"Playing Mars" in the Utah Desert

"Playing Mars" in the Utah Desert

Top of Mind with Julie Rose - Radio Archive, Episode 803 , Segment 5

Episode: Rising Gas Prices, Weight Stigma in Men, Neuroscientist Loses Her Mind

  • May 2, 2018 11:00 pm
  • 16:09 mins

Guest: Joseph Dituri, Crew Commander of Crew 192 at the Mars Desert Research Station, Consultant for the International Board of Undersea Medicine NASA hopes to be sending people to Mars by the 2030s. But if you want to know what it might be like to live on the Red Planet today, just take a four-hour drive from Salt Lake City to a spot in the Utah desert near the town of Hanksville. For more than a decade, researchers have been marooning themselves in a tiny habitat in the desert “playing Mars” for weeks at a time. The Mars Desert Research Station is a privately-run facility funded by donors including Elon Musk of SpaceX.

Other Segments

Bitter Pills

23 MINS

Guest: Muhammad Zaman, PhD, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, author of "Bitter Pills: The Global War on Counterfeit Drugs" If you’re buying cheap Lipitor or Viagra on eBay or a Chinese website, there’s a chance you’re getting a counterfeit. That seems pretty obvious. But the much larger problem for global drug supplies comes down to sloppiness and poor quality. Not that someone is making fake Viagra pills out of chalk, but that lifesaving malaria drugs and antibiotics are tainted with a deadly chemical or don’t have the full amount of active ingredient to make them effective. This problem is terrifyingly common around the world – and even occasionally in the US – according to Boston University biomedical engineering professor Muhammad Zaman's new book, "Bitter Pills."

Guest: Muhammad Zaman, PhD, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, author of "Bitter Pills: The Global War on Counterfeit Drugs" If you’re buying cheap Lipitor or Viagra on eBay or a Chinese website, there’s a chance you’re getting a counterfeit. That seems pretty obvious. But the much larger problem for global drug supplies comes down to sloppiness and poor quality. Not that someone is making fake Viagra pills out of chalk, but that lifesaving malaria drugs and antibiotics are tainted with a deadly chemical or don’t have the full amount of active ingredient to make them effective. This problem is terrifyingly common around the world – and even occasionally in the US – according to Boston University biomedical engineering professor Muhammad Zaman's new book, "Bitter Pills."