A strange guest will travel to space tomorrow

Blobs leave Earth after a residence of 500 million years

The organism resembles a yellow fibrous mass and consists of a single cell and several nuclei.

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The International Space Station is preparing to receive a strange guest of its kind, an object called "the blob", which is difficult to classify in a specific category, who will travel to space tomorrow, to be the center of an educational experiment run by French pioneer, Thomas Pesquet.

In the fall, hundreds of thousands of students, from primary school to high school, will reproduce the experiment from Earth on this strange organism, which is neither an animal, nor a plant nor a fungus, under the auspices of the National Center for Space Research, in cooperation with the National Center for Scientific Research (CNS). RS).

Visarum polycephalum consists of one cell and several nuclei. It resembles a yellow fibrous mass. It has no mouth, legs, or brain, but it eats, grows and moves very slowly, and has great abilities to learn.

The organism can also reproduce infinitely and enter a state of hibernation, without dying, dehydrated.

In this particular case, known as “hardness,” several pieces of it will arrive in space, as part of a cargo load destined for the International Station.

When Pesquet returns moisture to it in September, life will return to it at a distance of 400 kilometers from Earth.

These four pieces, which are barely half a centimeter in size, will be placed in Petri-type boxes, where they will undergo two experiments.

Interesting discussions

On Earth, thousands of plump samples from the same strain, LU352, which will send parts into space, will be distributed to 4,500 schools in France.

And educational institutions rushed to respond to the invitation to participate in this project, and the responsible for educational projects at the space center, Christine Korecher, said: “We initially planned to cooperate with 2,000 classes, but in light of the huge number of nominations, the two centers made an additional financial effort to meet the 4,500 requests.” .

She revealed, "More than 350,000 students will deal with the blobs!"

Another oddity that characterizes these organisms is that "there are more than 720 sexual types, while most organisms are based on two sexual types," according to the latter.

The presence of the blob on Earth dates back more than 500 million years, that is, before animals, and it has always been considered a fungus, before it was stripped of this classification in the 1990s, to join the amoebic protists.

• It is not an animal, plant, or fungus, and it has no mouth, legs or brain, but it eats, grows and moves slowly, and has great abilities to learn.

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