Does anyone else feel bad for the jellyfish? =(
Hell no, I hate those stingy, gunky bastards.
This does not bode well for humans born in space.
Really? I’m ashamed of you CD. Animal testing often finds huge differences between results of lab rats and humans, and they’re both mammals. Let’s hold back judgement until we at least have a result from an animal test in the same Phylum as us.
If microgravity was something I could have in my own home, I would totally start planning an experiment to see how mice react to sceduled shifts in gravity.
I’m pretty sure you’re just a mouse cage on a high ledge away from achieving your dream.
Ashamed? Really?
Of course animal testing doesn’t mean the results will be the same for humans, but we don’t test on animals first for no reason. Animal testing results can certainly be indicative, thus “this doesn’t bode well” is a perfectly acceptable statement.
I would think that if there were a space mission long enough for human babies to be born over the course of it, there would have to be be artificial gravity anyway, so it wouldn´t be much of a problem.
A warning for future space colonizers: Babies born in space might not
ever figure out how to deal with gravity.
What a stupid conclusion to make from jellyfish when we already have much more relevant results from vertebrates born in space:
That jellyfish is stunningly beautiful. (Provided it stays the hell away from me in water).
Small detail here:
fish have otoliths (ear stones)
mammals have otoconia (ear dust)
No, you wouldn’t. You’d be using it to have sex in.
I’m honestly a bit surprised that it turned out as well as it did. Lots of early-stage developmental processes start as cascades kicked off by nothing more than chemical gradients: the side with more X goes down the head trajectory, the other side starts into limbs, etc.
I guess developing animals get bumped and tumbled around a bit, so the gradients can’t be exquisitely gravity sensitive (even on earth gravity’s direction changes, when your egg rolls around, it just never changes to zero), which would keep them from just turning into horrible, undifferentiated masses of flailing organs in randomized places.
Always wondered why there isn’t a colony of mice on the ISS?
But can the ants be trained to sort tiny screws in space?
If there is one unchanging constant in the evolution of all earthly organisms it is gravity. There’s been no natural selection for zero gravity or radically different gravity. We are exquisitely tuned by evolution to function in a 1g environment. It’s only realistic to posit that complex organisms are less likely to have fully functioning offspring in low gravity than simpler organisms, because complexity means more potential failure points.
Why release a study like this and not provide a video to accompany it? It f*cking riles me that they can come out with these sorts of bold statements and we should take them at their word. Because science.
Show us
I am insufficiently familiar with the subject matter to come up with a direct reference, but I understand that the human inner-ear balance systems quietly shut down in zero gravity rather than wreaking havoc as one might expect. The way some people tell it, it’s almost as if we were exquisitely tuned to go into space.
Somebody should remind our skeletons about that… Some time in zero gravity and (without fairly intensive precautions) you’ll have bones like a calcium-deprived great-grandmother.
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