Poor Mojo's Newswire

Mars One (via NPR) says anyone over 18 is eligible to become a Mars astronaut, as long as you don’t mind being part of a reality TV show in the process and paying a $38 application fee. Oh and then you’ll have to live the rest of your life in an inflatable habitat on another planet. “If somebody’s an outdoors person who says, ‘I need my mountains, I need to smell the flowers,’ then it’s not the mission for him,” says Norbert Kraft, the group’s chief medical officer. Selling the trip as a TV show is a novel idea, but one that the co-founder thinks will work to finance the mission’s $6 billion price tag. Here’s how it’ll work: Applicants will be part of the contest online, with people who get the most likes on the site going on to the next round of selection. It’s worth noting there are already quite few pages worth of potential colonists listed on the Mars One site. Eventually, the process will be on TV, with participants duking it out in multiple countries and only one winning the prize of the one-way ticket in their respective nation. The final round will then be broadcast around the world, with six teams of four competing to go to space by 2023. The whole thing will last years, something the co-founder sees as working in the plan’s favor as viewers grow to like different applicants.

In modern times, antibiotics are largely taken for granted. But this complacent public attitude ignores the reality that such treatments require years — if not decades — to develop. Antibiotics also have limited shelf lives, since bacteria evolve and adapt to them. That wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that there have been zero major new antibiotics developed in the last 25 years, leaving the global community susceptible to the rise of drug-resistant bacteria: While a new infectious disease has been discovered nearly every year over the past 30 years, there have been no new antibiotics since 1987, leaving our armory nearly empty as diseases become resistant to existing drugs. “The barriers to approval of nine additional antibiotics by 2020 seem insurmountable,” said Henry Chambers, chair of IDSA’s Antimicrobial Resistance Committee (ARC). “We’re losing ground because we are not developing new drugs in pace with superbugs’ ability to develop resistance to them. We’re on the precipice of returning to the dark days before antibiotics enabled safer surgery, chemotherapy and the care of premature infants. We’re all at risk,” said Helen Boucher, from IDSA.

The research, titled “Organically Grown Food Provides Health Benefits to Drosophila melanogaster,” tracked the effects of organic and conventional diets on the health of fruit flies. By nearly every measure, including fertility, stress resistance and longevity, flies that fed on organic bananas and potatoes fared better than those who dined on conventionally raised produce. While the results can’t be directly extrapolated to human health, the research nonetheless paves the way for additional studies on the relative health benefits of organic versus conventionally grown foods. Fruit fly models are often used in research because their short life span allows scientists to evaluate a number of basic biological effects over a relatively brief period of time, and the results provide clues for better understanding disease and biological processes in humans. For her original middle-school science project, Ria evaluated the vitamin C content of organic produce compared with conventionally farmed foods. When she found higher concentrations of the vitamin in organic foods, she decided she wanted to take the experiment further and measure the effects of organic eating on overall health.