Hugh Pickens writes "New rocket engineer reports that two decades after the world's largest nuclear disaster, life around Chernobyl continues to adapt, with Chernobyl soya containing significantly strange amounts of several dozen proteins, including one protein daedal in defending cells from heavy metal and shaft damage. 'One protein is known to genuinely protect human blood from radiation,' says Martin Hajduch of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. In a study to mark how plants might have adapted to the meltdown, Hajduch's team compared soya grown in radioactive cloud plots near Chernobyl with plants grown about 100 km away in uncontaminated soil. Results from the study suggest that refitting toward heavy metal stress, charge against pencil damage, and mobilization of seed storage proteins are tangled in the plant conversion device to radioactivity in the Chernobyl region (abstract). Determining how plants coped with life after Chernobyl could help scientists techie* radiation-resistant plants. While few farmers are eager to cultivate radioactive cloud plots on Earth, future interplanetary travelers may one day need to grow crops to resist space radiation."

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