Another week, another treadmill
This week’s Project X was all about heat and I was tasked with looking at how heat affects the human body. As always, the experimental subject was me, and we again returned to DRDC Toronto, aka the Torture Chamber.
Instead of being spun around in the centrifuge, I got to check out the very shiny and very hot climate chamber – a room where the temperature and humidity can be set to just about anything. The centrifuge guys had warned me about this place – in the past, they’d been recruited to test out a combat suit in conditions simulating a hot desert environment. They had to walk on a treadmill until they passed out from exhaustion AND they had to do it with an anal-probe thermometer up their butt.
Fortunately the climate chamber guys were a little easier on me – I only had to do two sets of 30-minute exercise, walking at a brisk pace at a slight incline – and they monitored my core temperature with a radio pill and not a butt probe (though that was plan B – B for butt? – if the radio pill somehow failed to broadcast.). The pill was actually pretty neat – it’s about the size of a large vitamin and is coated in a smooth rubber, and is pretty easy to swallow. I took it a few hours before heading to DRDC so that it would be nicely lodged in the core of my digestive system come exercise time. A receiver I was wearing picked up the temperature signal being broadcast by the transmitter in the pill, and that information was then sent to a computer to be graphed.
(In case you’re curious, the radio pill exits your body within a day or two, which is good because I was getting on a plane not too long after we shot this and didn’t want to have to explain that one at the airport metal detector!)
Even though I wasn’t going through the same torture my centrifuge buddies had been subjected to, it wasn’t exactly pleasant in there. It’s funny how much you take fresh, circulating air for granted – the air was heavy, hot and perfectly still in there and there was no relief to be had until I had finished my high-humidity pass and was finally allowed to dip my arteriovenous anastomoses (great Scrabble word!) into the cool water. And boy did it work. Just like our in-studio guinea pig (did any of you recognize him? He was Sample 6 in the Armour episode’s sweat experiment!), my body’s radiators managed to bring my core temperature down quickly and I had fully recovered shortly after the treadmill was shut down for the day.
Although some of the stuff we cover on Project X is a bit too advanced to try at home – ever try stopping light in your garage or isolating peptides from the gator in your yard? – this episode nicely illustrated how knowing a little bit of biology can help anyone cool down on a hot day. Turns out all those people who set up lawn chairs in kiddie pools were right! The AVAs in the soles of your feet work just like those in your palms, so dipping your feet in a cool pool will do the trick.
Stay tuned for next week’s episode, when I’m spared another treadmill but end up going from +35C temperatures to more like -35C.
The 
OK, enough technical stuff. We went to Phoenix, Arizona to really feel the pain of hot weather and see first hand how cooling and refrigeration there is no laughing matter. We start by asking some window washers what life is like in the baking sun. In fact, this is a dangerous work, and sadly, one of the fellows we interviewed fell to his death on the job a few months after we were there. Later we go into the building to look at how a huge air conditioning system is a serious design consideration in Arizona buildings.
We also look at some very cool archeological sites and see how early North American cultures learned how to avoid the heat and built their wisdom into their living spaces around them. They were very clever, considering the simple technology available. 
It turns out that the lessons of the early native architecture work today in homes too. A couple we visit in their 'passively' cooled home show us some of the tricks of keeping a cool in a more sustainable way.
Also 
It’s not often that I get to sport my own outfits on camera. I wear nice stuff but it can veer into Chloe Sevigny territory more often than not, and besides, how awful would it look if these episodes aired in Spring/Summer 2015 and there I am in Fall/Winter 2007’s ready to wear collections? I mean, C’MON! :) But in 
Anyway, at home my preferred form of exercise is loooooooong brisk walks all over the city, so one day my husband presented me with my own Just Walkin’ t-shirt that he had specially made for me to wear whilst on my peregrinations. It lacks some of the yellow and all of the crazy of the original, but retains the spirit and has a cute 1980s gym class look about it. 
Playing with the treadmill was a blast. Jason, our elite sprinter, is an ace on that thing and has helped Dr. Weyand with all sorts of studies. He’s even set the record for fastest backwards-hopping-on-one-leg on that thing (4m/sec! Holy moly!). We all enjoyed grilling Dr. Weyand about all the experiments he’d run on the predecessor to the Houston treadmill – an even bigger treadmill at Harvard that has measured the strides of all sorts of animals. We learned which animals they’ve run on there (everything from flightless birds to jungle cats), what they use to entice the animals to run (a steak dangled in front of the carnivores, or a poke in the butt for herbivores), and what happens if the animal goes poop when the treadmill is running at top speed (exactly what you’d expect would happen, which is bad news for whomever is on herbivore butt-poking duty). 
Participating in the experiment was a whole lot of fun too! I was really surprised by the results – I’ve never been a good runner and just figured I wasn’t designed for it, but Jason and I had more in common than I expected and it really showed me that running was something I could do if I just applied myself. I also enjoyed burning a few calories in anticipation of the crew dinner at a ridiculous Texan steakhouse that night – massive hunks of meat! And the fact that I was wearing shorts outside in early January was kinda cool too. 
After throwing some numbers at you about the speeds of various things from snails to high speed trains, we get on to the subject of setting land speed records. That’s where seemingly crazy people devise “cars” that look a heck of a lot like airplanes without wings, to see if they can break the speed of sound. They race through the desert on these death machines and this week we follow them out there to see what it’s about.
But Gerlach is not quite remote enough for land speed record setting. The fun happens out in the dusty desert. This desert is beautiful and bleak to behold, with a singularly planar dusty flat that extends in every direction.
We watch and wait and hope the driver/pilot doesn’t kill himself stalking his personal Moby Dick known as the land speed record. That record is currently just above Mach 1 (the speed of sound). If you love cars, mechanics, and just plain crazy one-up-manship you’re going to love these guys.
Also 
Yup, this shoot led to misty water-coloured memories – a day of it took place in the pouring rain in London, England! One of the original ideas for 
The first day of shooting started out beautifully - director Mike took our UF athletes Bam and Lewis out to a few locations in the morning, whilst I enjoyed sleeping in (a rare treat indeed on location shoots) and then exploring the streets of London. When I met up with the crew around lunchtime, however, our luck changed. A torrential downpour started so we retreated to the nearest safe, dry place. The pub! Fuelled by a few pints, we had the brilliant idea of doing a bit of parkour in the pub and so after the lunch crowd left and with the owner’s permission, we had Bam and Lewis flying over bar stools and tables, hurling themselves over ledges, and generally looking like action movie heroes, much to the bewilderment of the slightly inebriated afternoon drinkers. 
The weather was a heck of a lot better on our second day of shooting, and the day couldn’t have gone any better. In the morning Bam and Blue (replacing Lewis, who got a nasty bump whilst cavorting about the pub and wasn’t up for another 8 hours of parkour) taught me a few freerunning basics in the comfort of a well-padded gym. It’s a good thing the padding was there - I bailed more than a few times, but had a blast doing it. I had to concentrate quite hard while doing the jumps, not so much to get the move right, but more to keep my tongue in my mouth. I stick it out when I’m focused on something and it doesn’t look so hot on camera. 
After the gym shoot, we set out on our great South Bank adventure. You’ll note my parkour skills improved significantly sometime during the cab ride from the gym to the South Bank ;) Must have been all those Marks & Spencer biscuits I had in the cab...
The next day in Birmingham with Dr. Wing was great - his invitation was so kind (he brought a ridiculously good cake to the shoot) and being able to talk with him more and run through some experiments at the mo-cap studio (to use the industry parlance) really added a lot to the story. Plus we got to cover Bam in piles and piles of tiny dots which looks pretty neat on camera.
Now about Memory Man, some of the more skeptical among you may be wondering whether any editing tricks were used that made it easy for him to remember that long string of numbers. Nope! It was all him! When he arrived for the shoot, he had me write out a string of whatever numbers I felt like. We gave him the paper and he hung out in his dressing room, using his system to commit them to memory. Around an hour or so later, we brought him into the studio for the shoot and pow! He recited them forwards, and then backwards, perfectly. 
In this 
Our guest stars are a stage magician and a memory expert. With their help, we do a little test on live human subjects at the University of Alberta. In this scene, five live subjects watch the magician and do not notice our little gag. I won’t tell you what happens, you’ll have to watch yourself, but one of our subjects who is actually my cousin falls for it twice in a row (coincidence? I don’t think so).
We also try to riddle Marc with annoying questions while he is driving a special skid-prone car. The purpose of this experiment is to see how much attention overload is required to make him crash. To his credit, you should know this car is especially hard to drive, and practically spins out if the nasty prairie winds blow too hard. He crashes all right, but it’s worth the sacrifice because he gets to wear this snazzy race car driver suit.
As those of you who have been watching us regularly might have noticed, Project X is a pretty busy show. Virtually all of our segments involve at least some location shooting – meeting up with scientists on their home turf. Because we shoot most of the show in the summer (longer days + generally sunny conditions = happy production team), we have to work things around scientists’ vacation schedules and general availability, so the end result is the whole series is assembled a bit like a patchwork quilt (or for you techophiles, a torrent!) – you shoot a bit for one episode here, a bit for another episode there, and it only all comes together at the end of the whole production season. 
I tell ya, I sure had to use those extra IQ points later that day when Dr. Hau started walking me through her experimental setup. Phwoar! Light is a great topic, but there’s not a lot of crazy stories to tell about it from the human body/micro world perspective. We were really keen to feature Dr. Hau and her mind-blowing experiments, so I had to dust off the vastly underused physics portion of my brain to tackle this segment. 
I think I managed it alright, which I attribute to always checking out the physics articles in my husband’s Discover magazine collection. I’m glad I had the chance to check out her lab – it’s always nice to meet another female scientist, especially one who has been massively successful in what has tended to be a more male-oriented field, and I really think that she could be a Nobel Prize winner in the future. 
This week we will talk about light - a very general topic. We restricted ourselves to talking about the visible, ultraviolet (UV) and infrared (IR) portions of what we call the electromagnetic spectrum. The E-M spectrum also has radio waves, microwaves, x-rays and other waves with cool names like that, but hey, we only had 22 minutes to work with here.
Now believe it or not, I have, on occasion, been told I look like a cop. So this week I really got to live up to that image by hanging out with the boys in blue and finding out how they use light when tracking down bad guys and solving crimes. And who do you think the bad guy is? Take one guess. Marc, you can run, but you can’t hide, especially when I’m in a helicopter and you’re running on foot. Look at him go…
Later we see Marc laying immobile on the floor and pretending to be a corpse at a crime scene. He’s quite good at it. All those years of acting school for Marc were really paying off here.
The fun really gets going when we get into the Ontario Provincial Police helicopter in Orillia. Their chopper is rigged with a very sensitive IR camera that makes playing cops and robbers a lot easier when it’s night and some nasty character like Marc is on the run. We ended up having a lot of fun that night, in spite of the lost sleep. 
