1.2. Survey for you!

Hello, our dear readers!

We, bioMARTIANS, are thinking about including insects in the Mars-habitat menú, and built up a survey about that. Would you be ready to try food made of insects?

If you'd like, please answer our little survey HERE (Link opens Google Docs)
If you're located in the Finland, Joensuu -area, you might get a chance of actually eating insects.

Thank You so much for contributing to science! ;)

Pre-Christmas party Bowling!

Hey, and happy early Christmas to us! 

BioMARS and Team Red Sandbox teamed up and went bowling together, to a local bowling bar called "Cosmic" (Get it? Working with NASA? Mars? Cosmic?). It's important to relax between working on a difficult challenge and studying hard, and what better way than with the great people you also work with?

Our bowlers were prepared for the black light, which made white clothes glow!

Hely, Kristina, and Ana making the pins scared for their lives :)

Perhaps Joni is giving Maria some tips? :)

There were no winners or losers, but we all had a great time! Thank you, Team Red Sandbox, let's not let this be the last time :)

9.12. Concepts here, concepts there

Hey!

So we've been individually coming up with greenhouse/ food growing concepts for the past week, and used yesterday to sharing our concept-ideas. Then we decided to check out a few of those more deeply, and used the Triz40-website and 39 parameters related to that. 

It all seemed quite complex at first, but once we tried it, it started to make sense, and it's a great way to develop our concepts further. Next time we'll have even more concepts to develop. 

Work in progress:

Until next time, dear readers!

11.11. Q&A

Hey guys!

This Wednesday was partly a Q&A with ISRU expert Mr. Garrett Carman, and partly discussing about our communal knowledge on plant growing and food properties.

ISRU stands for "In Situ Resource Utilization", and that means making what we need from where we are and what we can take from there, for example, on Mars. We talked about creating energy and material, like glass fibre from the regolith or soil. Thank you, Mr. Carman, for answering our questions!

We will now make lessons for each other considering our challenge, so everyone learns from everyone and in the end everyone knows everything. ; )

4.11. Deep (Mars) diving

Hello!
It's been a long day, it's 8:30 pm again, and we started leaving the lecture. Only the girls stayed to take a picture for you guys to see our tired but happy faces.

What is our agenda now? In November we will dive deeper in our specific challenge (of growing food on Mars) and actually we had a nice way of rephrasing that to make our new problem:

0. “To develop an Earth-independent Food Production Capacity Increasing System”

0. In short, EFPCIS.

0. This is beautiful, we'll go with this one. 

0. Also, check our Facebook-page for our upcoming ABC's!

31.10. Happy Halloween!

Trick or treat! 

Tonight we decided to leave studying for a moment, and celebrate a little. We went to one of our team members home, Krista's place, and carved some pumpkins, ate some apple pie (made by Kristina) and shared some laughs about life in general. Can you recognise some characters from our group picture? 

 Carving pumpkins can get a little messy, but the results were great! One pumpkin was a little stinkier, so we carved it outside to ease the pain. The finished Jack-o-lanterns have a alien/space-theme, and one has our logo on it! 

Timo played a little guitar for us, and here's also a close-up of Mariia's costume, how cool is that! Our group wen't artistic with all our costumes, even the finnish people (Halloween is not very Finnish); Sonja, Jesse, Timo, and Krista!

                             

                         

Here is also a picture of a little party-crasher, Maul, with the Jack-o-lanterns!

We're all hoping everyone's Halloween is more treats than tricks,

Yours truly,

28.10. Lesson and presentations

Good morning! Yesterday (28.10) was a long day, we stayed and studied till half past 9 o'clock PM.

First we learned about information searching, Janne Hietala from Arcusys was kind enough to come and educate us. The information about searching for information was new for most of us, and super helpful for the future. Thanks!

This was also the first time we met after publishing our first drafts of our Mars-presentations, so we talked about them, and asked more questions from each other.

Now we begin working on our presentations again, making them (hopefully) better. Everything is possible after a good night's sleep!

21.10. Work hard, play hard?

Hey!

We and the other Epic Challenge team, "The Red Sandbox" went and watched the movie The Martian yesterday!

Afterwards we talked a little about the differences of the movie and NASAs real Mars plans. We sure hope they're not sending Matt Damon there, he seems to get into a lot of trouble in space.

But we enjoyed the movie and suggest You go see it as well!


PS. About our current workflow, we are individually studying different Mars-themes, which we will then (at the end of the month) teach to each other!

15.10. Our Facebook-page and official logo!

Hello everyone! We are super excited to show our official logo at last. 

You can also check out our Facebook-page now!

We are planning a trip to the movies soon, can You guess what movie we want to see? ;)

Comment what could it be!

Thank YOU for reading our blog, please like and share our Facebook if you want to follow us more!