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Category: space – Page 944

The First Group of Female Cosmonauts Were Trained to Conquer the Final Frontier

In early 1962, members of the male space squad gathered at a dining room in Star City and were joined by Yuri Gagarin. “Congratulations! Get ready to welcome the girls in a few days,” announced Gagarin.

“We, a tiny group of military test pilots selected for the space program, had been living together as one big family in Star City for two years. We shared struggles and knew everything about each other, and now we had to accept new members to our family,” recalled cosmonaut Georgi Shonin.

“When we started training together, it was very unusual to hear soft and feminine call signs Chaika (seagull) or Bereza (birch) instead of solid and firm Sokol (falcon) or Rubin (ruby),” Shonin continues. “Their intonations alone were telling. If a voice was sonorous, everything went as planned. But sometimes their voices sounded pitiful. That meant the instructor was practicing certain failures of the system with them, and Bereza or Chaika was trying to fix the problem.”

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Strange anti-ageing effect of space travel discovered in NASA’s Twin Study

When NASA set out to study identical twin astronauts, leaving one on Earth and sending the other to the International Space Station (ISS) for a year, they expected that the rigours of microgravity would have largely negative impacts.

But on board the ISS, Scott Kelly, 51, underwent a very strange transformation which has left scientists scratching their heads.

The telomeres in his white blood cells got longer. Telomeres are the protective caps which sit at the end of chromosomes, protecting the DNA inside, like the plastic aglets on the end of shoelaces.

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This moss-covered wall is as air-purifying as 275 urban trees

From smog-sucking bikes to electric taxis and paint made of car exhaust, designers and architects are stepping up to address air pollution—the world’s single largest health risk. But a new air filter making the rounds in Oslo, Paris, Brussels, and Hong Kong shows that nature may be our best ally in this battle.

Essentially a moss-covered wall, each CityTree removes CO2, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter from the air while also producing oxygen. A single tree is able to absorb 250 grams of particulate matter a day and remove 240 metric tons of CO2 each year—a level roughly on par with the air purification impact of 275 urban trees. Thirteen feet tall, with a metal frame, the CityTrees are easily installed in a public space, and they even have built-in seating at their base.

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Inflatable space robots with integrated dielectric elastomer transducers (DETs)

Researchers at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute and Technische Universit\xE4t Dresden have recently designed a new type of inflatable robot for space navigation. These robots, presented in a paper published in SPIE Digital Library, were created using dielectric elastomer transducers (DETs), which are essentially electrical capacitors made from soft rubbery materials.

“Current technology is limited by its mass and volume. It takes thousands of dollars to launch even a single kilogram into orbit,” Joseph Ashby, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “Our research aims to replace or augment current technology with lighter smart-material replacements combined with inflatable structures.”

If they are integrated with inflatable structures, DETs could aid the development of soft and low-mass robots, which have high packaging efficiency and are easy to deploy. In fact, DETs deform when a voltage is applied to them, due to the Maxwell stress generated by the electric field.

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Grapes on Mars? Georgia winemakers aiming high

Georgia is immensely proud of its ancient wine-making tradition, claiming to have been the first nation to make wine. Now it wants to be the first to grow grapes on Mars.

Nestling between the Great Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea, Georgia has a mild climate that is perfect for vineyards and has developed a thriving wine tourism industry.

Now Nikoloz Doborjginidze has co-founded a project to develop grape varieties that can be grown on Mars.

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