From Chalkboard to Field Lab

We consume trillions of 'heavy' isotopes each day from the food we eat. Heavy isotopes form tighter bonds, they vibrate more slowly, diffuse at slower rates, and often have different spin. How changes in nuclear mass affect metabolic pathways is not well understood. These experiments will search for evidence of possible negative health effects associated with the migration and accumulation of heavy isotopes in membranes and tissues over long metabolic timelines.

All living organisms express circadian rhythms, but less well known is that hundreds of species also exhibit circatidal (12.4 hrs), circasemilunar (14.75 day), and/or circalunar (29.5 day) periodicity. Numerous diseases have been associated with the disruption of metabolic rhythms, however, the biophysics is not well understood at the molecular level. This project is looking for evidence of a bio-gravitational coupling driven by strain associated with Earth's wobbly orbital motion around our barycenter.

These experiments will test conjecture that jetlag results from the altered dynamic environment of jet travel during eastward vs. westward travel. Although we can't easily observe small dynamic asymmetries when viewing biological events under a microscope, Lorand Eötvös and a team of geodesists in the early 1900's identified and quantified just such Coriolis-like effects when traveling aboard moving ships. The equations never found their way into our biology books, but they have been used by geodesists to correct for motion relative to Earth's surface for over a century. We conjecture that our metabolic pathways might have evolved utilizing these asymmetric dynamics to maintain order at molecular scales and that they become skewed, or 'phase shifted' slightly when traveling either east or west for extended periods. These experiments will look for changes in metabolic data within a full spectrum of cells during long flights east and west.