[electronic music]
- Humans explore Earth, diving deep beneath its waters
and flying high above its surface.
For more than 20 years, humans have lived
beyond Earth's boundaries.
Have you ever wondered what living in space
would do to your body?
For this and more, find out next
on "Real World."
♪ ♪
Our exploration of living in space starts
by examining the tiny units that make up our bodies.
Cells make up all the components
in your body, and they keep you going
without you even having to think about it.
Let's find out more about how cells work
and how they keep us alive.
- I study what happens to astronauts in space,
which means I need to study what happens
to their cells in space.
So cells are important because they are the basic unit
of structure and function.
That means that every living organism,
including me and you and astronauts in space,
are made of cells.
So if you take a cell and look at it
through a microscope, you will see that it is packed
with different structures.
These structures are called organelles,
and these organelles are like different factories in a city.
Each organelle has a function that helps the cell survive.
So I like the big picture because basically mitochondria
and other organelles are parts of the cell.
Cells from tissues. Tissues form organs.
Organs form organisms, for example, humans.
So if I want to answer the big question
of how spaceflight affects the human body,
I can start by studying how spaceflight
affects the organelles of the cells.
- So clearly our cells are super important.
They make sure our bodies keep doing all the things
that need to be done every day here on Earth,
but what happens if you leave Earth
and go into space?
How do our human cells function in space?
Does anything different happen to them up there?
- What is difference in space compared to on Earth?
On Earth, we have gravity, and all of us,
which means all our cells, have evolved
to live in gravity.
In space, especially in orbit
on the International Space Station,
the gravity is extremely low,
and they're not used to the lack of gravity at all,
which makes them behave differently
and get more damaged.
For example, they are not able
to renew themselves quite as well,
making them look as if they were older than normal.
Now, on Earth, we are protected
from space radiation by the magnetic field
of the Earth, which stops radioactive particles
from getting to us.
The space station is just close enough
to the Earth that it mostly fits
inside the magnetic field,
but on missions to the moon and to Mars,
they will be exposed to space radiation,
so other scientists and I have discovered
that space radiation causes mutations.
Mutation is damage in the DNA of the cell.
That would be the code that describes
all the functions of the cell.
If a cell is mutated because of radiation,
then it may die or it may develop
in a wrong way and become a wrong kind of cell,
for example, a cancer cell.
In addition, space radiation causes damage
to the cells similarly to what an injury would do
to a whole organism, which causes inflammation,
which can hurt both the brain and the immune system.
- So NASA is studying what happens to our cells
in space, but how do they know how cells change
in different settings?
How do they keep track of the changes?
- We can look at the cell through a microscope
and count the number of mutations,
but also we can count how many cells
have been affected by radioactive particles,
and we can calculate it as a percentage.
So we would compare the number of cells that are damaged
to the total number of cells to find out
what percentage of the cells
are damaged by space radiation.
This is a very good example of quantitative data,
which means the type of data that we can count.
In addition to quantitative data,
we also work with qualitative data.
For example, if you look at the cells in a tissue,
do they change shape?
Do they connect to each other in a different way
after they were exposed to space radiation
compared to before they were exposed to space radiation?
We need to know how spaceflight
and space radiation affects normal functions of cells.
Then we can work to find out how to reduce
the harmful effects of spaceflight
so that astronauts could travel to Mars
without worrying about how space radiation
affects their cells. Who does this work?
Everyone.
I am one member of a huge team
of people working together.
In all science, people work together
to discover new things, similarly to how it takes
a lot of cells with different individual functions
working together to make organs
that make the human body.
- Well, that was ex-cell-ent.
Cells truly are the building blocks of life.
We are who we are thanks to the structure
and function of cells, and thanks to NASA,
we're learning as much as we can to help prepare
for current and future space travel.
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
are all working together
to help make exploring new worlds
as safe as possible for us and our cells.
See you next time on "Real World."