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I just read this news in Finnish online newspaper and wanted to share it. This is not astronomy news, but is related to space and sounds interesting, so you might want to read this. The news is that Russians have developed super cockroaches in space which are bigger, faster and survive better than those living on Earth.

As they say, the only spiece surviving from nuclear war is cockroach. If cockroaches are born in space, they seem to be able to stand even heavier events. This was found out when Russian scientists sent cockroaches to space where the cockroaches even multiplied. A cockroach named Nadezha came back to Earth with a number of eggs, from which 33 new cockroaches were born.

These cosmic cockroaches have been studied now for two months. “Results are amazing but also unambiguous“, says researcher Dmitri Atjakshin to news agency Ria Novost on last Thursday. “We can now say for sure that “space cockroaches” grow and develop faster, and are stronger than their relatives on Earth“, continues Atjakshin.

According to the researchers, the moustache, legs and body of space cockroaches grew faster than those in located on Earth. Additionally the researchers have noticed that cockroaches born in space are moving all the time and they move quickly. “They are also more energetic and viable“, says Atjakshin according to Newru.Com.

These cockroaches were given a free space flight in last September when Russian medical students were able to choose various spieces to space flight. Notice that Finnish Marcus Toivonen had to pay 15.000 euros for his space flight, and he did not even go as high in space as cockroaches. Flight to the international space station costs around $20.000.000, so these cockroaches should be grateful for the free flight. Cockroaches flew to space inside Foton-M3 satellite. Duration of the flight was 12 days.

Read more about this in Novosti (in English).