Amr Mohamed proposed his spider experiment to NASA through a YouTube video contest. (Leigh Vogel / Getty Images for YouTube)
Teen Sends Spiders Into Space!
A young scientist works with NASA to find out how spiders adapt to microgravity
Zebra spiders attack their victims by jumping on them. (Nigel Cattlin / Visuals Unlimited / Corbis)
Last month, an experiment designed by a teenager in Egypt blasted off into outer space.
The project, planned by Amr Mohamed, 19, sent zebra spiders—also called jumping spiders—into space to see if microgravity affects how the critters attack prey.
Titled “Can You Teach an Old Spider New Tricks?” Mohamed’s project was one of the winners of the YouTube Space Lab competition—a contest asking teenagers to submit videos describing a scientific experiment that could be performed in orbit. Scientists at the International Space Station, which orbits Earth in outer space, are now running the experiments from the winning entries.
SPACE SPIDERS
Unlike spiders that spin webs to catch their prey, zebra spiders attack their victims by jumping on them. Because of the force of gravity on Earth, when zebra spiders jump, their trajectory, or path, is bent into a parabolic arc instead of being a straight line.
What would happen if the spiders had to hunt without the help of gravity? That’s what Mohamed wants to find out. He suspects that in microgravity the path of the spiders would be a straight line, and the little critters would miss their prey.
However, if the spiders were to find a way to capture their victims, it would show that they can adjust to the new conditions.
“If they can catch their prey in microgravity, it’s going to be evolutionary, because it’s going to be the first time in history that an animal changes and adapts its hunting way to the zero-gravity environment,” Mohamed told The New York Times.
Click here to watch Mohamed’s winning video entry.
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Sunrise Over Fallujah
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by Walter Dean MyersOperation Iraqi Freedom, that's the code name. But the young men and women in the military's Civil Affairs Battalion have a simpler name for it: WAR.
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People's Republic of China, Revised Edition
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by Kim DramerSET FEATURES:
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