The International Space Station is Super Germy (washingtonpost.com) 88
Thousands of species have colonized the International Space Station -- and only one of them is Homo sapiens. From a report: According to a new study in the journal PeerJ, the interior surfaces of the 17-year-old, 250-mile-high, airtight space station harbor at least 1,000 and perhaps more than 4,000 microbe species (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source ) -- a finding that is actually "reassuring," according to co-author David Coil. "Diversity is generally associated with a healthy ecosystem," said the University of California at Davis microbiologist. A varied population of microscopic inhabitants is probably a signature of a healthy spacecraft, he added. And as humanity considers even longer ventures in space -- such as an 18-month voyage to Mars -- scientists must understand who these microbes are. The samples for Coil's paper were collected in 2014 as part of the citizen science program Project MERCCURI. The initiative, conceived by a group of National Football League and National Basketball Association cheerleaders who are also scientists and engineers, involved swabbing down dozens of professional sports stadiums, identifying the microbes in the samples, and sending those species to the ISS to see whether they would thrive. (Bacillus aryabhatti, collected from a practice football field used by the Oakland Raiders, grew fastest.)
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Oh, you mean like Rome, the French Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Egyptian Empire....oh, wait, you're either a fool or a liar
Re: "Diversity is generally associated with... (Score:2)
It is, just make sure you don't bring in too many germs that happen to point east five times a day while attempting to forcibly kill off any other germs that refuse to adapt.
Think of it like having a large colony of MRSA bacteria.
Not very diverse (Score:3)
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LOL, it wasn't just me then.
Mir (Score:3)
So was Mir. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
So let me get this straight (Score:2)
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"If you rotate humans from five nation space agencies in and out of a bunch of sealed tubes over nearly 20 years, germs happen."
Perhaps it's about time they rotate in a cleaning lady.
Missing contact data (Score:3, Funny)
Cheerleaders who are also scientists and engineers... a dream come true! Names, phonenumbers......?
Caption: response :-)
Re:Missing contact data (Score:5, Funny)
All along we thought there was a shortage of women for STEM professions, there's not they've just decided to become cheerleaders. Now if we only had a way to convey this knowledge? A calendar perhaps? A Sports Illustrated special edition?
Healthy Scum! (Score:2)
Wonder what that pink stuff growing on the bottom of my shower curtain is worth.
It LAUGHS at Puny Bleach!
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It's pathogenic and antibiotic resistant too. Lovely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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That's Serattia marcencens, probably not worth much
Don't know about that! You could have the Eucharistic Miracle [wikipedia.org] on the bottom of your shower. Take that Jesus-In-A-Tortilla!
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If you really have pink stuff there, that can be a kind of yeast/fungus/mold.
But in a bathroom it is most likely a bacteria that actually thrives on soap. Some simple "sprays" don't help there, you have to brush it away.
Cheerleaders who are Engineers and Scientists??? (Score:2)
Man, my 15 year old self is sporting a big woody.
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That's a sexist statement - Why would you assume that only the male cheerleaders are the Scientists and Engineers?
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The bit where it clearly states that the images in the sequence for the eclipse were "as seen from the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter"? [As in: most emphatically not the International Space Station]
Although I've seen that set of images before [I happen to have a framed print hanging on the wall in my study] I don't have specifics as to the reason for the shading. However, I will hazard a guess [since that's often a good way to get corrected by som
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Mighty fine trolling there Oh AC!
This territory, stoutly defending a ridiculous position with misrepresented "evidence" is old news. I liked reading the Braheian Debater [internatio...eptics.com] while in college which asserted a similarly silly idea - that of the Geocentric Universe. It was an amusing intellectual game.
Instead of picking out and misrepresenting miscellaneous "cherries" you would be much more interesting if you went back to the history of science where the sphericity of the Earth was proved (Eratosthenes) and likewi
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So you have *no* disproof of Eratosthenes -- only unproved assumptions of a far more complicated model which do not even bother to explicate in detail or show evidence of. Good to know.
Sorry, appealing to special hidden laws thrown in as needed to prop up your refusal to accept simple evidence is a flaming failure.
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Foucault was a fraud, and his experiment has not been repeated.
Yeah about that. [wikipedia.org]
I know, I know, all of the 324 Foucault pendulums listed and are displayed in public for all to observe are part of the world-wide Foucault Conspiracy which you alone have penetrated and revealed! Such brilliance! And you keep your identity a secret! Don't you realized that fame and fortune are yours for the taking if you but drop your cloak of anonymity?
Quite a number of them are in high schools where students can observe the rotation of the Earth for themselves, exactly as you recommend.
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The ignorance you display is truly staggering.
"Gyroscopes" aren't "rigid in space". Perfect gyroscopes are, but not ordinary real gyroscopes. Friction makes the kinds of demo gyros you using as "proof" insensitive to gradual changes in orientation. You can put a gyroscope on lazy susan, and when the lazy susan is turned sufficiently slowly (but much faster than the rotation of the Earth) the gyroscope will turn also, showing that it is not really "rigid in space". This is why gyroscopes used in actual navig
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Oh, and why the hiding behind the AC label given all the effort you putting into this?
Create an identity so that we can track your posts of wisdom!
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This is hust a guess, but the shadow colour "changing" and the unshadowed part "brightening" are probably the same thing: the camera exposure was adjusted in post. The dynamic range of the camera is much greater than that of the video format.
Your eyes do the same thing if you walk from a dark room to a light room and vice versa. The room is too bright (and a different colour saturation) until your automatic gain control compensates.
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Most consumer-grade cameras, as well as your eyes, have automatic exposure control. So it's unsurprising that you will perceive both the Moon and the Earth's shadow as brighter as the amount of light decreases.
I don't live in North America, but I would encourage you next time to set out a camera with the exposure set manually to slow (an astronomical photographer should be able to suggest a good setting) and see if the shadow is red for the entire eclipse. The best experiment would be to use three cameras s
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I don't really understand what you're referring to. The 2 second exposure example looks red to me; I pulled the image into GIMP, eyedroppered a point inside the shadow, and the RGB values were (82,54,51).
Having said that, colour reproduction is more art than science. Every professional photograph or movie that you have ever seen has been colour timed or colour graded before it made it to your eyes. The raw numbers that come out of a modern astronomical observatory are not meaningful by themselves, and need
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I don't see what's different about them, beyond perhaps the fact that camera lenses aren't perfect so there is going to be some leak around the shadow perimeter.
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What *would* we do without you, Captain Obvious?
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If it were so obvious, how come I had to explain it? Take that, round Earthers!
Is that a lot? (Score:5, Insightful)
People are germy. (Score:2)
People are germy. The space station contains people.
That, and to germs, we are the space station. The bacterial cells alone outnumber human cells by roughly 10 to 1. Viruses are so absurdly numerous beyond even that, that it's difficult to consistently measure. Heck, the viruses that attack us are almost always a misfire of them preying on their actual target mechanisms - the bacteria living in us.
Nothing particularly dangerous in the space station having pockets of germs, in context. They aren't espec
Authors name was a close miss (Score:1)
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My mind filled in the blanks and made me read the authors name as David E Coli
You are not the only one!
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Same here!
Solution (Score:1)
Sigh. (Score:2)
Or.
The ISS is as germy as one would expect such an environment to be, in line with most of the predictions and hopes of the scientists involved, given it's history and cleanliness.
I realise that doesn't have the snap of "super-germy" but it is, at least, vaguely accurate.
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There is a biologist named Elisabetta Coli. She caused some headaches for bio text researchers.
microbes going ballistic? (Score:2)
People will talk of being in orbit as being in "zero-g" but they experience gravity like everyone else but the forces from traveling at such incredible speeds cancels out the gravity. Think of throwing a ball and how at the top of it's arc of travel all the forces equal and for a small period of time all forces on it are nearly zero. The higher a ball is thrown the longer this period. Put something on top of a missile and get it high and fast enough this period of time of where all forces acting on it ar
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Umm, no. "Free fall" is a much more useful term, since it describes what actually happens - we fall toward the ground and miss.
No, there are no "forces from traveling at such incredible speeds" involved. Just gravity. And going fast enough to miss the ground....
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People will talk of being in orbit as being in "zero-g" but they experience gravity like everyone else but the forces from traveling at such incredible speeds cancels out the gravity.
This is a terrible description. Bordering on nonsense. There is no "force from traveling at such incredible speeds", and nothing "cancels out gravity".
What's happening is that the ISS and everything in it are both constantly accelerating towards the earth (falling, hence the name "free fall") and moving at high speed perpendicular to the direction of the fall. Essentially, this perpendicular velocity means that they continually "miss" the Earth as they fall. More precisely, the effect of the gravitationa
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I made a very simplistic explanation of the conditions on the ISS in an attempt to set up a pun as best I could without being too wordy. It's a stupid joke, lighten up.
The condition is called "missile toe", get it? Say it out loud if you have to. It rhymes with "mistletoe". Get it now?
Have a Merry Christmas.
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That was a long way to go for "missile toe".
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That's part of the joke.
Human beings are quite complex ecosystems (Score:2)
"Thousands of species have colonized the International Space Station -- and only one of them is Homo sapiens".
Incorrect, silly man!
Homo Sapiens - at least healthy specimens - themselves carry around thousands of species of bacteria, viruses and fungi. It's become a cliche that you have ten times as many bacterial cells as human ones - and if you somehow managed to get rid of all the bacteria, you would die.
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Here's an experiment (Score:2)
Good thing only one of the species is Homo Sapiens (Score:2)
I would be incredibly confused is Homo Sapiens somehow made up more than of of the species.
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NASA is more fake than MSM.
Dang man.. That's a reach.. Have you actually *seen* MSN lately? Talk about space cadets...
"Just germ, baby" (Score:2)
(Bacillus aryabhatti, collected from a practice football field used by the Oakland Raiders, grew fastest.)
Seeing the fans in the stands, I have no doubt that the Oakland/LosAngeles/Oakland/Las Vegas Raiders are the germiest organization in pro football. As a 49er fan, I just couldn't resist taking a shot at the Raiders :-)