Charles Robert Darwin was born on February 12, 1809 in Shrewsbury, England. In 1831 Charles Darwin received a proposal to participate in an expedition of the ship Beagle as a naturalist. Initially he refused, partly because of his father’s perplexities concerning the long duration of the trip and the lack of retribution but, also due to the intervention of his maternal uncle Josiah, he ended up accepting and on December 27, 1831 he set off on the Beagle for a journey that lasted almost five years.

During the Beagle’s journey, Charles Darwin noticed that on each island of the Galápagos archipelago there were different species of turtles and birds that had various similarities and various specific characteristics. Those were among the key observations for what became the theory of evolution. During those years he also collected other observations not only on flora and fauna but also on the geology of the places he surveyed, which were the basis of various scientific essays that were published in the following years.

An article published in the journal “mSystems” describes a research on the adaptations of bacteria of the species Bacillus cereus and Staphylococcus aureus found on the International Space Station. A team of researchers led by Erica Hartmann of Northwestern University compared 189 genomes isolated from various origins to understand the influence of what are called built environments, human products that modify the natural environment. In the Station’s case, it’s an extreme environment and yet no dangerous mutations were detected such as resistance to antibiotics but they developed adaptations to difficult conditions.