Astronauts’ eyeballs deformed by long missions in space, study finds:

They were alerted to the issue when astronauts who had flown on the space shuttle and International Space Station reported changes to their eyesight, with some seeing worse and others better than they had before.

Brain scans revealed that seven of the 27 astronauts had a flattening of the back of one or both eyes. By making the eyeball shorter, this made the astronauts more long-sighted, which in some cases had the effect of reducing or correcting their short-sightedness.

This could impact the nascent space tourism industry.

Multinational crew blasts off for space station

More activity for the International Space Station! Cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, NASA Flight Engineer Don Pettit and European Space Agency Flight Engineer Andre Kuipers began five months in space with the successful launch of their Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome to the International Space Station. The three are joining Expedition 30 station Commander Dan Burbank of NASA and Russian Flight Engineers Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin, who’ve been on the outpost for just over a month.

The fact that lateral thinking is not a natural gift, but instead is a product of experience and practice is something that I find fascinating. Everyone should be able to learn how to be an effective lateral thinker. Here’s an intriguing example of lateral thinking that actually happened and saved the lives of the astronauts on the Apollo 13 mission

Japanese astronaut, Satoshi Furukawa, having some fun playing baseball against himself in the International Space Station during mission 28 & 29!!!

Educator astronaut tells stories of space: Richard Arnold, chosen by NASA’s Educator Astronaut Program to travel to the International Space Station, was the featured guest at Saturday’s Museum of the Rockies’ Astronomy Day.His main message to kids, he said, was just two words: math and science. “We need a citizenry that’s science literate,” Arnold said. “I want to encourage kids to keep doors open by working hard in school and getting good grades.”