Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Nautilus

    99 Problems, and a Wild Gecko Space Orgy Is Just One

    by Amy Shira Teitel Aug 01, 2014 3 minutes

    By the time of this launch of the space shuttle Discovery in 2009, NASA knew well the dangers of lightning to spacecraft. At the launch of Apollo 12, in 1969, they were in the dark.NASA

    On July 19, Russia launched a satellite designed to study the effects of microgravity on, among other living beings, geckos. The purpose was to observe the geckos—four females and one lucky male—mating, then study how fertilization in microgravity affected the eggs after the satellite returned to Earth. But there was a glitch: The satellite stopped responding to commands. Russia’s orbiting gecko orgy

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from Nautilus

    Nautilus7 min read
    The Feminist Botanist
    Lydia Becker sat down at her desk in the British village of Altham, a view of fields unfurling outside of her window. Surrounded by her notes and papers, the 36-year-old carefully wrote a short letter to the most eminent and controversial scientist o
    Nautilus13 min read
    The Shark Whisperer
    In the 1970s, when a young filmmaker named Steven Spielberg was researching a new movie based on a novel about sharks, he returned to his alma mater, California State University Long Beach. The lab at Cal State Long Beach was one of the first places
    Nautilus9 min read
    The Invasive Species
    Several features of animal bodies have evolved and disappeared, then re-evolved over the history of the planet. Eyes, for example, both simple like people’s and compound like various arthropods’, have come and gone and come again. But species have no

    Related Books & Audiobooks