Nobody can fly a whole city to Mars. So a lab in California is teaching bacteria to make the

Nobody can fly a whole city to Mars. So a lab in California is teaching bacteria to make the building material out of Mars itself.
Pioneer Labs, a nonprofit in Emeryville, started with a bacterium known for making a kind of plastic. They let it evolve through more than a trillion cell divisions to handle Martian dirt. Now it gets all its nutrients from that dirt, poisons and all, with no fertilizer from Earth.
In lab tests that copy Mars, it made more than three times the plastic of the strain it came from.
CEO Erika Alden DeBenedictis says equipment from a single rocket launch could turn Martian dirt, water and air into enough building material for a small city. And this microbe is only the first: the lab's plan calls for five in total to make Mars greener.
Credits: Pioneer Labs
#lab #space #mars #science #reels