What Happens to the Human Body in Space?

In the largest study of its kind, scientists are coming closer to understanding exactly how space affects the human body. » Subscribe to Seeker! » Watch more Elements! » Visit our shop at Back in 2019, NASA published the first ever space twin study. This compared twins Mark and Scott Kelly before, during, and after Scott spent 340 days in space—that’s the longest any U.S. astronaut has consecutively spent in spaceflight—while Mark stayed here on Earth. That study gave us so much insight into how the human body changes in microgravity: from telomere shortening to gut microbiome changes to rapid alteration of gene expression. It also told us there was still so much to 2020 delivered. A set of nineteen new studies builds on the results of the Kelly Twins study, reanalyzing some of that data and comparing those results to measurements between 56 astronauts in total. Plus ten more papers