ISS Is Home To Molds That Can Withstand Radiation Doses That Would Kill a Human, Researchers Find (newatlas.com) 74
Mold spores commonly found aboard the International Space Station (ISS) turn out to be radiation resistant enough to survive 200 times the X-ray dose needed to kill a human being. Based on experiments by a team of researchers led by Marta Cortesao, a microbiologist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne, the new study indicates that sterilizing interplanetary spacecraft may be much more difficult than previously thought. New Atlas reports: The researchers exposed samples of Aspergillus and Pennicillium spores to X-rays, heavy ions, and high-frequency ultraviolet light of the kinds and intensities found in space. Such radiation damages DNA and breaks down cell structures, but the spores survived X-rays up to 1,000 gray, heavy ions at 500 gray, and UV rays up to 3,000 joules per meter squared. Gray is a measurement of radiation exposure based on the absorption of one joule of radiation energy per kilogram of matter. To place the results into perspective, five gray will kill a person and 0.7 gray is how much radiation the crew of a Mars mission would receive on a 180-day mission.
Since mold spores can already survive heat, cold, chemicals, and drying out, being able to take on radiation as well poses new challenges. It means that not only will manned missions have to put a lot of effort into keeping the ship clean and healthy, it also means that unmanned planetary missions, which must be free of terrestrial organisms to prevent contaminating other worlds, will be harder to sterilize. But according to Cortesao there is a positive side to this resiliency. Since fungal spores are hard to kill, they'd be easier to carry along and grow under controlled conditions in space, so they can be used as raw materials or act as biological factories.
Since mold spores can already survive heat, cold, chemicals, and drying out, being able to take on radiation as well poses new challenges. It means that not only will manned missions have to put a lot of effort into keeping the ship clean and healthy, it also means that unmanned planetary missions, which must be free of terrestrial organisms to prevent contaminating other worlds, will be harder to sterilize. But according to Cortesao there is a positive side to this resiliency. Since fungal spores are hard to kill, they'd be easier to carry along and grow under controlled conditions in space, so they can be used as raw materials or act as biological factories.
Hopeful (Score:5, Insightful)
it also means that unmanned planetary missions, which must be free of terrestrial organisms to prevent contaminating other worlds, will be harder to sterilize.
That is a hopeless cause.
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ISS Is Home To Molds That Can Withstand Radiation Doses That Would Kill a Human
So is your mother.
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No, This means we have found away to adapt humans to that nasty radiation in space. We just send a bunch of them to Mars and let nature take its course. Eventually we will breed a race of martian humans that are radiation resistant!
Life will find away, or something like that. I see no flaws in my plan.
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No, This means we have found away to adapt humans to that nasty radiation in space.
No, it simply means we have to cover the inside of the ships with mold.
Re: Hopeful (Score:1)
No it just means that using X-ray to kill mold is dumb.
It doesn't mean that using bleach or something else won't work.
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must be free of terrestrial organisms
That is a hopeless cause.
Well of course; NASA would never kill the astronauts before the very launch.
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You mean sending humans, and human-made things, to another planet isn't the very definition of contamination? What a concept.
That doesn't mean much (Score:2, Interesting)
Most spores can withstand radiation doses that would kill humans. They're much simpler and deal with such damage much better. Instead, tell us what makes these spores different from those found on earth. But that'd require doing actual science, instead of fucking around with apples and oranges.
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Most spores can withstand radiation doses that would kill humans. They're much simpler and deal with such damage much better. Instead, tell us what makes these spores different from those found on earth. But that'd require doing actual science, instead of fucking around with apples and oranges.
If you read very carefully, you will see that the experiments were in fact conducted on Earthly mold spores. And then the article author injected the bit about "commonly found on ISS" as a non sequitur that only confuses things. The experiment was actual science, and compared apples with apples.
It was commonly known that things with simpler DNA are less susceptible to radiation than things with more complex DNA. Now we have a little more quantification of the differences.
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Or whoever writes that sort of item now that he has passed on.
Admittedly the Andromeda Strain was pretty close. Radiation resistant bacteria from space, anyone?
Well the "belters" in "The Expanse" (James S. A. Corey) are quite manic about cleaning their ships and a spot of mold will nearly set off alarms.
Mir was a fungi greenhouse ... (Score:4, Interesting)
... in the end. "There are places you don't want to stick your hand in." an astronaut was quoted. (iirc he was German) They had problems keeping up with cleaning away the fungi and they were known to be*very* resilient against all kinds of things including hard detergents, space itself, radiation and temperatures near absolute zero.
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Greenhouse?!? That's a brilliant idea!
Lots of molds are edible . . . like the stuff in blue cheese that makes it blue. Or upscale truffles.
So we could CRISPR up ourselves some edible mold that could grow on the ISS or a spacecraft to Mars.
An excellent and sustainable way to eliminate the need for hauling up tons of MREs!
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Molds still have to eat biomass, typically high energy like sugars (lactose if you want blue cheese) and expel waste (CO2 etc). Humans do better already with the raw materials and perform the same process, as such, producing humans for work and then consume them for energy is the most practical.
human being ? (Score:5, Insightful)
turn out to be radiation resistant enough to survive 200 times the X-ray dose needed to kill a human being.
Why compare them to a human being? It would be much more interesting to compare them to same species of mold spores found here on Earth.
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The space molds could survive up to 200 times as many decapitations as it would take to kill a human being.
I suspect there's no difference. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the enviroment up there were so hostile then humans wouldn't be in the IIS. Its probably just some mold that got lucky and like all molds is pretty resilient. Anyone who's had black mold in their home knows how hard it is to get rid of the bastard once its established. Sure, you can wipe it away and use all sorts of chemicals, but a week or 2 later and its back. Along with bacteria molds and fungi are natures great survivors.
Re: human being ? (Score:2)
Exactly what I came here to say. Aren't MANY such life forms on earth similarly hardy?
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Umm they would have the same resistance because they are the same species. These molds are those molds just some that happened to sneak aboard the ISS.
Use as external coating agent (Score:1)
3.6 Roentgen (Score:1)
Not good, not terrible.
Re: Bleach. (Score:2)
Hype (Score:3)
Okay.
These moulds didn't spontaneously arrive out of thin air. They evolved from... us... Earth... the stuff we live in 24 hours a day. Yes, they evolved to survive a particular condition but, in the words of any nutrition anal retentive, they're "natural".
As such... they might well already be around, we just don't see them among the billions of unidentified species, because they don't happen to thrive spectacularly well when all their competition is able to survive.
I'm not saying they're "good" but they are part of our biome that we live in. As such, this means that you aren't going to get rid of them. So long as they're not toxic to you, or going to eat your food, or your spaceship, then you're fine.
The "contaminating other worlds" thing - always been an issue. If you haven't noticed we cannot push something through miles of atmosphere into the vacuum of space without something getting onboard. Everything we've ever sent up contaminates somewhere. Mars and the Moon are just as compromised as Europeans bringing their diseases to South America. Sure, they may not have known, but we did.
So this is really just hype. We know that there are moulds inside the Chernobyl reactor, the most deadly man-made environment at the moment (possibly Hiroshima/Nagasaki were at one point, but that was very fleeting... still a guy was caught in one blast, escaped to the other city, got caught again and *still survived*. Not ground zero, but a human survived. You think there's a bacteria that didn't?).
Life is very much like a disease, and it's impossible to keep a ship sterile, let alone a planet. And from there we just have to accept that every piece of space debris could contaminate whatever it touches.
There is nothing new here. You can't even have hospital-levels of clean in a spaceship (zero gravity means dirt can just hang in the air and touch a surface months later after you've cleaned everything else). And if this stuff starts doing bad things you're gonna need a way to fight this particular thing (I wouldn't suggest radiation, it seems to quite like).
If something is a source of energy, something will use it as such and adapt to utilise it to its full extent. Radiation is an amazing source of energy... that's why we use it ourselves.
if i get this right ... (Score:4, Interesting)
... it also opens a window to investigate radiation resistant complex life?
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... it also opens a window to investigate radiation resistant complex life?
Not an astronaut so take everything I say with a grain of salt but.... you probably shouldn't be opening any windows on the ISS.
If it's not OK then (Score:2)
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Too late. (Score:2)
This means weâ(TM)ve basically already likely to have contaminated most places.
Is this out of the ordinary? (Score:2)
Maybe I missed it but how does this compare to typical molds on earth? Maybe this isn't anything out of the ordinary.
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Open the doors (Score:2)
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Chernobyl fungi *eat* radiation, "so what"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Life that is simpler than humans is very often more radiation resistant. Almost always.
Remember hearing that cockroaches will survive nuclear war? The grain of truth in it is that cockroaches and other simpler forms of life can survive far, far more radiation dose than any human could. Some things can survive 1000x as much, no problem.
And have you heard about the radioactive mold growing in Chernobyl's damaged nuclear reactor? It actually USES the ambient radiation for energy.
https://www.nature.com/news/20... [nature.com]
Hmm (Score:2)
Have thet tried (Score:2)
to cast something using these molds?
(How di you pour molten metal into a mold in zero G )
Gels (Score:2)
What is needed is some different colored gels the astronauts can rub on each other to sanitize for space mold.
All Hail (Score:2)
Our Spore Overlords! They shall inherit the Earth!
Seriously, this can become a serious problem. I know someone who was infected by Black Mold spores following a Black Mold infestation. The spores are diffused throughout her body and she continues to suffer from pain and sickness from them.
If this stuff gets on earth and spreads, we will have no way to fight it. We will lose.
Mold (Score:1)