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.)

Comments

Mir

[Dan East]

So was Mir. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Missing contact data

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheerleaders who are also scientists and engineers... a dream come true! Names, phonenumbers......?

Caption: response :-)

Re:Missing contact data

[Virtucon]

All along we thought there was a shortage of women for STEM professions, there's not they've just decided to become cheerleaders. Now if we only had a way to convey this knowledge? A calendar perhaps? A Sports Illustrated special edition?

Is that a lot?

[jandrese]

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.

Not very diverse

[barbariccow]

I feel like I have more different species of microbes in my gut than on that whole space station!

Re:microbes going ballistic?

[CrimsonAvenger]

but the forces from traveling at such incredible speeds cancels out the gravity.

Umm, no. "Free fall" is a much more useful term, since it describes what actually happens - we fall toward the ground and miss.

No, there are no "forces from traveling at such incredible speeds" involved. Just gravity. And going fast enough to miss the ground....

Re:Elon Musk, staring at a gyroscope

[careysub]

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.