Carolina Marques and Akmarar Suleimenova, two PhD students in the area of Nanotechnologies and Nanosciences at NOVA Schoo of Science and Technology, will have the opportunity to carry out a scientific experiment in space, in the absence of gravity that, in the future, may help tourists to control diabetes.
Carolina, who is Portuguese, and Akmarar, from Kazakhstan, were selected for a program by the European Low Gravity Research Association (ELGRA), in collaboration with Swedish Space Corporation's, which was looking for initiatives that could be integrated into the launch of unmanned rockets that will be sent to space by the two institutions and that will be six minutes in microgravity before they fall.
In a recent article published in Expresso dedicated to this research, the students, who are being tutored by Elvira Fortunato, explain that the objective is to verify how diabetes tests with paper biosensors behave in a microgravity environment. Experience is important in the context of the development of space tourism, for which it will be essential to have inexpensive mechanisms for health monitoring.
Paper biosensors are ideal for this experiment since they are a non-invasive mechanism, of reduced size and weight and easy to interpret, since they can be used using saliva and sweat.
Learn more about this research in the article from Expresso newspaper (content in Portuguese).