Category Astronomy/Space

Learning how spaceflight affects living organisms will help us understand potential health risks related to humans on long duration missions, including our journey to Mars. Cells, microbes, animals and plants are affected by microgravity, and studying the processes involved in adaptation to spaceflight increases our fundamental understanding of biological processes on Earth. Results on Earth from biological research in space include the development of new medications, improved agriculture, advancements in tissue engineering and regeneration etc.
Some biological research experiments on the ISS:

Biomolecule Sequencing

Biomolecule Sequencer: hopes to demonstrate (for the first time) that DNA sequencing is feasible in an orbiting spacecraft...

Galaxy NGC 2337 in constellation Lynx Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

This galaxy, NGC 2337, resides 25 million light-years away in the constellation of Lynx. NGC 2337 is an irregular galaxy, ie —along with a quarter of all galaxies in the universe—lacks a distinct, regular appearance. The galaxy was discovered in 1877 by the French astronomer Édouard Stephan who, in the same year, discovered the galactic group Stephan’s Quintet (heic0910i).

Although irregular galaxies may never win a beauty prize when competing with their more symmetrical spiral and elliptical peers, astronomers consider them to be very important. Some irregular galaxies may have once fallen into one of the regular classes of the Hubble sequence, but were warped and deformed by a passing cosmic companion...

Top: Gamma rays (magenta lines) coming from a bright source like NGC 1275 in the Perseus galaxy cluster should form a particular type of spectrum (right). Bottom: Gamma rays convert into hypothetical axion-like particles (green dashes) and back again when they encounter magnetic fields (gray curves). The resulting gamma-ray spectrum ((lower curve at right) would show unusual steps and gaps not seen in Fermi data, which means a range of these particles cannot make up a portion of dark matter. Credits: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory/Chris Smith

Dark matter, the mysterious substance that constitutes most of the material universe, remains as elusive as ever...

This is an infographic explaining the fact that 10 trillionths of a suntan comes from beyond our galaxy. Credit: ICRAR/Dan Hutton

Lie on the beach this summer and your body will be bombarded by about sextillion photons of light per second.Most of these photons, originate from the Sun but a very small fraction have travelled across the Universe for billions of years before ending their existence when they collide with your skin. Astronomers have now accurately measured the light hitting Earth from outside our galaxy over a very broad wavelength range. The research looked at photons whose wavelengths vary from a fraction of a micron (damaging) to millimetres (harmless).

But radiation from outside the galaxy constitutes only ten trillionths of your suntan, so there is no immediate need for al...