SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the is-dark-matter-like-dark-energon dept.
The Conversation has a story about five key findings from 15 years of the International Space Station:
1. The fragility of the human body — there is considerable loss of strength and bone mass without intervention. Mitigating this is key to making it possible to have manned trips to mars.
2. Interplanetary contamination — spores of Bacillus subtilis were exposed to space upon the ISS (but shielded from solar UV radiation). "The space vacuum and temperature extremes alone were not enough to kill them off."
3. Growing crystals for medicine — "Crystals in a microgravity environment may be grown to much larger sizes than on Earth, enabling easier analysis of their micro-structure. Protein crystals grown on the ISS are being used in the development of new drugs for diseases such as muscular dystrophy and cancer."
4. Cosmic rays and dark matter — early results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) support the theory that a halo of dark matter surrounds the Milky Way.
5. Efficient combustion — flames burn more efficiently in space with much less soot produced. Understanding this may lead to more efficient combustion in vehicles.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Friday January 01 2016, @03:26AM
Yeah if those 5 are really the key findings the ISS is I'd say it's a very very expensive way of achieving "science fair" quality results. The burning with less soot could just be the lack of convection causing stuff to stay hot more easily- no updraft.
If you ask me the most interesting and ground breaking experiment the ISS did was space tourism. And the NASA were against it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 01 2016, @05:31AM
Just being there, actually doing that, and maintaining the political, financial, logistical supply chain to keep it going is a huge achievement. Yeah, rocket science is cool and all, but it's actually kind of the easy part.
Put another way, what have we learned from the CVN-75 Harry S. Truman, 8th Nimitz class aircraft carrier in the fleet (of 10), after 17 years in service? I'm not saying nothing, and I'm not saying that aircraft carriers are redundant and useless in international politics, but: the ISS also serves a role in international relations, and is operating in a unique environment that does teach things you can't learn elsewhere - and, overall, the ISS is costing less money and creating / occupying fewer U.S. jobs than the super carrier fleet, probably a small fraction of a single ship, when you consider the entire logistics tail.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday January 01 2016, @06:17AM
Puzzling, isn't it?
I thought maybe stuff would not burn past the initial flareup because nothing was pushing the spent reactants out of the way.
This is precisely the kind of weird stuff that orbiting zero-gravity space labs are supposed to foster the investigation of.
My belief is that space will become the ultimate "clean room" for building perfect microcircuit structures to atomic precision. When I say that, I mean building circuits atom by atom just as a building is made block by block. Maybe one day we will understand DNA well enough we can build some analogues that construct whatever nanodevices we dream up - a 3D printer operating at the atomic level.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]