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China Moon Science

China Grew Two Cotton Leaves on the Moon (ieee.org) 43

Posted by msmash from the marching-forward dept.
The team behind a pioneering biological experiment sent to the lunar far side has released an image showing two green leaves grown on the moon. From a report: The experiment began shortly after China's Chang'e-4 spacecraft made the first ever landing on the far side of the moon, on 3 January this year. Cotton, arabidopsis and potato seeds, and fruit-fly eggs and yeast were all aboard the 2.6-kilogram mini biosphere, but only the cotton produced positive results. Image processing has now shown that two cotton leaves had grown -- rather than just one as initially thought -- in what was the first biological growth experiment on the moon. All the species died with the onset of the first lunar night, with no power to protect the canister from temperatures that reached as low as minus 190 degrees Celsius. The cotton leaves were dead within one lunar daytime, or around 14 and a half Earth days. The experiment continued until May, however, in order to test the longevity of the apparatus. The Chang'e-4 lander and rover meanwhile have just started their tenth lunar daytime in Von Karman crater.
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China Grew Two Cotton Leaves on the Moon More

China Grew Two Cotton Leaves on the Moon

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  • No beer, No potatos on the moon ? (Score:3)

    by Crashmarik ( 635988 ) on Monday September 30, 2019 @02:41PM (#59253630)

    Man going to be hard to get engineers there.

  • Deep fakes on the moon. I think the illustration may not be, strictly speaking, a photo of the leaves.

    • Yeah that image really looks like a 3D render. I don't know what it's supposed to be growing on/in but it looks like a dirt texture from a late 90's video game. The edge of the leaf underneath has a strangely sharp point, as if someone neglected the 3D mesh and didn't add enough vertices.

      I sure hope they're not trying to pass this off as an actual photo, because we've already seen what the inside of the experimental chamber looks like - and we know those plants died months ago;

      https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/s [nbcnews.com]

      • I took one look at the pic and my first thought was "Man, they really need to increase the mesh density on their ground plane and maybe use higher resolution normal maps"
    • If you look closer, there is a "made in China" mark

  • Oh, the inappropriate jokes that spring to mind...

  • Maybe Try Fungi (Score:3)

    by BringsApples ( 3418089 ) on Monday September 30, 2019 @02:54PM (#59253676)

    Fungi doesn't need the sun, and can get oxygen from the supposed water in the moon's soil. Paul Stamets [fungi.com] would be able to figure out which strains would be best to try first.

  • Congratularions to the Chinese Scientists... (Score:3, Funny)

    by bogaboga ( 793279 ) on Monday September 30, 2019 @02:59PM (#59253688)

    I can now see why the Americans see Chinese as their biggest threat...

    From High Speed trains to developments in 5G with several patents to back [up] the science, space, manufacturing...Who can still say China is a developing country?

    In the meantime, some country continues to foment chaos in distant while wasting money in the process. This all is while its infrastructure is tending toward the 3rd world class.

    • Re:Congratularions to the Chinese Scientists... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ItsJustAPseudonym ( 1259172 ) on Monday September 30, 2019 @03:20PM (#59253774)

      Who can still say China is a developing country?

      I know, right? China should totally lose all allowances that are granted in international trade or monetary supply, based on "developing" status.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Their high speed trains they stole from Germany.
      Much of the telephony comes from the west.

      Space from Russia/America.
      Manufacturing, from the west.

      What is your point?
      • You can't have them make everything without them learning to make everything. Doesn't matter where they stole it to start with. Same thing happened in Japan, and they're very high tech now.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        What is your point? The West stole Chinese bureaucracy and how to properly govern without the use of aristocracy and royalty. Prior to that Western governments were inefficient as fuck, and employed high levels of nepotism. The Judaic religion had a violent and vengeful god, that's image was curbed and made more benign by the mixing of Eastern cultures like Buddhism to create Christianity. Almost nothing in the world was developed in a bubble.

    • Who can still say China is a developing country?

      The hundreds of millions of poor rural farmers who are completely left behind.

      It's the same with India: you have very modern, nice, clean cities -- and that's the image they'd like to convey -- not the subsistence farmer or slums with designated shitting streets. There are parts of the US that are poor, but nothing like the urban/rural divide in india or china.

      • There are parts of the US that are poor, but nothing like the urban/rural divide in india or china.

        Well, yes and no...What I saw in San Francisco, though wasn't anything I though I'd see in the USA.

        Folks defecating in the streets!! And on another adjacent street, some worker was washing down the feces with some pressure hose. The stench was so bad! All this in the so called richest country in the world!!

  • Fake? (Score:2)

    by escay ( 923320 )
    Is it just me or that IEEE article picture looks fake? why is it zoomed in so much? Perhaps 2 pics, one close in and one wide shot may help put things in perspective. Of course all pics can be faked by I'm curious about the particular choice of the picture.
    • The image seems to be a 3D rendering. Perhaps a rendering of what the cotton sprout eventually was, but still not a photo. That's so misleading.

    • Actually a comment above gave a link to the actual picture. Not sure what this article is about ... an empty article with a fake picture. IEEE is losing points on this one.

      https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/china-s-moon-plants-are-dead-just-days-after-sprouting-ncna959971

    • Is it just me or that IEEE article picture looks fake? why is it zoomed in so much? Perhaps 2 pics, one close in and one wide shot may help put things in perspective. Of course all pics can be faked by I'm curious about the particular choice of the picture.

      A "wide shot"? The mini-biosphere is a cylinder, 18 cm tall and 16 cm in diameter. [eoportal.org]

      Not exactly roomy.

  • good job China. We need more experiments like this ASAP on the moon. Hopefully, SX will speed things up and be on the moon in 2-3 years.
  • Now wait just a cotton picking minute.
  • Old news. Cotton died months ago

  • (Ignoring the possibility of faked pix alluded to above.)

    I'd have been more impressed if the cotton plant had gotten to more than two leaves. Cotton is a dicot, so the seed comes with the first two leaves built-in - and they're more primitive than the rest that grow later. More than two would mean it had actually done some successful growth and maturation on the moon.

    Of course if you're going to give it a hard freeze before it gets the chance to grow that far, you're going to be out of luck.

    What's interes

  • But did they open a sweat-shop there, yet? (Score:3)

    by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Monday September 30, 2019 @05:10PM (#59254210)
    What good is cotton if you don't have some cheap labor around to turn it into some fast fashion to sell to spoiled shopping queens? Clearly China has to up the ante now and open some sweat shop on the moon, next. And it will have to be cheap enough that it can still compete "with shipping included".

  • Those are cotyledons. Pre-formed embryonic leaves already in the seed and waiting to pop. They look totally different from the true leaves that come afterwards.

    This announcement isn't that they "grew two cotton leaves," it's that they successfully germinated a seed on the moon.

    Here's a nice picture showing the difference. The cotyledons are left and right, the first two true leaves are up and down.
    https://cdn.agdaily.com/wp-con... [agdaily.com]

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