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5 Weird Things We Figured Out On the ISS
5 Weird Things We Figured Out On the ISS
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0:00
The International Space Station,
0:01
or ISS, has been swinging above humanity’s collective heads for almost three decades.
0:08
But it won’t be up there forever.
0:09
Details are still a little vague, but we’re all going to have to say
0:12
Goodbye to the ISS sometime around 2030.
0:16
Personally, I will be buying a fifth of bourbon and trying not to cry
0:20
as the remnants of its metallic corpse crash into
0:24
Earth’s spaceship graveyard in the South Pacific.
0:26
But if the bourbon can’t console me,
0:28
I can always think of all the weird things the ISS taught us about reality.
0:33
It turns out a lot of things don’t work the same up there as they do on Earth.
0:38
From human cells, to spiders, to goodness gracious small balls of fire…
0:43
because safety first, people!
0:45
So let’s break down five of the weirdest discoveries we’ve made thanks to the ISS.
0:50
[♪ INTRO]
0:53
Scientists have a particular interest in knowing what kinds of life
0:57
can and can’t survive outer space environments.
1:00
Horror movies are, sadly, not a reliable resource.
1:04
For example, they might focus entirely on the lack of air
1:07
or the extreme temperatures, and not at all on the
1:10
cancer-causing radiation that isn’t getting blocked.
1:13
If humanity ever wants to try setting up a colony somewhere as inhospitable
1:17
as Mars…let alone terraforming it…we’re gonna need to know where to start.
1:22
Which kinds of life will have the best chance of survival,
1:25
to help give us the best chance?
1:27
Well, in a study published in 2025, one research team attempted to
1:31
answer this question by slapping a bunch of moss to the outside of the ISS.
1:36
I’m only kind of exaggerating.
1:38
The team chose the species Physcomitrium patens,
1:42
which is a cute little kinda-palm-tree-looking plant
1:45
that is used quite a bit for scientific experiments.
1:48
It’s physiologically simple.
1:49
We’ve sequenced its full genome.
1:51
It’s known to be pretty dang good at dealing with environmental stress.
1:56
What’s not to like?
1:56
The team also chose to investigate three different forms of the moss,
2:00
representing three different life stages.
2:03
First, there’s protonemata, which are chains of cells from
2:06
very early in the reproductive process.
2:09
Then, brood cells, which act like spores.
2:12
And finally, sporophytes: reproductive structures that basically
2:17
“give birth” to spores.
2:18
All these mossy cells were placed in a small,
2:21
box-like container with a mesh window for exposure,
2:25
and attached to a special platform outside the station’s module called KIBO.
2:30
Not with a spacewalk, but with the space station’s robot arm!
2:34
Then, they were left out in space for nine months.
2:37
Different samples were subjected to different aspects
2:40
of a standard space environment… like the general vacuum of it all,
2:44
the extreme heat and cold, and perhaps most damaging of all: ultraviolet radiation.
2:50
And while neither the protonemata nor the brood cells survived the full experiment,
2:55
a significant number of the sporophytes did.
2:58
A full 99% survived the vacuum of space, 81% survived the freezing cold,
3:03
36% survived the high heat, and 27% survived the ultra-damaging UV-C rays.
3:11
You can’t even get UV-C rays down on Earth’s surface.
3:15
They’re the ones our atmosphere blocks out.
3:17
Which is why your sunscreen only worries about the A and B types.
3:21
But that’s not all.
3:22
After the surviving sporophytes were brought back to Earth,
3:25
80% of the spores cocooned inside them germinated.
3:30
Not only did they live, they lived enough to carry on a new generation!
3:34
Now, granted, even multiple generations of moss
3:37
aren’t the most complex life forms in the world.
3:40
They’re not even the most complex plants we’ve brought to space.
3:43
In fact, humanity’s done a lot of research on plants in space.
3:47
It’s mostly crop plants, because if we ever intend to live anywhere other than Earth,
3:51
or take really long space journeys, we’ll need crops to feed ourselves.
3:56
But because of their simplicity, mosses can help scientists set
3:59
a solid baseline for how plants in general may fare in a spaceship’s tiny garden…
4:05
or on the surface of another planet.
4:07
Certain mosses are also quite hearty here on Earth,
4:10
so they have the potential to survive in more hostile environments
4:13
than complex plants like crops and trees.
4:16
So if we can’t get a crop growing on our first fancy lunar research base,
4:21
we could at least ship some moss up to help make oxygen.
4:24
But even if we never wind up colonizing the solar system,
4:27
this research isn’t useless.
4:29
Testing plants’ hardiness in space can help researchers figure out
4:32
how resistant they can be to the effects of climate change on Earth…
4:37
which you may have noticed has become a bit of a problem.
4:41
So wherever future humans have to live,
4:43
today’s space moss can teach us how to survive whatever tomorrow’s deal is.
4:48
Unless tomorrow reveals we’re living in a horror movie,
4:52
and the monster is space-mutated moss.
4:55
Stem cells are the building blocks and maintenance crews of almost all our tissues.
4:59
Not only are they great at making more of themselves,
5:02
but they basically start as blank slates.
5:05
Then when given the right chemical signal…BAM!
5:08
They transform into a new, more specialized type of cell.
5:11
If scientists can harness that power for medical treatments…
5:14
say, to regrow a patient’s damaged organ…
5:17
we could have an absolute game changer on our hands.
5:20
Now, the stem cells inside of you right now aren’t
5:22
as blank slate-y as you’d find in a newborn baby.
5:25
After all, the latter ones just got done cooking, metaphorically speaking.
5:30
For example, a newborn’s cardiovascular progenitor cells, or CPCs,
5:35
can create a greater variety of cardiovascular cells than adult CPCs.
5:40
But what if we could convince those adult CPCs to dream bigger?
5:45
Not necessarily all the way to the true blank slates you find in embryos…
5:49
which have to build a body from scratch…
5:52
but at least regain the options of a newborn’s CPCs?
5:55
Space could help with that.
5:57
According to a paper published in 2021, if you bring adult CPCs to the ISS,
6:02
and let them chill in microgravity for a month,
6:05
they will change to resemble something closer to that newborn state.
6:10
Thanks to all kinds of pathways for chemical reactions and signals opening up,
6:14
the cells got even better at replicating themselves
6:17
and differentiating into other cardiovascular tissues.
6:21
One might say the stem cells got even stemmier.
6:25
Now, do we know for sure why this happened?
6:28
Unfortunately no.
6:29
Scientists have a few ideas, and they observed some
6:32
related genes getting turned on and off.
6:34
But there’s no concrete answer yet.
6:37
We also don’t know how to replicate this on Earth,
6:39
to bring about a revolution in stem cell treatments.
6:43
But maybe, if scientists can figure out what exactly makes those genes flip on and
6:47
off, they could make progress on growing replacement organs from cell cultures.
6:52
After all, it’d be great to circumvent the crucial,
6:55
but frustrating bottleneck that is organ donation.
6:59
If this study is the first step, we’ll be on a path to
7:02
sci-fi space organ replacements in no time.
7:05
Now just like the ISS, SciShow needs funding to keep running.
7:09
So here’s a quick ad.
7:11
If you’re still watching, you’re probably the kind of person
7:13
who loves engaging with new ideas and learning outside of a classroom.
7:17
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7:20
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7:22
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7:27
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7:30
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7:32
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7:35
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7:40
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7:43
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7:47
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7:52
You’ve probably heard of the three main states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas.
7:56
You’ve also likely heard of a fourth state: plasma.
7:59
The Sun kind, not the blood kind.
8:01
But scientists have identified way more states than four.
8:05
Including Bose-Einstein condensates, or BECs.
8:09
A BEC emerges when some gas gets so cold,
8:13
the weirdness of quantum physics starts playing out on macroscopic scales.
8:18
What do I mean by that?
8:19
Well, in quantum physics, each particle has its own quantum state,
8:23
which has nothing to do with the states of matter.
8:25
Basically, a particle’s quantum state is a complex math equation
8:29
that describes everything about that particle, like its position and its spin.
8:34
Meanwhile, all particles of the same type…such as every single electron…
8:38
are interchangeable with one another.
8:41
So if you collect a bunch of the same particles that are also sharing the same state,
8:46
they’ll wind up amplifying the quantum behaviors of just one of them.
8:50
In a BEC, instead of thousands of separate atoms,
8:53
they all collectively act like one large atom.
8:57
And scientists can use them to observe some weird fundamentals of reality,
9:01
like how each bit of matter is both a particle and a wave.
9:06
But creating and maintaining a BEC is easier said than done.
9:10
For one thing, when I said “cold”, I meant
9:12
“hovering just above absolute zero,” which is tricky to achieve on Earth.
9:17
For another, after you’ve got your BEC, one standard experiment requires you to
9:21
then monitor its particles during free fall.
9:24
And when you’re in a lab on Earth,
9:26
you’ve got like 1 second of observation time, max.
9:30
Lucky for scientists, the ISS has the Cold Atom Lab onboard,
9:34
which solves both those problems.
9:36
The Cold Atom Lab is sometimes called the “coldest spot in the universe”.
9:40
And it’s a multi-step process to get it that way.
9:43
It starts with laser cooling: trapping atoms in the middle of
9:47
six lasers until they stop vibrating so much.
9:50
It’s kind of like how if you push a kid on a swing at the wrong time,
9:54
they’ll slow down instead of picking up speed.
9:58
Then, the lab switches off the lasers and turns on a magnetic trap
10:02
to hold the newly chilled atoms, which is carefully tuned to
10:06
allow the hottest of those uber-cold atoms to evaporate away.
10:10
Finally, it turns down the intensity of the magnetic trap,
10:13
and allows the atoms to spread out and get even colder.
10:17
In the microgravity environment of the ISS,
10:20
scientists can push this further than they can on Earth.
10:24
They can cool things down to less than one billionth of one Kelvin…
10:29
all from the remote comfort of NASA’s
10:31
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
10:35
Meanwhile, microgravity also helps the atoms to stay in free fall longer,
10:40
giving scientists much more time to study their behavior.
10:43
We don’t just want to study BECs to better
10:45
understand quantum shenanigans, of course.
10:48
There are potential practical applications, too.
10:51
Like inside superconductors that transmit electricity without energy loss,
10:55
or the lasers in atomic clocks that keep everything
10:58
from the clocks on your phones to GPS working properly.
11:03
But for even more shenanigans,
11:04
let’s move on to our next subject of scientific investigation: spiders.
11:09
You may personally have issues with spiders,
11:11
but I think they’re cool even when they aren’t giving teenagers superpowers.
11:15
And just like Spider-Man in 1972’s Marvel Team-Up #54,
11:20
several real spiders have been launched into space.
11:23
Technically, the bad guys were trying to launch the Hulk into space,
11:26
and Spidey was just there to stop them.
11:28
Don’t worry; he got rescued, eventually.
11:31
For a long time, scientists have known that spiders
11:33
decide how to orient their webs using gravity.
11:36
But they wanted to test if gravity was the only guide they used.
11:40
Hence, the sending of spiders to a space station.
11:43
Which, much like studying a BEC, is easier said than done.
11:48
The first spider astronauts arrived at NASA’s Skylab station back in 1973.
11:53
But someone forgot to pack any food for the spiders,
11:56
so the human astronauts couldn't tell if the weirdly shaped webs
12:00
were because the spiders were in microgravity, or just starving.
12:04
Researchers tried again in 2008, bringing two spiders to the ISS.
12:09
The experiment featured one adult spider and a juvenile backup,
12:13
along with colonies of fruit flies for them to munch on.
12:17
Unfortunately, the backup spider somehow escaped its cell,
12:20
and joined the first spider so no one could tell whose web was whose.
12:24
Not that it even mattered, because the fruit flies wound up reproducing so fast,
12:29
the sheer mass of them blocked the view inside the cell.
12:33
But finally, in 2011, scientists got their spider experiment to work.
12:38
They took two golden silk orb weavers to the ISS,
12:42
leaving two more on Earth as controls.
12:44
The species they picked is known to make asymmetric webs,
12:48
which would make it easier to notice any differences in orientation.
12:51
By the way, the astronauts who took care of the two spiders
12:54
nicknamed them “Esmeralda” and “Gladys.”
12:57
The experiment setup was improved to avoid
12:59
both cross contamination and fruit fly overload.
13:03
And after a 2-month observation period…and 56 space-based webs…
13:08
the team learned that in the absence of gravity,
13:11
spiders will use light to orient both their webs and themselves.
13:16
The spiders seemed to treat the direction of light as “up” and the other as “down,”
13:21
implying they instinctively knew that light meant “up.”
13:25
While it might sound weird for spiders to have a Plan B for when gravity seemingly
13:29
disappears, remember that bodies are fallible…be they human or spider bodies.
13:35
It makes sense they evolved another system that can take over if the
13:38
gravity-sensing one fails, or to work in tandem for extra support.
13:43
However, a whopping two space-faring spiders is a pretty small sample size.
13:48
We’ll need a lot more if we want to make certain this is a real “thing”...
13:52
and not just an Esmeralda and Gladys thing.
13:55
To be fair, pretty much everything acts weird in microgravity.
13:59
Including fire. Which apparently burns cold.
14:03
In a 2012 experiment called FLEX, astronauts set
14:06
small droplets of heptane fuel on fire and let them burn themselves out.
14:11
The goal was to better understand how to extinguish fires,
14:14
and they chose heptane because: 1) it’s relatively simple,
14:18
2) it’s very well-studied, and 3), at least for a while,
14:22
scientists thought it may have been a good ingredient in some kind of
14:25
substitute…or “surrogate”, to use the technical jargon... for gas or diesel fuel.
14:31
How this work will transfer to other fuels, we don’t know.
14:34
But you gotta start somewhere.
14:36
During the experiment, the crew saw the burn, and then saw the extinction…
14:40
but their instruments revealed there was an invisible flame
14:43
that kept going until it finally snuffed itself out.
14:47
It turns out, the camera was capturing a kind of burning
14:50
known as cool-flame chemical heat release.
14:53
Which isn’t really that cool from a human perspective.
14:56
A cool flame burns around 600 degrees Celsius,
14:59
but that’s nowhere near the roughly 2000 degrees you can measure in a flame
15:04
burning your typical hydrocarbon fuel.
15:07
Under ideal conditions, at least.
15:08
While scientists knew heptane could produce a cool flame before
15:12
the much hotter visible flame, getting one after was a complete shock.
15:17
This sparked a whole bunch of excitement around space-based cool flames,
15:21
and in 2021, researchers were able to get a gas-fueled
15:25
cold flame to burn in space for the first time.
15:29
One day, cold-flame research could lead to more efficient and
15:32
less polluting engines, turning the same amount of fuel into more power.
15:37
And of course, understanding how fuel is secretly burning
15:40
will keep astronauts safer, as fires can get very dangerous very quickly
15:45
in the tight quarters of a space station floating in an empty sea of death.
15:50
With so much weird and wonderful science coming from the ISS,
15:54
it's a bummer that we have to say goodbye to it in a few years.
15:58
But there's still plenty of time for scientists to make even weirder discoveries.
16:03
[♪ OUTRO]
