I had no idea this was happening, but earlier this week the first mission of NASA’s Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) concluded, where four crew members lived in isolation for over a year in a habitat simulating Mars! Specifically:

This high-fidelity simulation involved the crew carrying out different types of mission objectives, including simulated “marswalks,” robotic operations, habitat maintenance, exercise, and crop growth. The crew also faced intentional environmental stressors in their habitat such as resource limitations, isolation, and confinement.

CHAPEA crew entering the habitat, where they lived in isolation for 378 days (via NASA).

According to Jalopnik: “Even communications between the CHAPEA and mission control were artificially delayed by 22 minutes to replicate the distance it would have to travel between parties on Mars and Earth.”

Their 1,700 square foot base was a 3D printed structure using “Martian clay” to understand the feasibility of building habitats without having to launch huge quantities of building materials.

The second CHAPEA mission will happen in 2025!

Not much to explain…just a fun random thing from the Internet: One Million Checkboxes. You can either check boxes or uncheck boxes. That’s it! It’s actually surprisingly addictive and exhibits a microcosm of social human behavior…are you checker or an unchecker?).

Its creator @eieio has made some other really cool stuff.

I try to avoid flying Southwest Airlines because of its open seating policy. Open seating brought out some weird behaviors: setting an alarm to immediately check-in a second after online check-in is open, calculating in your mind if it’s worth sitting in the middle seat to risk no one sitting next to you, judging fellow passengers that have boarded before you as you decide where to sit…

Thankfully, there’s news that it might go away.

Nonetheless, this CGP Grey video shows how finding an effective boarding procedure is a surprisingly complex problem. Also, it’s interesting that the “common-sense” system of boarding back-to-front is actually slower than boarding in a random order(!).

More interestingly, the theoretically best solution is not feasible because of social implications.

Maybe airlines have an incentive to make boarding as painful as possible as it gives them opportunity to sell boarding related perks like priority boarding or even seat selection…