President’s decree.

Kosmos 1514 launched into low Earth orbit on December 14, 1983, from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, 500 miles north of Moscow. On board were ten pregnant white Wistar rats, each at day 13 of their 22-day gestation cycle—and two adult male rhesus monkeys, named Abrek and Bion. They were there to help scientists understand why astronauts in space often experienced a headward shift of body fluids. The monkeys were implanted with sensors to monitor blood flow in their carotid arteries—the vessels in the neck that supply blood to the eyes and brain.

Alberts traveled to Moscow for the launch, but couldn’t visit the Plesetsk Kosmodrome to witness it. By Soviet decree, no American was allowed to see their space-vessels' launch—not even on a monitor. Meanwhile, a presidential order from Reagan had barred federal employees from flying in or out of the Soviet Union. So while Alberts had managed to reach Moscow by plane, his NASA colleagues had to take a train from Helsinki. “They came in sick as dogs,” Alberts recounted, “they’d caught a bug on the train.”

Migrating to Mars would be one of the most complex and perilous endeavors in human history. It will require more global cooperation than ever before—not less. 

Kosmos 1514 was scheduled to remain in space for seven days. But one of the monkeys got out of his restraints and started dismantling the satellite from the inside. So the satellite was brought down early, after just four and a half days. It landed in a far-flung province of what is now the country of Kazakhstan.

The Soviet scientists, accompanied by the Soviet Space Force, set out to retrieve the animals. Since the Americans were to have no contact with the satellite, Alberts stayed in Moscow (years would pass before he finally saw a Kosmos biosatellite—on display at the Museum of Cosmonautics—its paint scorched, still carrying the sharp scent of reentry into Earth’s atmosphere). Alberts’s Soviet colleagues, in Kazakhstan, spent days crossing uneven terrain in a crawler-transporter, a massive tank-like vehicle designed to carry rockets. Their fur coats and hats offered little relief from the brutal cold. When they finally found the satellite, they threw up a semicircular quonset hut around it, installed picnic tables inside, and got to work beneath the flapping canvas. The picnic tables would double as dissection stations once the animals were retrieved.

Scientifically speaking, the mission’s shortened length was a blow. “Four and a half days is something like 20 percent of gestation, which is not great,” said Alberts, “but it’s way better than nothing.” Alberts had negotiated with the Russians to bring five of the 10 pregnant rats back to Moscow alive. The dams needed to be kept under strictly controlled conditions for the sake of the experiment, so Alberts hashed out every detail: how they would be transported, what they would be fed, and when. Unfortunately for him, his dear Soviet collaborator, Luba Serova, had other ideas.

“She was a scientist,” he recalled, “but a Russian woman in the richest sense of the word; who had decided—she was full of intuitions—that one of the females was feeling needy after the landing. So that rat was taken out of its cage and made the trip back to Moscow nestled in the cleavage of Luba’s breasts.”

This breach of protocol was, at the time, upsetting to Alberts. But all five females returned alive. Alberts was able to conduct his experiment, which aimed to answer two questions. The first was whether a mammalian pregnancy—at least in its latter stages—could withstand the challenge of microgravity. The second, if the fetuses survived, was to determine what had happened to their sensorimotor development.

The first question was answered on Christmas Eve—before Alberts had even begun his testing. Late that night, he received a call in his hotel room. It was Serova, with good news: four of the five dams had given birth by natural delivery to live pups—the first mammals to have spent part of their gestation in the absence of Earth’s gravity.

When the scientists compared the flight dams with ground controls—pregnant rats at the same stage of pregnancy, housed and fed under identical conditions on Earth—they found that the rats’ duration of labor, number of pups born, pup weights, and even maternal care remained remarkably consistent.

The mother-fetus system, it would appear, was highly adaptable—capable of adjusting to an environment unlike any previously encountered on Earth. And with the birth of the Kosmos 1514 space pups, the idea of humans living beyond Earth moved out of the realm of science fiction.

Years later, in the 1990s, Alberts and a NASA scientist named April Ronca conducted two follow-up experiments aboard NASA shuttles, which confirmed the findings from Kosmos 1514. In these missions, the rats spent the final 40 and 50 percent of their pregnancies in orbit. A key improvement here was the use of continuous video monitoring—24 hours a day, both in space and on Earth—which allowed the scientists to detect a subtle but significant difference during labor: The space dams, when they gave birth on Earth, experienced twice as many contractions as the ground controls.

Subsequent anatomical studies, conducted by colleagues of Alberts and Ronca in Canada, revealed that the muscles of the rats’ abdominal walls had been altered by their time in microgravity. Among the muscles that had weakened was the transversus abdominis—a deep core muscle that wraps around the spine and trunk like a corset. In both rats and humans, the transversus abdominis

works with the diaphragm and the muscles of the pelvic floor to forcefully expel things from the body—be it feces, vomit, air during coughing and sneezing, or even a baby.

To understand why this muscle in particular had deconditioned, Alberts and Ronca turned to footage from the spaceflight. What they found was striking: The flight dams were rolling in their cages—roughly 700 percent more than their Earth-bound peers. Freed from gravity, they explored every surface—floor, walls, ceiling. They were small, furry astronauts in zero-G. When rolling, rats—and humans—engage our external oblique muscles, surface muscles on the sides of the abdomen. While those muscles are put to good use in space, muscles like the transversus abdominis—used to maintain and adjust body position in Earth’s gravity—are required less, and weaken. “Use it or lose it,” as the saying goes.

A deeper investigation revealed more clues. The flight dams had lower levels of connexin 43—a protein found in the smooth muscle layer of the uterus, in both rats and humans. The protein connects cells, one to another, conducting the contraction wave throughout the uterine tissue during labor. Reduced connexin 43, along with weak core muscles, would lead to weaker uterine contractions, requiring the mother's body to produce more contractions to move the fetus through the uterus and into the birth canal.

Pregnancy might survive outer space. Labor, on the other hand, could become significantly harder. 

But back in the 1980s, Alberts did not know this yet—he was in Moscow, working with Serova to answer his second question by testing the pups’ sensorimotor responses on the day of their birth—“P0,” or postnatal day 0, in scientific parlance.

The sequence of sensory development in humans and rats may be the same, but the timings differ. Humans begin to hear in the third trimester, while our vision becomes functional shortly after birth. Rats, by contrast, are born blind and deaf and remain so for the first two weeks of postnatal life. At P0, they rely on their sense of touch, balance, taste, and smell—all of which develop before birth. In Moscow, Alberts’s tests showed that the other senses were largely intact, but their vestibular sense was clearly impaired (as was confirmed, a decade later, by more targeted testing after the two NASA flights).

To assess their vestibular function, Alberts held the pups on their backs in a warm bath—a position rat pups don’t particularly like—and then released them. Pups are naturally buoyant and tend not to sink like stones, giving them plenty of time to turn over and right themselves before reaching the bottom of the bath. When released by Alberts, in the absence of a surface to push against, the pups had to rely entirely on their sense of spatial orientation, posture, and balance—all functions of the vestibular system. Whereas 90 percent of the Earth-bound controls fully righted themselves, only 60 percent of the space pups managed to do so. The deficit persisted for five days, or until P5, after which the pups—still within the window of developmental plasticity—had adjusted to Earth’s gravity.

After their second NASA flight, Alberts and Ronca tested the fetuses just three hours after landing. Using heart rate as a proxy for cognitive engagement—a method also used in studies of humans—they found that the space-exposed fetuses showed strong sustained drops in heart rate—a sign of attention and learning—when rolled, while the Earth-bound controls barely responded. In this one respect, the space fetuses showed enhanced vestibular function.

Their heightened response to angular motion traced back to their mothers, who had rolled around and climbed walls and ceilings in microgravity. The fetuses experienced these movements in utero, during a critical phase of vestibular development, leaving them adapted to a world in which the ground was not the limit. This showed in their neurons too. In the absence of gravity, cells in the 

 of the inner ear—key to sensing angular acceleration—formed stronger connections in the brain. Meanwhile, gravity-sensing neurons reached the brain but formed fewer synapses, consistent with the core principle of brain development that stimulation determines maturation.

When space changed how the mothers behaved, it also changed how their fetuses developed. Alberts now predicts that growing up entirely in space will rewire the sensorimotor system of any mammal. And it was after that first Kosmos flight, as he wrapped up his experiments with Serova in Moscow, that Alberts began to consider the full implications of humans living away from Earth's gravitational influence.

Alberts concluded his experiments in Russia in early 1984. The scientists had seemingly overcome every logistical and political hurdle. But as Alberts stayed to wrap up his experiments and ship back his equipment, the NASA crew decided to return home for the holidays. “At the time, you didn’t do this—you didn’t leave somebody alone in Moscow,” Alberts explained. “But they did, and then things started to go bad for me.”

A message came through Serova, offering no explanation, that Alberts was prohibited from taking the data back to America. Alberts was livid. After several failed attempts to convince the Soviet officials, he went to the American consulate in Moscow for help. Together, they devised a scheme. The consulate arranged for Alberts to call an American journalist from his hotel room. The journalist, who was in on the plan, would agree to run a story about the Soviets refusing to hand over the data, in violation of their international agreement with the United States. The assumption was that Alberts’s phone was bugged, and the call would serve as a warning—to whoever was listening in—to release his data, or the Soviet Union would be disgraced in the press.

Alberts can’t say for sure that anyone was listening, but shortly afterwards, the Russians agreed to release the data. The Institute of Biomedical Problems organized a symposium to mark the end of their collaboration and formally hand over the data disks.

The Soviets were big on ceremony, and Alberts knew that this would involve toasts, speeches, and the exchange of token gifts. He arrived at the Institute with his bags packed and his farewell gifts ready, but found that the meeting had been postponed by a few hours. As Alberts wandered the halls to kill time, he happened to reach into his backpack and discovered a handful of seashells from a recent visit to his parents in Florida. On a whim, he added the shells to his collection of gifts. 

“I gave these shells to Luba,” Alberts told me. “They were very beautiful, and she just disappeared. She just floated before my eyes into some other sphere.” Serova held the shells up to her ears, gazing into the distance. Bewildered, Alberts turned to the interpreter assigned to the project, who had become a friend of his, and was also close with Serova. “You may not know this,” the interpreter said, leaning over, “but Luba believes in reincarnation—and she thinks she was a mollusk in her previous life.”

Darshana Narayanan is a journalist, scientist, and technologist. She received an MFA in narrative nonfiction from NYU and a PhD in psychology and neuroscience from Princeton University. 

tec-ballpill

Baby-Making on Mars

A Lily Pad on the Muck

Issue 03, Available Now

In the 1990s, astronomy professor Joe Patterson wrote and illustrated a seasonal newsletter, in the style of an old-fashioned paper zine, of astronomical highlights visible from New York City. His affable style mixed wit and history with astronomy for a completely charming, largely undiscovered cult classic: Big Apple Astronomy. For 

, Joe shares current issues of Big Apple Sky Calendar, the guide to sky viewing that used to conclude his seasonal newsletter. Steal a few moments of reprieve from the city’s mayhem to take in these sights. As Oscar Wilde said, “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

January

(1801) On the very first night of the nineteenth century, Giuseppe Piazzi found a slowly moving starlike object, which he assumed to be a comet (at that time, only the planets of antiquity were known). But was it a comet? Maybe not, because it showed no tail or fuzz. Only a few precise observations were obtained before it was lost in the glare of the Sun. Fortunately, a very young Carl Friedrich Gauss—now regarded as the greatest mathematician since Archimedes—became interested in how to derive an orbit from merely three observations. He successfully predicted where it would be when it emerged from the solar glare…and later studies showed that the object moved in a nearly circular orbit between Mars and Jupiter. Sort of like an actual planet!

The object was named Ceres, after the Roman god of agriculture. It was the first known asteroid, or “minor planet” (the currently favored term). There are now many thousands known, most quite small and in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Asteroid names have gone berserk. They ran out of Greek and Roman gods a long time ago. For a good time, google “funny asteroid names”—and if you actually 

 an asteroid (plus solve for the orbit), you can even contribute to the madness.

There was another planetary puzzle that dogged astronomers throughout the nineteenth century: the motion of Mercury. It did not exactly obey Newton’s Laws and some astronomers thought there could be another planet, close to the Sun, that was tugging slightly on Mercury. It even got a name: 

(of course). On January 2, 1860, the French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier announced that he had discovered (through calculation) the orbit of Vulcan. But no one ever actually saw it. Le Verrier was wrong. There were scattered claims of seeing the 

of unknown objects crossing in front of the Sun. But none were confirmed, and Mercury’s odd motion wasn’t explained until Einstein’s General Theory (in 1915) showed that the geometry of space in the near vicinity of the Sun is slightly non-Euclidean.

as close as it ever gets to the Sun, just 0.983 AU from the Sun. Amid January’s deep freeze, this may be surprising. But remember that the seasons are caused not by distance, but by the 

 of the Earth’s axis. The variation in distance (0.98 AU in January, versus 1.02 AU in July) is just not enough to make a big difference.

Still, wouldn’t you expect that the maximally close Sun in January and the maximally distant Sun in July would give the northern hemisphere warmer winters and cooler summers? The opposite

is true—the highest recorded temperature on Earth is 134°F (Death Valley) and the lowest is -109°F (Yakutsk, Siberia). Can you guess the reason for the extremes being reached in the North rather than the South?

The anniversary of Galileo’s death, in 1642. Still under house arrest from the Inquisition, Galileo hung on just long enough to get his magnum opus on dynamics (

) smuggled out to Holland, where it could be published. On this precise date three centuries later, another adventurer in space and time was born: Stephen Hawking. Hawking showed that the two bedrock principles of twentieth-century physics—relativity and quantum theory—can actually be reconciled if black holes emit some radiation. It has never been observed, but we’re still looking!

On these four nights in 1610, Galileo turned his telescope on Jupiter… and noticed four stars which moved around Jupiter—the “Galilean satellites,” as we now call them. Or the Medicean Stars, as Galileo called them, in an effort to curry favor with his patron, Cosimo de Medici (a boy of nine). This discovery did a lot to demolish the Ptolemaic model of planetary motions. It had previously been argued: “If the Earth moves, how can it hang onto the Moon?” Well, there was Jupiter up there, obviously moving around 

, and having no difficulty hanging onto its moons.

Before the discovery scene in Bertolt Brecht’s play 

, a curtain appears with the ominous words: “January 10, 1610: Heaven Abolished.”

Last quarter Moon, rising near midnight. Also, Jupiter is at “opposition” tonight—meaning “opposite the Sun, transiting near midnight”… and therefore in a great position for telescopic observation.

 
The Orthodox New Year, which is New Year’s Day on the 

 calendar (as distinct from the modern calendar, which was instituted by Pope Gregory in 1582).

 
Five good overpasses of NYC (or anywhere nearby) by the ISS (International Space Station) occur this month. Here’s the schedule:

Magnitude -3 and -4 means “brighter than any star, and as bright as Venus.” For these ~five-minute apparitions, look first near the WSW horizon. It looks like a plane, except that (a) its light doesn’t flash, and (b) it disappears suddenly in the middle of the eastern sky (as it enters the Earth’s shadow).

The ISS moves at about 18,000 mph, so it travels about 1,500 miles during these quick visions. It’s strange that the station could be mistaken for a plane—yet it is, frequently.

ALL appearances of the ISS start from the west, and end (roughly) in the east.

The waxing crescent Moon passes pretty close to Saturn on these nights. Saturn’s rings are pretty close to edge-on this month, so they won’t present the beautiful view we all love. But if you have a decent telescope and a good southwestern horizon, give it a look. As a consolation prize, look for the brilliant Venus, low in the southwest, an hour after sunset. The medium-bright starlike object next to it is Saturn, as a telescopic look will confirm. But you’ll need a really good southwestern horizon.

First-quarter Moon. Excellent time for telescopic observation—when the mountains and crater walls cast long shadows, as seen from the Earth.

The Moon is next to the Pleiades tonight. Very nice target for observation through binoculars.

Things are getting a little crowded up there. On these nights, the nearly-full Moon is practically on top of Jupiter and the Gemini twins.

February

, as we have come to call it. This is the first of the four “cross-quarter days,” roughly the mid-points of the four seasons. The groundhog connection dates back to an old German legend about the predictive power of badgers. In Christian liturgy, it’s also called Candlemas (candles are lit during services).

BTW, since you’re reading a calendar, it’s a fair guess that you’re interested in such things. If so, indulge yourself, visit 

, read about this day, and find room for a new habit.

The nearly-full Moon is very close tonight to Regulus—the brightest star in Leo and the “backward question mark” of the winter sky.

For observers in NYC, the International Space Station (ISS) will make a pass directly over NYC at precisely 6:37 pm EST tonight. These overpasses are dramatic. You’ll first see it low in the NW, at 6:34 pm. It bears repeating that it may resemble a plane—except that it has no flashing lights and appears to be flying directly over NYC (which only hijacked planes do).

At 6:37, directly overhead, it’s as bright as Venus, and at 6:40 it 

in the SE, even though it’s still 30 degrees from the horizon (only UFOs do this). That’s because it’s entering the Earth’s shadow.

The ISS orbits at ~18,000 mph. When you first see it, it’s roughly over Minnesota. Three minutes later, it’s over NYC. You can see why “landing” this giant structure—a football field in size and requiring 42 visits by astronauts to assemble in orbit—will eventually be a gigantic engineering problem.

Theoretically, these overpasses happen a lot, but only a few are so conveniently placed and timed for NYC. The only other really good one this month occurs the next night, February 4, starting at 5:46 pm. Same progression and duration. A splendid reward for six minutes of observation!

Last quarter Moon, rising around midnight.

On this day in 1913, sky-watchers from Saskatchewan to Bermuda saw a great procession of meteors moving rapidly across the sky. There were hundreds, throwing off sparks as they went and maintaining a near-perfect formation. This was probably a tiny comet or asteroid, which happened to strike the Earth’s atmosphere at grazing incidence. It might have dissipated or skipped off the atmosphere, like a flat stone skipping off a pond.

such objects are out there. Our detection methods mainly pick up the larger ones, and those are too few to pose a serious concern. 2021 had a real groaner of a movie about one (

 had some silliness too, but the science was spot-on perfect. A 400-foot tsunami roaring over Columbus Circle is just what you’d get with a deep impact in the ocean!

Galileo’s birthday in 1564. Very nearly the day of Michelangelo’s death (February 18). Perhaps the greatest scientist and artist of the last millennium.

First day of Ramadan, probably. The mullahs in Mecca will be carefully scrutinizing the western sky tonight, to glimpse the thin lunar crescent (just following the New Moon). If they see it, Ramadan starts. But they do have modern calendars, so they might bend the rules a bit to allow for cloudy weather.

On this day in 1930, Clyde Tombaugh discovered a faint moving object beyond Neptune, soon named Pluto, after the ruler of the underworld. It was considered the outermost planet of the solar system, until it was ruthlessly dethroned in 2006. (Basically, it was deemed too small, too distant, and more closely resembling the “dwarf planets” in the debris at large distances from the Sun.)

This decision was massively unpopular among America’s children, partly because of what they had learned in school, and partly because of Pluto the Dog. Astronomers be warned: Don’t mess with Disney characters.

Tonight, the thin crescent Moon gets very close to Mercury in the early-evening sky. It won’t be a barn-burner of a sight, very low in the southwest. I’ve only seen Mercury a few times—and supposedly, even Copernicus never saw it (he relied on Arab observations from earlier centuries). But if you have a clear SW horizon, give it a try! If you see a stationary point of light very near the lunar crescent, that’s Mercury. No telescope needed, of course—only naked-eye observations count. (Maybe binoculars are OK, in a pinch… but get away from any buildings in the southwest!)

Having visited Mercury yesterday, the lunar crescent pays a visit to Saturn in tonight’s early-evening sky. But no big deal—Saturn is on the Moon’s usual menu for monthly visits.

Birthday of Copernicus in 1473. Copernicus is often hailed as marking the great transition from medieval to modern ideas about the universe. But historians of science tell a somewhat different story. He seems to have published his master work, 

, from his deathbed in 1543—probably at the urging of his student, Joachim Rheticus. Perhaps despairing that the master would ever publish the full work, Rheticus pre-published his own version in 1540 (

Ironically (in view of what happened to later advocates of heliocentrism), Pope Paul III expressed interest in the idea, while Martin Luther called Copernicus “a damn fool.”

Tonight, the Moon is just north of that famous “Pleiades” star cluster—otherwise known as the Seven Sisters. Great sight in binoculars!

On February 27, 40–60 minutes before sunrise, look low in the southeast for a thin waning crescent Moon. Above it is Mars, and above Mars is the brilliant Venus. On the morning of the 26th, the planets are in pretty much the same place, but the Moon is to the

 (as you view it) of the Mars-Venus pair.

You’ll need a good horizon and clear sky (but not crazy-good and crazy-clear) to see these.

March

The 50th anniversary of the launch of Pioneer 10, humanity’s most ambitious venture out of our home solar system. The spacecraft was designed to study Jupiter (which it did in 1973), but then went sailing past Neptune—into what you might call “interstellar space.” It’s still there, coasting along at 51,000 mph in the direction of the bright star Aldebaran. It’ll arrive—well, get close, anyway—in a mere two million years. It bears a plaque showing who sent it (a man and a woman), where it came from (third planet from a star), and even a suggestion for what frequency to use in sending a return radio message (1420 MHz, the “song of interstellar hydrogen”).

Seems unlikely the Aldebaranites will figure all that out, but it’s worth a try—assuming, of course, that Jeff Bezos or Richard Branson don’t mount a recovery mission to add Pioneer 10 to their private collections.

Full Moon and a total lunar eclipse, because the Moon is now exactly opposite the Sun. Unfortunately for most of us North Americans, it occurs slightly too late at night to be easily visible. It’s mainly a Pacific Ocean affair. On the west coast of North America, you can see most of it if you have a clear view to the west. Mid-eclipse is at 6:34 am EST, so folks in eastern USA will see only the beginning—and even then, they'll need a very clear view down to the western horizon to see the Moon at all.

The date of the semi-annual rip in the fabric of time, scheduled for 2 am EST on Sunday, March 8 (“spring ahead, fall back”). It’ll go into effect just about everywhere in the U.S., except sunny Hawaii and Arizona, where they presumably don't need any help saving daylight.

Last quarter Moon, rising around midnight (1 am EDT).

The anniversary of the discovery of Uranus—the first planet to join the planets of antiquity—by William Herschel in 1781. Uranus was the father of Saturn and the grandfather of Jupiter; William was the brother of Caroline Herschel and the father of John Herschel—famous astronomers all! Although the discovery date is credited as March 13, the object was sighted and catalogued as a star many times previously. On March 13, Herschel realized that it changed positions in the sky, and he therefore classified it as a comet. (Since all

were known in antiquity, the idea of “discovering” a new planet was just too weird to contemplate.) After tracking it for two more years, he realized that it had no tail, and orbited in a near circle outside the orbit of Saturn. QED: PLANET. Herschel wanted to call it Sidus Georgium (Star of George) to curry favor with the English monarch. But Americans will recall that during 1781–3, George III had to deal with issues more serious than planets.

Also the exact anniversary of the 1986 flyby (within 600 miles) of Halley's Comet by the European spacecraft Giotto, which snapped some amazing photos

The original Giotto painted a famous fresco, 

, likely in the year 1320. In it, the Star of Bethlehem is represented as a comet, and we know that Comet Halley visited the inner solar system in 1301. Had old Giotto been around for Halley's 1986 visitation, he would surely have painted the comet in the background of Bill Buckner's famous error to “win” the World Series for the New York Mets.

Prof. Joe Patterson is a professor of Astronomy at Columbia University, an observational astronomer, and a baseball enthusiast. (He was also our editor-in-chief’s first astronomy professor.)

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Big Apple Sky Calendar: January, February, March 2026

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Miranda July: Circle Jerks

Is a River Alive?

Scientific Controversies: Deep Thoughts of Artificial Minds

A Thousand Julys

Toward a Maternal Gaze

Garth Greenwell Is Too Much

Picture This: Adinkras

Compatible Perversities: Maggie Nelson

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Scale

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Marshall Allen's Infinite Voyage

Best of Broadcast 2025

 memorably opens with a scene of feral vulnerability: I love you—the words, Maggie Nelson writes, “come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad. You had 

 by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does it get any better? 

 you asked, then stuck around for an answer.”

A few days later she sends Harry Dodge—of the aforementioned you, an artist and Nelson’s now long-term partner—a passage from Roland Barthes comparing the Argo, whose parts are replaced while the ship’s name remains the same, to the nature of love’s expression over time. By mid-book, Nelson is pregnant and Dodge is taking T and getting top surgery. About their changing bodies, she writes, “On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more ‘male,’ mine, more and more ‘female.’ But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.”

With its shrewd integration of memoir and theory, maternity and queerness, since its publication in 2015 

 has brought new life and new audiences to autotheory—a term used since the ’90s to describe work, with early innovations in women of color feminist writing, that combines autobiography and embodied subjectivity with theory and philosophy. Nelson's book feels exemplary while defying classification. 

 tells the story of many forms of love, wrestled with and renewed with hot abandon and scrupulousness. In her writing before and since, Nelson has taken up subjects as specific and wide-ranging as the color blue, freedom, love, cruelty, chronic pain, and profusion with her distinctive sensibility: a thoroughness of thought that seeks to see beyond the options first presented, often leading her and her readers to different, more interesting questions.

With creative precision, poetry (how she came up) meets form (how she creates the container each book calls for). Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that “the test of a book (to a writer) is if it makes a space in which, quite naturally, you can say what you want to say.” Nelson’s various, and very different, projects are a testament to this observation, and to another made by her teacher Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: “In every language the loveliest question / is, You can say that?” Describing the nominative of the theory she helped pioneer, Sedgwick called queer “a continuing moment, movement, motive—recurrent, eddying, 

. Keenly, it is relational, and strange.” A “perpetual excitement,” Nelson adds, like the Argo; like love naming itself, again and again.

Nelson meets this difficult flux unlike any other. Her friend and teacher Wayne Koestenbaum has described her style as “bathing in the light that comes from irresolvability.” Or, as Nelson puts it in 

, relating Barthes and Sedgwick, hers is a presence to writing and thinking that “demands an attentiveness—a relentlessness, even—whose very rigor tips it into ardor.”

Lucy McKeon

—how does it feel for the book to be a decade old? It’s been so influential in conversations about autotheory (you’ve said you stole the term from Paul B. Preciado’s 

), genre, and formal experimentation. It’s become a classic in queer and feminist circles. I wonder how you feel 10 years and many books later about this important work of yours.

Maggie Nelson

In some ways 10 years doesn’t feel like that long, though it is a while. I think I probably don’t see its influence as much as people on the outside do. What you just described, I was like, 

. I think I don’t quite know that exactly, but I know the tremendous unexpected journey that the whole thing took me on. It was my ninth book, or something like that. I was happy enough going along publishing books, so I wasn’t really thinking that this book would be any different in terms of its reception in the world. I’m really grateful.

Baby-Making on Mars

A Lily Pad on the Muck

Issue 03, Available Now

Big Apple Sky Calendar: January, February, March 2026

Big Apple Sky Calendar: January, February, March 2026

Maggie Nelson: Compatible Perversities

Maggie Nelson: Compatible Perversities

The Most Daily Feeling

The Most Daily Feeling

13 Ways of Looking: Heather McCalden

13 Ways of Looking: Heather McCalden

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Deep Thoughts of Artificial Minds

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When Baseball Threw Physics a Curve