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The International Space Station is Super Germy (washingtonpost.com)
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.)
So was Mir. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Better known as 318230.
If you rotate humans from five nation space agencies in and out of a bunch of sealed tubes over nearly 20 years, germs happen. Who knew? I thought that only happened on airplanes /s.
Cheerleaders who are also scientists and engineers... a dream come true! Names, phonenumbers......?
Caption: response :-)
Wonder what that pink stuff growing on the bottom of my shower curtain is worth.
It LAUGHS at Puny Bleach!
Man, my 15 year old self is sporting a big woody.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Numbers like 1,000 and 4,000 are reasonably big for human scale things, but could be absolutely tiny in the microbe realm. IIRC humans have over a thousand different types of bacteria in our gut alone. That "super germy" figure could be the result of a single fart.
I read the internet for the articles.
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 especially likely to mutate into something horrible at that scale - if anything, it is the very 'clean' aspect of the environment that is going to cause immune systems to relax, and cause more harm than the bacteria/viruses.
Ryan Fenton
My mind filled in the blanks and made me read the authors name as David E Coli
RTFM is not a radio station.
Lysol. Hey NASA want to send me a check for it?
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.
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 are near zero lasts a very long time. This changes how the microbes grow and where they grow.
This makes things we don't think of as much of a deal on Earth quite the problem in orbit. These microbes on the skin of the astronauts feed off their dead skin. Because we here on the surface of Earth walk to get around this skin is worn off our feet and gets scattered by gravity and convective air currents off our warm bodies. I was a bit grossed out by this realization once in high school as we were filing out to get on the buses. I'd see the janitor would be sweeping the cafeteria floor and picking up this thin film of dust over the entire floor. Most of that is dead skin as people walk and our shoes and clothes wear it away.
Athlete's that get their feet sweaty and the skin wears off will have problems with a disease we know as "athlete's foot". This is just those microbes finding an environment to grow. When in space the astronaut's suffer from a similar disease. The microbes don't grow as much on the bottom of the foot like on athletes but more between the toes. This disease has come to get it's own name to differentiate it from the Earthly affliction of athlete's foot, they've come to call it "missile toe".
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
"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.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Um... did you happen to read the notes on the page you link to?
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 someone who knows the actual details!] and say that it's likely because of the way that the light from the sun gets refracted by the Earth's atmosphere.
For example, we know that the reason that our sky appears blue is because water vapour in the atmosphere refracts away some of the light... So if it's refracted away, perhaps the red wavelengths make it to the moon, which is why that shot appears that colour? The reason you're seeing refraction is because we're seeing the edge of the shadow, cast by light refracted through Earth's atmosphere...
This is just a poorly-educated guess, mind.
That's a sexist statement - Why would you assume that only the male cheerleaders are the Scientists and Engineers?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
How about they send Tony Bennett up there and see if they all catch herpes.
I would be incredibly confused is Homo Sapiens somehow made up more than of of the species.
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.
I feel like I have more different species of microbes in my gut than on that whole space station!
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 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 likewise the Heliocentric solar system, and disprove the pieces of evidence used to demonstrate them conclusively. But that would be hard, probably impossible to do so convincingly, since after all you are attempting to demonstrate something that isn't true.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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!
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
NASA is more fake than MSM.
Dang man.. That's a reach.. Have you actually *seen* MSN lately? Talk about space cadets...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
(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 :-)
LOL, it wasn't just me then.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Foucault was a fraud, and his experiment has not been repeated.
Yeah about that.
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.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
There is a biologist named Elisabetta Coli. She caused some headaches for bio text researchers.
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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.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
What *would* we do without you, Captain Obvious?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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 side by side: one fast, one slow, and one auto.
Now the catch is that the moon is also round, so reflection off the silhouette edge is darker than that of the part that faces us. But the Moon surface is enough of a retro reflector (the Oren-Nayar model captures it reasonably well to a first approximation) that it should be visible.
Do the experiment.
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If it were so obvious, how come I had to explain it? Take that, round Earthers!
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Oh, you mean like Rome, the French Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Egyptian Empire....oh, wait, you're either a fool or a liar
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 to be visualised to be meaningful.
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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 navigation or physics experiments - if they are spinning rotors - are magnetically levitated in vacuums, or else use more exotic technologies (laser gyros, or oscillating mass MEMs gyros). Commercial inertial navigation systems easily detect the rotation of the Earth, and their algorithms must model it exactly.
But the many hundreds of Foucault pendulums everywhere precess in the swing at exactly the rate determined by latitude (sin(lat)*360/1440 for degrees per minute). You can look up the closest Foucault pendulum to you in the list, and go there, and time it yourself to confirm this.
In fact Foucault pendulums are gyros, and sensitive ones at that. They are of the oscillating mass type, but using gravity rather than elasticity to provide the oscillating force.
Please list the "many subtle effects" that you fantasize affect the operation of pendulums. There are really just two - gravity (which is essential) and motion through the air. This last causes gradual damping of the swing (and thus perpetual pendulums have an electromagnet to provide a kick at each swing), and requires protection from gross air currents, but you can just start a heavy pendulum (everyone used heavy pendulums) and it will reveal the rotation of the Earth quite nicely before damping becomes serious. Try it. Use the burning thread release technique.
The fact that you are unaware that spinning gyros are far more prone to disturbing effects (the aforementioned friction, and air currents, imperfections in balance, etc.) confirms you know nothing about what you speak.
But it is a waste of time to argue with a cowardly guy hiding behind anonymity. I post this really for the benefit of other readers here, and will ignore your further fantasies and display of profound ignorance.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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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