Ellen & special guests, Ella Hubber and Tom Lum of Let’s Learn Everything, turn our gazes to the skies and talk animals in space. We discuss the fruit fly fan club, the great big farm on the moon, which earthlings were ACTUALLY the first to make the trip around the moon and back, a spider escape where you least want it, why dentistry researchers had a snake room, shooting tardigrades out of a gun, and so much more. This one is truly out of this world.

Works Cited & Further Reading:

"Bioastronautics Research" video
"This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury" - Loyd S. Swenson, Jr., James M. Grimwood, Charles C. Alexander, NASA SP-4201
"Judith's Web - Student Experiment Aboard Skylab 3" - NASA.gov
“URODELEAN AMPHIBIANS IN STUDIES ON MICROGRAVITY: EFFECTS UPON ORGAN AND TISSUE REGENERATION” - E.N. Grigoryan et al., Adv. Space Res, 2002
"From Undersea to Outer Space: The STS-40 Jellyfish Experiment" - NASA STI Program
"For water bears, the glass is all full" - Tina Hesman Saey, Science News, December 2015
"Tardigrades survive exposure to space in low Earth orbit" - K. Ingemar Jonsson et al., Current Biology, September 2008
"What happened to those tardigrades sent to the Moon?" - Laurent Palka, The Conversation, February 2024
"Tardigrade Survival Limits in High-Speed Impacts—Implications for Panspermia and Collection of Samples from Plumes Emitted by Ice Worlds" - Alejandra Traspas & Mark J. Burchell, Astrobiology, July 2021

Links:

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334: Animals in Space w/ Let's Learn Everything!