Mark
and Scott Kelly are identical twins who were both selected for NASA's
astronaut program. They are the only siblings ever to both fly in space.
Mark Kelly flew the space shuttle for ten years, then retired in order
to
take care of his wife.
Scott Kelly spent an entire year in space aboard the ISS. Now NASA is
studying the differences between the two after Scott's year in space,
and the early results are intriguing.
As identical
twins, the brothers are genetically very similar. However, researchers
found that while he was in orbit, Scott’s telomeres—the caps on the ends
of chromosomes—grew longer than his twin brother’s. Though Scott’s
telomeres returned to their pre-flight lengths shortly after he returned
to Earth, these results were totally unexpected, since telomeres
naturally shrink over the course of one’s life, and the stresses of
spaceflight are supposed to accelerate this. At least that was the idea.
“That
is exactly the opposite of what we thought,” Susan Bailey, a radiation
biologist at Colorado State University, told Nature.
That's not the only genetic difference they found in the twins.
Read more about the study at Gizmodo.
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