Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Great Cthulhu will not be pleased

Sacrificial offering Science to be made in orbit. [Link]
It's a momentous occasion for cephalopods everywhere as the first ever squid in space is now, uh, in space. The celebration will be short lived, however, as NASA plans to have the astronauts about Endeavour kill the squid in just a matter of hours, before it can break out of its tube of seawater and turn the battle lasers of the ISS on us. Or something.
The reason that a baby bobtail squid is going along for Endeavour's final flight in the first place is not to study whether squid turn into superhuman monster brain sucking aliens when exposed to cosmic rays and a low gravity environment, but rather to watch and see whether a certain type of bacteria inside the squid plays naughty or nice in orbit. Previous studies of harmful bacteria in space suggest that zero gee can make the bad bugs up to three times nastier, so the question is, what happens to thegood bugs?

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