As a child, Adriana Marais always wanted to live on another planet. Today, the 31-year-old scientist born in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, is almost half-way to realizing that dream.
Marais is one of 100 hopefuls from around the world and one of seven from Africa to have cleared the third round of the Mars One project for its maiden trip to Mars. Mars One is a not-for-profit foundation with the goal of establishing a permanent human settlement on Mars; crews are expected to depart for their one-way journey to the planet starting 2026.
It would seem Marais has been preparing for this moment all her life.
“When I was in standard seven, a friend and I did a project for a school science competition, and we built a paper mache city on Mars; we had the crops, we had the habitat, we had the lifestyle,” she says.
Marais, who has been a doctoral student (quantum biology) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, says she is taking the leap of faith for the sake of science, knowing she will never be able to return to planet earth once she makes the trip.
<div id="attachment_30163" style="width: 698px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-30163" class="wp-image-30163 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/A-Marais-688x1024.jpg" alt="" width="688" height="1024" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/A-Marais-688x1024.jpg 688w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/A-Marais-300x447.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/A-Marais-600x893.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/A-Marais-202x300.jpg 202w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/A-Marais-768x1143.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/A-Marais.jpg 687w" sizes="(max-width: 688px) 100vw, 688px" />Adriana Marais</div>
“I have become interested in how life emerged. This is a question that can most certainly be researched on Mars as well, because it has been indicated that it may have been possible for life to exist on Mars at some point.
“The surface of Mars on average is very cold at minus 55 degrees, the air is 96% carbon dioxide, so it is not breathable, and the pressure is very low. The air is very thin. And also the radiation from the sun is dangerous on the surface of Mars. A lot of [our] time on Mars will be spent indoors.”
For now, all the short-listed finalists have on paper are artists’ impressions of Mars’ habitat, and some idea of the life-changing expedition.
“But I imagine that there will be a lot of developments taking place from now until then. So I don’t think it’s possible to imagine what it will be like,” says Marais.
Her own work so far has not gone unrecognized; she has already been published in journals. In March, Marais won the L’Oréal-UNESCO Women in Science International Rising Talents Grants program award in Paris. She was one of 15 women globally to win.
Marais is confident it will be extremely fascinating traveling to Mars – and settling there.

Adriana Marais

From Africa To Mars

Rowan Leibbrandt trained as a scientist but he ended up selling beer and whisky  in Africa.
A younger Leibbrandt, from the rural Matubatuba, outside Richards Bay in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, did everything right. He was a maths and science whizzkid and earned a university degree. But a career in science was not what he had in mind.
It was in 2012 that an epiphany in Nigeria changed everything for Leibbrandt. At the time he was heading Pernod Ricard’s marketing department, selling whisky brands in African emerging economies.
“Time and again I was with these young and rich Nigerians in focus groups. They were amazed by these whisky brands they had never experienced before. There were two things going on there, these guys attracted to international brands and there was this man with a briefcase representing these companies. I said, ‘hang on, I can be that man with the briefcase’. That was my real epiphany,” says Leibbrandt.
A year later, Leibbrandt found his first business partner in South Africa and he quit Pernod Ricard to return and form a company – Truman &amp; Orange. Jason Duganzich, a former brand ambassador for Glenfiddich, and Leibbrandt launched their distributing business in South Africa with a Scottish blended beer Innis &amp; Gunn.
By 2015, Truman &amp; Orange gained two more partners, an incognito financier in Zurich and Robert Hill, a brand specialist based between India and Britain.
“My insight was that in a lot of these African countries, some of the bigger companies are taking their eye off the ball. Things in Africa are happening far quicker than they anticipated. I thought that’s an opportunity for us. In the spirits front, Africa hasn’t really been there with the rest of the world. So, we have a 10 to 15 year window period while these guys are trying to set up in Africa for formidable businesses,” says Leibbrandt.
The journey began when Leibbrandt made his career switch from science.
“I probably wanted to work with people, so I found advertising quite captivating and I started my career in advertising. At that stage, the advertising agency I worked for managed a very small account for Glenfiddich in the early 2000s. The whole whisky phenomenon was not as big as it is now in South Africa,” says Leibbrandt.
He landed a marketing post at Glenfiddich in London in 2005. After three years, the company sent him to Moscow to set up a joint venture marketing business, which encompassed brands such as Glenfiddich; William Grant &amp; Sons; Remy Martin; Campari and Russian Standard Vodka, in a vodka country.
While he was in Russia, juggling work and an MBA at Warwick Business School in England, Leibbrandt met his wife Nadya Surikova.
“My wife Nadya comes from Russia, a country where the idea of working for one company your whole life is absolutely zero. The safest thing for them is to start your new business. One of the things young entrepreneurs often struggle with is the partner who feels security and safety when they are starting a business,” he says.
It was in Moscow where the idea of entrepreneurship took root in Leibbrandt.
“In many ways Russia was quite similar with South Africa, they had enormous political disruptions in the nineties, and later a mass emancipation of people with money that had been put into the system. You had a drinker who didn’t have a role model, like a father who had money, but is suddenly learning to drink these western products that are affordable to him because he’s making money. I started gradually to get the sense that I wanted to do my own thing. Each time I got promoted in the business, I started to realize that it doesn’t matter how high you get but you are still going to be answerable to somebody,” says Leibbrandt.
Leibbrandt says the craft beer revolution in South Africa taught a few lessons to Truman &amp; Orange.  Innis &amp; Gunn is a hybrid of beer and single malt whisky.
“Innis &amp; Gunn is the cornerstone of our business at the moment, but although it is the important part of our story, it’s by no means the most important part,” says Leibbrandt.
By the end of March, Truman &amp; Orange will be shipping its first sparkling wine and whiskies in Angola, Nigeria, Ghana, Congo and Kenya.
And he could have been a scientist.

A Scientist With Spirit

It is not your everyday job. Marcus Byrne is a zoologist who discovered that dung beetles navigate by the stars and use balls of dung to cool their heels. His next assignment could be researching whether beetles cool down by spitting on their legs.
A broad grin spreads across Byrne’s face as he explains how he funds his research.
“You as taxpayers pay for me to behave like a small child and satisfy my curiosity.”
Byrne is a professor at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He was born in Coventry, in Britain, and began working with insects when he moved to South Africa 30 years ago. In September, he won an Ig Nobel prize for his work with dung beetles. An Ig Nobel honors projects with no cash but lots of cache.
The scientist and his colleagues dressed the beetles in hats to prove that they use the stars to navigate. They also placed boots on the insects’ feet to show how they use balls of dung to cool themselves.
Many may think that spending years working with animal faeces is repulsive, but Byrne revels in it.
“Dung is the beetle’s food source and nesting site. It is a valuable commodity. They therefore need to get away from their competitors at the dung pile as quickly as possible.”
To do this they look to the stars and the moon to make sure they are moving in a straight line. The experiment proved this. When the beetles had caps on, they could merely wander in circles.
“Here we have an animal with zero brainpower. How does it fulfil complex behaviours with minimal computing power? Eventually there may be a use for it in computers,” he says of his research.
The boots were a different experiment. It proved that the beetles climbed up on the balls of dung to find refuge from the heat on the ground.
“That is dead cool because evolution allows this animal to take something that is already useful for food for another job to increase the likelihood of their survival.”
While doing this research, Byrne discovered that the beetles spit on their front legs. When asked if he will add spit to dung for his next experiment, he replies: “Yeah. Terrible job isn’t it?”
The research was born when the question arose whether beetles dance. It fed what Byrne calls his selfish curiosity.
It’s not always enjoyable though. His work requires money that the university does not always have.
Byrne’s work on dung beetles was done on a shoestring. It was paid for by using insects to get rid of agricultural pests. He also gets money from publishing papers, but not a lot.
“We use all the money we raise on blue sky experiments. It’s not terrible. It’s great to do something we love and it doesn’t cost a lot.”
The next big project? Byrne tells of tiny bees that his colleague is studying. The information from these experiments on the eyes of the bees is being used by a car manufacturer to create a camera that is able to see light in pitch darkness without using an infrared laser.
“We can learn massive amounts of things from nature because nature is running on a minimum, which is useful for computer hardware.”
An Ig Nobel comes with prestige—any business?
“No,” he says with a laugh.
“I would be surprised if it had. The prize just raises your profile. Scientists trade in knowledge and trade in knowledge for free.”
Byrne even had to pay for his own plane ticket and accommodation to attend the award ceremony at Harvard University, in the United States.
Nevertheless, he is proud that his research has attracted worldwide interest and has nudged people’s curiosity.
“That’s the important thing about human society. You don’t have to sell everything because if you sold everything there would be very little poetry, very little music and a lot of art wouldn’t come out. It’s part of the human condition to be creative and be curious and that is what I trade in,” he says.
“I’m really grateful to you guys to pay for me to do what I love.”
Despite the success of Byrne’s research, he has one regret. Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious science journals, didn’t publish his paper.
“The interest that this has generated has been monstrous. This paper inspired people from all walks of life. It grabs people’s imagination. It is a shame that Nature rejected it. I suppose it’s like getting into FORBES as opposed to the ‘Rosebank Gazette’ (a community newspaper in Johannesburg).”
Byrne received what he refers to as a tacky trophy along with a 10 trillion Zimbabwe dollar bill, a relic of the country’s collapsed currency and a testament to human folly.
At first, the humor associated with the Ig Nobels irritated Byrne. But he warmed up.
“The guy who conceptualized the awards has created a monster that could create a huge amount of money if he sold advertising, but he focuses on promoting science and having a good time while doing it. It is not treated like a creed or gospel but rather says ‘hey, we’re having a good time here’.”
The attention that Byrne has drawn hasn’t sunk in yet. He, however, remains humble and is willing to spread the word to whomever is willing to listen. The strangest request he has received so far is being asked to talk to a nearby cuckoo bird club.
“It will probably be to six people and a dog,” he chuckles.
The Ig Nobel awards are designed to honor work that first makes you laugh and then makes you think. Byrne does the same.

Tag: Scientist

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

From Africa To Mars

A Scientist With Spirit

A Dung Deal Written In The Stars