Growing microbes in space sounds cool. Collecting microbes from sporting events is also cool (“excuse me, could I see that basketball after the game?”). Having fans collect samples with a chance that some of them will fly to the space station is a great way to engage people. Put them all together and you get …
(cross-posted from our static page on the project which will be updated as we move forward) Project MERCCURI is a collaboration of microBEnet with the Science Cheerleaders, Nanoracks, NASA, and SciStarter.com. There are three components to the project: 1) Collecting microbial swab samples from the International Space Station (ISS) and examining the microbial communities therein …
Just found a very interesting, very detailed article about keeping space robots / vehicles clean in terms of microbes: RYOT News » Scientists building robots focused on not contaminating Mars. The article reports: The decontamination of spacecraft, an obscure arm of space science, has grown in importance as NASA turned its attention to places such as …
Going through the list of Microbiology Blogs we have curated at microBEnet and going to try to feature one of them every day or so. And just going to do this in semi-alphabetic order. Today’s blog: Curiosidades de la MicrobiologÃa (Curiosities of Microbiology: English translation) Author: Manuel Sánchez Tagline/Summary: Los seres vivos son a las leyes de la …
Interesting article via Mashable (from the Atlantic) in September bu How NASA Keeps Earth’s Germs Out of Space. It discusses how to keep the sites where space equipment is built clean and the general issue of planetary protection. Stay tuned for more posts about space as we are involved in a project to sample microbes on …
Here’s a case where just the title of an article is awesome: “Pyrosequencing-Derived Bacterial, Archaeal, and Fungal Diversity of Spacecraft Hardware Destined for Mars”. Sadly it’s not open access but the abstract is worth a read at a minimum. The authors conducted environmental surveys in cleanrooms and of equipment destined for Mars. Basically they found that …
As many out there now, I am a bit fascinated by the possibility of studying microbes in space ships. And I guess I got to get my act together because it turns out there are multiple projects out there in this arena. There is a story on Space.Com about a new push in this area: Scientists …
The last flight of the Shuttle Atlantis is scheduled for early July and there’ll be some cool microbes aboard. Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus are both biofilm-forming bacteria with serious health consequences, particularly in hospitals. The researchers involved in this project are interested in the effects of microgravity on biofilm formation, and have some preliminary …