Posted on 06/11/2021 6:52:59 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Japanese researchers behind the new work... wanted to know how space radiation affects fertility in mammals. Radiation can damage the DNA within cells, causing mutations... Environments on Earth with heavy radiation exposure can cause defects in the offspring of animals.
Space radiation in particular has been a major concern for countries like the U.S. and Japan that have sent many astronauts on lengthy missions into low Earth orbit. Farther space destinations are also on the horizon. NASA and other space agencies are developing systems that could support humans on monthslong journeys to other solar system destinations such as the moon and Mars, and radiation is a big concern.
Researchers freeze-dried mouse sperm samples from 12 mice and sealed them within small lightweight capsules...
The packets were transported to the ISS and stored for different amounts of time. A portion of the samples returned to Earth after nine months in space, another set returned after two years and nine months, and the final set of mice sperm samples came back after five years and 10 months in space.
Once back on Earth, the team...chose to rehydrate the sperm with water, then injected them into fresh mouse ovary cells. After transferring them to female mice, the mothers became pregnant and eventually gave birth to baby mice.
The "space pups" were born healthy and with no defects...
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Just trying to prove the mile high club can go to new heights.
Trust the Plan.
What a headline!
Imagine someone seeing that 50 years ago !
WTF?
What are the two most asked questions ... ever ?
How do you poop and what's sex like in zero grav. ?
Were they trying for chipmunks? Cats? Gold?
Alchemists don't die, they just change form.
Sex in space? Press Conference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BFzepWiUwU
Howard Wolowitz could demonstrate for you using his Mom's meatloaf.
NASA conducted multiple experiments with married astronauts to determine how copulation can be done in zero-g. Ensuring that the partners obeyed Newton’s third law of motion was the primary finding. The solution was to do it in a sleeping bag.
A much more critical study needs to be done to see if reproduction, gestation, and childhood development also occurs normally in space. Research by Michael Levin at Tufts University indicates that although DNA codes for proteins that are used to build the structures of the body no one understands how multiple individual cells arrange themselves into the shapes of hearts, liver, lungs, brains, fingers, and toes.
Levin’s theory is that there are archetype “fields” that influence the configuration of electrically charged ion channels in cells and act as a network or scaffolding to direct the emergence of structure.
This is analogous to the way energy density curves space time in Einstein’s General Relativity. In this case what is influencing the field is the population density of successful biological species that are structural copies of each other.
The concern is that if these biological fields fall off with distance from the population density, organisms that try to develop in space will not form the proper organ structures as quickly or at all.
This hypothesis needs to be tested before manned space colonization should be considered.
First Mice, then Men!
Totally worthless study. Just wow.
OUTERCOURSE ?
It could actually be very useful.
Cryogenically preserved mouse sperm and embryos from genetically engineered mice have been important to medical research for a while now.
It could be useful to see how they survive under different circumstances.
The lightyear high club?
-—>Insert salamander joke, here
Had they actually sent them outside the Van Allen Belt, the study might have proven useful.
Well, the article doesn’t tell exactly/all that they were looking for.
I agree that there are ‘stupid and useless’ studies; but science builds on science - and often in the process of looking for something, we find something else that happens to be useful or intriguing, and shoots us off into new directions.
I wouldn’t judge a study like this without reading the proposal/protocol and then the assessment of results.
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