For the Sake of Astronaut Health, Should we Make the ISS Dirtier?
Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps
There are several well-documented health risks that come from spending extended periods in microgravity, including muscle atrophy, bone density loss, and changes to organ function and health. In addition, astronauts have reported symptoms of immune dysfunction, including skin rashes and other inflammatory conditions. According to a new study, these issues could be due to the extremely sterile environment inside spacecraft and the International Space Station (ISS). Their results suggest that more microbes could help improve human health in space.
The study was a collaborative effort with astronauts aboard the ISS, who swabbed 803 different surfaces – 100 times that of previous surveys – to get a census of microbes aboard the station. The researchers identified which bacterial species and chemicals were present in each sample and created three-dimensional maps to illustrate where each of them was found and how they might be interacting. Their results indicate that the ISS has a much lower diversity of microbes compared to human-built environments on Earth.
NASA astronaut Catherine (Cady) Coleman, Expedition 26 flight engineer, is pictured with a stowage container and its contents in the Harmony node of the International Space Station. Credit: NASA
Overall, the team found that chemicals from cleaning products and disinfectants were ubiquitously throughout the station and that astronauts mostly introduce microbes aboard the ISS through shed human skin cells. They also found that different modules hosted different microbial communities and chemical signatures based on the module’s use. For example, dining and food preparation areas contained more food-related microbes, whereas the ISS’s space toilet contained more urine- and fecal matter-related microbes and bioproducts of metabolism (metabolites).
“We noticed that the abundance of disinfectant on the surface of the International Space Station is highly correlated with the microbiome diversity at different locations on the space station,” said Zhao in a Cell Press release. These results suggest that more microbes from Earth could help improve astronaut health. Said Salido:
“Future built environments, including space stations, could benefit from intentionally fostering diverse microbial communities that better mimic the natural microbial exposures experienced on Earth, rather than relying on highly sanitized spaces. If we really want life to thrive outside Earth, we can’t just take a small branch of the tree of life and launch it into space and hope that it will work out. We need to start thinking about what other beneficial companions we should be sending with these astronauts to help them develop ecosystems that will be sustainable and beneficial for all.”
The team found that microbial communities were less diverse aboard the ISS than most places on Earth, except where urban, industrialized, and isolated environments (i.e., hospitals) were concerned. They further found that ISS surfaces lacked free-living environmental microbes usually found in soil and water. Similar to the well-documented benefits gardening has for the human immune system, the researchers conclude that incorporating these microbes and their substrates into the ISS could improve astronaut health without sacrificing hygiene.
Astronauts on the International Space Station experience an orbital reboost. Credit: NASA/ESA
“There’s a big difference between exposure to healthy soil from gardening versus stewing in our own filth, which is kind of what happens if we’re in a strictly enclosed environment with no ongoing input of those healthy sources of microbes from the outside,” said co-author Robin Knight, a computational microbiologist and professor at UCSD and leader of the Knight Lab.
Looking to the future, the researchers hope to refine their analyses to detect potentially pathogenic microbes and how environmental metabolites could be used as indicators for astronaut health. The team claims that these methods could also help improve the health of people living and working in similarly sterile environments on Earth.
Even as the avian flu continues to affect birds and the local egg supply, health experts say eggs remain safe to eat . Commercially available eggs pass through testing, grading and inspection by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture , the agencies that share responsibility for the safety of eggs before they hit your plate. Federal inspections of egg farms with multiple millions of birds occur four times a year. California’s agriculture department further regulates the safety of eggs produced, shipped or sold here — ensuring they go through an industrial washing and sanitization process. All eggs sold in California from farms with 3,000 chickens or more, whether originating within or being imported from outside of this “egg-deficit” state, go through additional measures and labeling rigors implemented a decade ago to combat bacterial contamination by Salmonella enteritidis. Related Articles Science | With avian flu flying around, is it ...
In 1974, science fiction author Larry Niven wrote a murder mystery with an interesting premise: could you kill a man with a tiny black hole? I won’t spoil the story, though I’m willing to bet most people would argue the answer is clearly yes. Intense gravity, tidal forces, and the event horizon would surely lead to a messy end. But it turns out the scientific answer is a bit more interesting. On the one hand, it’s clear that a large enough black hole could kill you. On the other hand, a black hole with the mass of a single hydrogen atom is clearly too small to be noticed. The real question is the critical mass. At what minimum size would a black hole become deadly? That’s the focus of a new paper on the arXiv . The study begins with primordial black holes. These are theoretical bodies that may have formed in the earliest moments of the Universe and would be much smaller than stellar-mass black holes. Anywhere from atom-massed to a mass several times that of Earth. Although astronome...
On October 14th, 2024 , NASA’s Europa Clipper mission launched atop a Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will spend the next few years traveling 2.9 billion km (1.8 billion mi) to reach Jupiter’s moon Europa , arriving in April 2030. Once it arrives in the system, the probe will establish orbit and conduct 49 close flybys of this “ Ocean World ” and search for chemical elements that could indicate the presence of life (biosignatures) in the moon’s interior. By July 2031, it will be joined by the ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE), which will conduct a similar search around Callisto and Ganymede. As is customary, the mission team has been checking and calibrating the Clipper’s instruments since launch to ensure everything is in working order. The latest test involved the probe’s stellar reference units (or star trackers), which captured and transmitted the Europa Clipper’s first images of space. These two imaging cameras look...
Comments
Post a Comment