Space children may be malformed

The Journal of Cosmology recently devoted a number of specials to the necessary conditions and dangers associated with a journey on a manned ship to Mars, which mentioned a taboo subject. that NASA never mentioned: sex in the universe.

Yellow grouper in the experiment.Photo: New Scientist

It seems a very natural thing, inevitably the " briefings " in a journey. Those " briefings " also need to be taken seriously, at least in terms of re-creating the next generation.

For example, a recent study showed that embryos of zebrafish live in microgravity will have a skull defect .

These defects are not necessarily harmful right away, but certainly not a good thing. In yellow grouper species, abnormalities appear in nerve crest cells, which are responsible for developing cartilage and skull. Suppose, this also happens in human embryos; spacebaby may not have a distorted head shape, but later generations will suffer.

One study placed embryos of yellow grouper into a bioreactor that mimics microscopic gravity during the development of fertilized eggs. When the eggs hatched, the researchers marked a number of cartilage of the skull of the fish and found that the supporting cartilage - the part corresponding to the human jaw - changed shape . A few months later, when the fish were mature, they observed some fish and saw that they had abnormalities, bones and skull bottom buckled.

It is only a matter of doing experiments on the effect of micro in force on zebrafish. There are some scientists who argue that the bioreactor is not quite similar to the microgravity in the universe.