A Martian diet might aid your health on Earth (but there are probably better interventions you should try first)
Tag - Astrobotany
Alun Salt
Is Red the Signature of Life-Bearing Planets?
What colours should we be looking for from exoplanets if they hold life? New research from Japan suggests they could be more similar to Earth than previously thought.
MELiSSA delivers AstroPlant
We have an interest in plant biology in space here on the blog, so naturally we’re excited about MELiSSA’s AstroPlant desktop greenhouse. Normally we’re blogging about either space salad or else plant...
The European Space Agency goes back to its roots
The roots are Arabidopsis roots. They’ll be flying, along with the rest of the plant, on a parabolic flight to see how they react to zero gravity and hypergravity. Franck Ditengou of the University of Freiburg in...
annbot
Use it or lose it, for a plant’s sense of gravity?
Gravitropism is the ability of a plant to turn in response to gravity. Roots have gravitropism, bending to turn down and stems negative gravitropism to turn up. But what happens if you remove a plant’s ability to...
Calibrating data in a weightless environment
A Test to Verify the Biocompatibility of a Method for Plant Culture in a Microgravity Environment by Brown and Chapman is an example of the basic science people needed to do with the shuttle. If you’re going to...
30 years of Astrobotany in Annals of Botany
“In the newspapers I used to read about shuttles going up and down all the time, but it bothered me a little bit that I never saw in any scientific journal any results of anything that had ever come out of the...
Figs In Space! Or lettuces at least.
Mashable reports that NASA will experiment with growing food in space. Fans of the Muppet Show may be disappointed that the first crop will be lettuce, not figs.
Will Martian cuisine have a terrifying surprise?
Mars One has launched a project to put humans on Mars by cutting out one of the biggest costs of the mission. Putting a human into space is easy. A lot of expense is cut out if you don’t plan to bring them back...
Are radishes the perfect astronauts?
A common question is if you were to leave a spaceship without a spacesuit, what kill you? Would you boil in the lack of pressure, freeze, explode, asphyxiate or what? How long could you survive before death? A story...
More on Astrobotany from the Phytophactor
Following up his helpful comments on alien botany, the Phytophactor has more commentary on why plants on Earth are green.
Astrobotany on the web
A couple of Astrobotanical stories have caught my eye in the past week. I renewed my subscription to SciAm Digital today and read the story Black Plants and Twilight Zones. It’s subscription only, but if you read...
