Can Germs Go the Distance? Students’ Project on Space Station to Focus on Astronauts’ Health ASTRONAUTS ON A MANNED MISSION
can’t exactly make a U-turn if a nasty disease strikes 10 million miles out. A bacterial infection, which could be anything from strep to anthrax, can pose serious and unique threats to their health, particularly since nasa has found evidence that bacterial motility—or ability to move—increases during weightlessness. Three University of Maryland pre-med students and self-described “space geeks” aim to expand our understanding of how bacteria behave in microgravity—and ultimately how to safeguard space travelers—when their biology experiment is launched in March onto the International Space Station (ISS). The research project by seniors Yaniv Kazansky, Aaron Solomon and Garshasb Soroosh was selected for the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program, run by the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education. It’s the first UMD student experiment to catch a ride 249 miles into space, through a partnership between NASA and the low-orbit payload company NanoRacks. Solomon says their research has significance beyond the iss, as SpaceX aims to send a human voyage to Mars as soon as 2024 and NASA in the 2030s. “Space medicine is an emerging field, and how these pathogens act in space is still poorly understood,” he says.
TO MARS
Their experiment calls for sending dormant spores of a common bacterium to the ISS , where astronauts will activate them and allow them to grow and divide. Those samples will be compared with identical control samples on Earth to determine whether and how microgravity causes their genes to behave differently. “If there are differences, then those are potential targets for drugs,” says Kenneth Frauwirth, a faculty mentor and lecturer in the Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics. “We might either develop or select drugs that affect or compensate for those kinds of things.” The program award covers the cost of launching the experiment into space and the astronauts’ time conducting it. The students raised $4,137 through a LaunchUMD crowdfunding campaign in the fall to help pay for materials and data analysis procedures once it returns, and for travel expenses to watch the SpaceX rocket launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla. “There’s nothing like fulfilling a childhood dream of flying to space— even if it’s by proxy of an experiment,” Solomon says.— LB
A Gateway to Maryland History local newspapers are a microcosm of history, both grand and small. The federal government shut down the Maryland Free Press, for example, because of its Confederate bent. Baltimore’s Der Deutsche Correspondent was a popular source of information for German immigrants before losing advertisers and closing during World War I. And the Prince George’s Enquirer chronicled the gentry’s local jousting tournaments. Since 2012, umd’s Historic Maryland Newspapers Project has been digitizing local papers like these to make them broadly and freely accessible to the public. The project, which was recently awarded a third grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, has put more than 200,000 pages online. Digitizing local sources of history is more important than ever, says University Libraries’ Robin Pike, one of the project directors, as libraries eliminate microfilm machines, researchers become more fluent online, and genealogy gains popularity.—lf
Visit terp.umd.edu for a photo slideshow of some of the most fascinating examples, going back to 1690. For more information about the project, visit lib.umd.edu/digital/newspapers.
ILLUSTRATION BY STEFFANIE ESPAT
WINTER 2017 TER P
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