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A survey published by the fairly staid Moscow daily Noviye Izvestia found that barely half its readers believe the official report that the blast was caused by a meteor. According to the newspaper, the other half prefer to believe in an assortment of bizarre explanations, including that the blast was a secret US weapon test, an off-course ballistic missile, a message from God, a crashing alien spaceship, or even an extraterrestrial trojan horse carrying a deadly space virus to wipe out the Earth, C S Monitor reported. "Our people remember the Soviet past, when news of disasters was concealed or lied about," Alexei Grazhdankin, deputy director of the Levada Center, an independent Moscow polling agency said. "We have no scientific polls on what people think about the Chelyabinsk event last week, but it's safe to assume the majority of Russians accept that it was a meteorite. However, our past surveys show that up to 25 percent of Russians do believe in UFOs. A lot of our people just prefer not to accept the safe explanations they were taught at school. Even when all necessary information is available, they don't want to believe it," he said.
Scientists insist that they already know most key facts about 10,000-ton iron and stone meteorite - now named Chebarkul, after a city nearest to where the largest fragments landed - that exploded over the Urals city of Chelyabinsk a week ago in a dazzling fireball that released 500 kilotons, the power of 30 Hiroshima A-bombs, about 15 miles above the city. It was the largest meteorite to make contact with Earth since the vastly more destructive 1908 Tunguskaya event, which involved an estimated 50 megaton blast that leveled an area of almost 800 square miles, and flattened 80-million trees, in a remote part of central Siberia. For those Russians not prepared to believe in UFOs, a wide variety of other offbeat explanations are available for the Chelyabinsk event.
Russian ultranationalist parliamentarian Vladimir Zhirinovsky, with a nod to the currently strained relations between Russia and the US, has suggested that anti-Russian hardliners in the US staged a secret weapons test over Russia. About a third of Noviye Izvestia's readers said they thought the meteor was actually a Russian missile test gone awry, or perhaps a falling satellite, which was covered up with the official story of a meteorite. Inevitably perhaps, at least one leading Russian cleric has insisted that the meteor was a message from God, to remind us all of the fragility of life on this world. And from the trade union newspaper, Trud, the cheery suggestion that the meteorite could be carrying deadly viruses from outer space, possibly the work of malevolent extraterrestrial forces.
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These findings, as well as research to help reduce these risks, are part of the ongoing projects at the International Space Station that use microgravity to reveal secrets about microbes. "We seek to unveil novel cellular and molecular mechanisms related to infectious disease progression that cannot be observed here on Earth, and to translate our findings to novel strategies for treatment and prevention," said microbiologist Cheryl Nickerson at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute. Nickerson detailed these findings on Monday (Feb. 18) at the annual meeting of the American Association for Advancement of Science in Boston.
In space, researchers encounter greatly reduced levels of gravity, often erroneously referred to as zero gravity. This near-weightlessness can have a number of abnormal effects on astronauts, such as causing muscle and bone loss. Although microgravity can distort normal biology, conventional procedures for studying microbes on Earth can cause their own distortions.
Experiments on Earth often involve whirling cells around to keep them from settling downward in a clump due to gravity. However, the physical force generated by the movement of fluid over cell surfaces causes great changes to the way cells act. This property, known as fluid shear, influences a broad range of cell behaviors, and the shear that experiments on Earth introduce could twist results.
mORE Super Space Germs Could Threaten Astronauts | Space.com
