20 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
NOTEBOOKbut in the end, they don’t say there is an
impact on cell thermogenesis.”
Guillaume Baffou, who researches
nanotechnology and thermodynamics
at the French National Center for Scien-
tific Research (CNRS) and coauthored the
2014 paper calculating the energy require-
ments for temperature spikes in single cells,
also remains unconvinced by the UIUC
researchers’ results. “I’m still skeptical
because physically speaking, it’s not possi-
ble,” he says. In their paper, Baffou and col-
leagues found that “if you fill the full inside
of a cell with glucose, and you burn every-
thing... even if you do that, you have a
very small temperature increase,” he says.
“I think what [the cell] can do with [proton
uncoupling] will be still weaker than what
you can do with glucose,” because heat gen-
erated at the mitochondria would dissipate
quickly out of the cell before the cell could
significantly heat up.
But Sinha finds the evidence persua-
sive, noting in an email to The Scientist
that the research team conducted “several
control experiments to rule out artifacts
in our measurements.” On the feasibility
of the temperature spikes, he writes that
mitochondrial proton gradients could pro-
vide a greater source of energy than a cell’s
glucose reserves. “The neuron we used
has copious amounts of mitochondria....
Dissipating proton gradient in all of these
mitochondria could potentially provide
the amount of transient heat we observed.”
As for Bertholet’s critique, Sinha argues
that previous studies by other groups have
firmly established that mitochondria can
heat up the whole cell via proton uncou-
pling, meaning that “any information on
mitochondrial thermogenesis is directly
relevant to cellular thermogenesis.”
Amidst their deep dive into mito-
chondrial thermodynamics, the UIUC
researchers haven’t lost sight of the ques-
tion that brought them together in the
first place—that of the connection, if a ny,
between cellular temperature and synaptic
activity. “That’s a much harder problem to
solve than what we did so far,” Rajagopal
says. “We will eventually be going there,
but this [study] is just the beginning of it.”
—Shawna WilliamsPolar Naps
When he was a postdoc at KU Leuven
in Belgium, Daniel Vigo helped analyze
results from an experiment that sim-
ulated a spaceflight to Mars. Six crew
members were secluded in an artificially
lit, spacecraft-like facility for 520 days
starting in June 2010. Part of an inter-
national project known as the Mars500
mission, the experiment aimed to assess
the psychological, social, and biological
effects of prolonged confinement and iso-
lation, along with the absence of normal
day and night rhythms.
That isolation, of course, was just an illu-
sion, manufactured by the Institute for Bio-
medical Problems of the Russian Academy
of Sciences and the European Space Agency.
The simulation took place in central Mos-
cow, where any sudden medical problems
could have received immediate attention—
as Vigo, now a researcher at the Catholic
University of Argentina and a member of the
National Scientific and Technical Research
Council (CONICET), tells The Scientist inSpanish. He began wondering what would
happen in a less artificial scenario.
One of the key findings from the study,
for example, was that confinement—in
this case in an artificially lit building—
disrupted normal sleep patterns: the crew
members in the Mars500 experiment had
suffered from sleep problems and rapidly
fell into sleep-wake routines that were out
of sync with one another. But what would
the story be like for people experiencing
a similarly extreme living environment,
Vigo wondered, without the safety net pro-
vided by a carefully controlled simulation?
Antarctica offered an obvious place
to answer such a question. The harsh
conditions and remoteness of the white
continent make it one of the best space
analogs on Earth, and its extreme seasonal
changes make it an ideal setting to study
sleep behavior in the absence of regularAGUSTÍN FOLGUEIRATIME FOR SHUT-EYE: Research at the Belgrano
II Base in Antarctica suggests cultural habits
such as napping infl uence how people adapt to
extreme environments.