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The Earth is drowning in water by leaps and bounds. Worse still, this growth is accelerating. This is one of the most serious consequences of climate change, and scientists have been warning us about it for decades.

Watch out for aerosol overuse, since the ozone holes in the atmosphere might be reopening. Luckily enough, we also count on the European GOME-2 project, which is closely survey how these holes evolve.

The tiniest one is smaller than a Rubik’s cube and was engineered by an Indian student. The European Sentinel satellites are much heavier than a car, but that’s for a reason, as they monitor severe environmental issues!

You don’t have to be in the aerospace business to imagine what life is like in zero gravity. It’s hard to eat, drink, go to the bathroom and, in general, do anything that involves moving your joints.

You can buy them for a few euros at a chemist’s, but there was a time when they were only seen in space agencies labs. These are infrared thermometers which are quite accurate and take just one second to measure our body temperature.

Every single star in the universe has an origin and an end. Some of them, like our Sun, may exist for about ten billion years; others, the largest stars, can last up to twenty billion years.

In our planet, timings are structured exclusively around Earth’s rotation on its own axis and its orbit around the Sun. The movement of the Earth around the Sun marks the years; while rotation marks the days.

Saturn is not the only ringed planet in the Solar System. But there is no doubt that the brightest and most massive ring system we all know is Saturn’s. Why? Its secret lies the material it’s made of: ice.

If you use glasses since you were a kid, you probably remember how often your parents scolded you for breaking them. You probably didn’t notice it then, but lenses used to come out unscathed. Why?

Checking the forecast on your mobile phone to find out if the weather will be OK tomorrow is something we all commonly do nowadays, but not so long ago humans relied on the shape of the clouds or the direction of the wind.

Only when you know summer is just weeks away, you will get off the couch, into your sneakers and out on the street for a little exercise. Your gym is next door. You even keep a bike in your attic, but you haven’t used it for years.

Thousands of methods have been invented to suppress snoring: putting a dish with an onion and salt by the bed, sleeping on one side, putting on special patches, taking refuge in self-help…

Going on an expedition to a high mountain could somehow be compared to a trip into space. It would be impossible in both cases to take a huge suitcase with everything that comes into mind.

F1 drivers, fire fighters and astronauts have all been called superheroes (some of them more often than the rest). However, in this case we are making reference to their suits, which make them virtually indestructible.

Compartir +1 TwittearCompartir 0 The name of Valentina Tereshkova probably doesn’t ring a bell, and that’s a shame. We’ve all heard of Neil Armstrong and his legendary first trip to the Moon, but do not know much of this Russian woman, a cotton mill...

You’re sick and tired of those damn glasses. So, you’re considering surgery to get rid of the eye problems you’ve had since that eye patch in kindergarten. This lifelong solution would not exist without the advances of space industry.

Hardly anyone is happy to wear braces. What you may not know is that your brackets may now be made of a material that’s almost invisible, thanks to the space industry.

Toothpaste tubes are a fairly common object in our daily lives. They are small, practical and hygienic. It is hard to believe that this object, used to dispense toothpaste, creams or make-up, lived a very different life in the past… inside a spaceship.

Gherman Titov will be remembered as the youngest astronaut in history (and also the first space photographer). At just 25 years of age, and just three months after Gagarin manned the first space flight ever,

There have been hundreds of disappointments we have bumped into when trying to prove that Mars is our twin. So we’ll not get too excited: however, there are reasons to believe that Mars is our stepbrother, at least.

Our Solar System neighbours have countless features, but one of them has always grabbed our attention: their colour. Fire-red Mars; bright golden Venus; Uranus and its greenish-bluish hue… What’s behind these colours?

If someone asked us what was the first animal to travel into space, Laika would probably be the first name we would come up with. However, a fly took the lead in 1946, no less than eleven years earlier.

There was a time in the space race when virtually every animal was a candidate to be launched on a rocket. The idea was to check out what happened to them in order to anticipate how humans would resist space flights.

Heart conditions kill 3 out of 10 people every year. Heart attacks and failures, hypertension, strokes… However, you may not be aware that the space industry has given Humanity a kind of patch for it all: heart valves.

How do astronauts go to the bathroom up there? This is a very common, intimate question that few dare to make aloud. It’s been a long-kept secret until Samantha Cristoforetti explained it.

Most earthlings are unaware of this, but the garbage stalks us. And not exactly milk cartons, plastic bags or soft drink cans, which pose a real problem on their own. As we leave Earth, another kind of junk has all satellite owners on pins and needles.

Ever heard of the remarkable weight loss of astronauts after spending some time in space? This is not due to extra-hard diets or long gym sessions. According to biochemical and nutrition specialists, gravity is to blame.

The life of astronauts up there is about adapting, even for such routine tasks as daily hygiene. That’s why engineers have been developing new techniques that will make the International Space Station (ISS) astronauts smell of roses.

We won’t go too far and say that the wheel was invented in space. We’ll give that credit to Mesopotamians. However, engineers did their bit so the rounded, wooden device created several millennia before Christ would become the tires in your car today.

Gamer culture cannot be understood without it. The joystick is, for those unfamiliar with videogames, a device that allows moving around a computer or a video game console screen., and its operation is not too complex.

Neil Armstrong got all the fame when he became the first human to set foot on the Moon in the summer of 1969. However, before that, the Russian Yuri Gagarin had already taken a trip into space, eight years earlier.

When we saw Michael Phelps dive into the pool at the Beijing National Aquatics Centre during the 2008 Olympics, we all wondered whether he came from another planet.

Laika was a connoisseur of the alleys in Moscow and she was the first dog in the world to try the weightlessness of outer space. This loving animal had to go through an intense casting.

Are you more of a pizza or a burger person? If you go Italian, consider yourself lucky: you’ll have a plan for Saturdays if you ever visit the International Space Station (ISS).

Maybe you’ve flown in one of these before. Several airlines offer now a Wi-Fi service in their aircraft. This was unthinkable some time ago. Four little curved lines of happiness for many!

This is a million-dollar question. Why in Earth would anybody want to go up there? Some would prefer to invest all those funds on earthly matters, but the fact is that space research has brought us great technical advances at home.

On April, 6th, 2009, a magnitude-6.3 earthquake struck the Italian town of L’Aquila. 309 people died and hundreds were injured. Alarms went off and help arrived from all over Europe, including its satellites in the sky. Copernicus, the European Earth observation programme, helped save dozens of lives by detecting victims trapped under the rubble, thanks to high-definition images.

Sharing information with your loved ones is vital for you. That’s how you enjoy life twice as much: a picture on Instagram, a WhatsApp text to say good morning, checking your email. But today, we still find places where neither data nor Wi-Fi are at hand.

Sadly, wildfires are one of the most common natural disasters across our continent. The European aerospace industry are aware of this, so it regularly helps firefighters from high above. From the sky, actually. What do we mean? We mean the Copernicus Earth observation programme.

There is no such thing as an Astronauts University, nor a master’s degree that will pave the way to outer space. If your dream is to put a spacesuit on and fly up to see the Earth from space, this article is for you. How is the European selection process, how long does it take, what are the requirements?

It’s a Sunday. You’re meeting your friends for a Harry Potter marathon and apparently the films will be shown in a downtown cinema you’ve never been to before. Uh-oh… You’ve never heard of that address! But, wait. Click on the link you’ve been sent and… bingo! You’re a 23-minute walk away.