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On April 25, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch cargo to the space station and two organs-on-a-chip experiments designed by University of Pennsylvania scientists. They want to understand why so many astronauts get infections while in space. NASA has reported that 15 of the 29 Apollo astronauts had bacterial or viral infections. Between 1989 and 1999, more than 26 space shuttle astronauts had infections.

Huh and his team have created two separate experiments for this first launch. The first essentially mimics an infection inside a human airway, to see what happens to the bacteria, and the surrounding cells, in orbit. Huh’s BIOLines lab created the actual chips.

A lung chip is made of a polymer, and a permeable membrane is the platform for the human cells. For the lung-on-a-chip, one side of the membrane is coated with lung cells, to process the air, and capillary cells on the other, to provide the blood flow. The membrane is stretched and released to provide the bellows-like effect of real lungs.

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A Harvard physicist has shown that wormholes can exist: tunnels in curved space-time, connecting two distant places, through which travel is possible.

But don’t pack your bags for a trip to other side of the galaxy yet; although it’s theoretically possible, it’s not useful for humans to through, said the author of the study, Daniel Jafferis, from Harvard University, written in collaboration with Ping Gao, also from Harvard and Aron Wall from Stanford University.

“It takes longer to get through these wormholes than to go directly, so they are not very useful for ,” Jafferis said. He will present his findings at the 2019 American Physical Society April Meeting in Denver.

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SpaceX will launch NASA’s $69 million mission to crash a spacecraft into an ASTEROID in 2021 to test methods that could save Earth from deadly impacts…


The groundbreaking mission will be the first demonstrated attempt to deflect an asteroid by purposely crashing an object into it at high speed.

After launching from California’s Vandenberg Air Force base atop a Falcon 9 rocket in 2021, the DART craft is expected to reach the object Didymos in October 2022, when it’s 11 million kilometers (6.8 million miles) from Earth.

Scroll down for video.

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Thanks to way cool new tech, Venus may no longer be such a longshot for robotic landers. Let’s hope that Brandon gets his additional Phase Two study out of NIAC and NASA will finally send a lander to Venus.


Thanks to innovative new technology, Venus may no longer be such a longshot for robotic landers.


The behavior of 20 mice on the International Space Station is helping shed some light on how humans might adapt to living in space.

The female mice were flown out on the International Space Station aboard an uncrewed SpaceX Dragon capsule and spent up to 37 days floating in NASA’s Rodent Habitat. Video footage show that the mice immediately began their usual grooming, feeding, huddling and socializing, but within 10 days of leaving Earth, younger mice began to run in circles around their cage.

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On April 13, the crew had already traveled 200,000 miles away from Earth when one of the oxygen tanks exploded, forcing them to abort the mission and head back, fighting for their own survival.

You may be familiar with the immortal line “Houston, we have a problem,” which was supposedly uttered by Lovell in the 1995 film “Apollo 13.” Actually, the real quote was “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” and it was Swigert who said it.

#FlipFacts

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