http://www.space-travel.com/reports/China_Looks_To_Space_For_Super_Fruit_And_Vegetables_999.html

Are there indeed reports of high-yield space-exposed crops or are the
Chinese simply consuming too much super hero comic books and their
corresponding movies?

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Lucio de Souza Coelho"
wrote:
>
http://www.space-travel.com/reports/China_Looks_To_Space_For_Super_Fruit_And_Vegetables_999.html
>
> Are there indeed reports of high-yield space-exposed crops or are the
> Chinese simply consuming too much super hero comic books and their
> corresponding movies?
>

interesting though seems more like alchemy than science.. sending
seeds up to expose them to cosmic rays, cross your fingers and hope
for a helpful mutation. ehhh I hope they get eaten by giant space
cucumber..
but all in all be interesting to see what their findings are...

Gun Fighter

OK, seeing how plants and seeds actually GROW and develop in space,
that's useful, but seeing how they mutate? come on! Can't you just
expose them to radiation here on Earth? is there something special
about Cosmic Background Radiation that causes different kinds of
mutations? Would the microgravity cause any mutations at all? Maybe
pollinating for several generations in microgravity would, but taking
a single generation of seeds for two weeks? And they say the seeds
have a higher vitamin content? Could that be something less spacey
like, say, the SOIL MAYBE???

I would like to see someone plant rows of crops in various degrees of
artificial gravity and such and see how they grow. That would be much
more useful.

You know, I really don't know what I'm talking about. I guess the
Chinese experiments could be legit. At any rate, they're doing more
than I am. It just sounds kind of dingy to me.

doug

On Jul 31, 2006, at 12:55 PM, Lucio de Souza Coelho wrote:

On 7/31/06, Douglas May wrote:
(...)
> OK, seeing how plants and seeds actually GROW and develop in space,
> that's useful, but seeing how they mutate? come on! Can't you just
> expose them to radiation here on Earth? is there something special
> about Cosmic Background Radiation that causes different kinds of
> mutations? Would the microgravity cause any mutations at all? Maybe
> pollinating for several generations in microgravity would, but taking
> a single generation of seeds for two weeks? And they say the seeds
> have a higher vitamin content? Could that be something less spacey
> like, say, the SOIL MAYBE???
(...)

Well, we can't reproduce all types cosmic rays out there, I think -
for one, some of them have energies too high for our particle
accelerators and the like. Also, I wouldn't rule out the hypothesis
that microgravity can cause mutations. We know that microgravity
affects many biological systems and that ultimately has either effects
or causes in the cell molecular machinery - and parts of that
machinery deals with organization, replication and checking of the DNA
itself. In short, I think that the only way to test if something in
space causes different mutations is to do experiments targeting that
possibility.

So, under a purely scientific point of view, the Chinese research is
interesting - although certainly one can question its practical
utility and its legitimacy.

http://www.physorg.com/news8212.html

Ed

--- Lucio de Souza Coelho wrote: