A British space scientist has found that it is much more costly to send a message by cell phone than to transmit data from the Hubble space telescope to Earth.

Dr. Nigel Bannister from the University of Leicester in England calculated that one megabyte of SMS texting costs $730.63 to transmit based on U.K. rates. Hubble transmissions cost between $17.27 to $165 per megabyte based on NASA data.

One megabyte of SMS consists of 7,490 text messages each containing 160 characters.

Bannister used the calculation for the UK’s Channel 4 Dispatches program entitled “The Mobile Phone Rip-Off.”

“Hubble is by no means a cheap mission - but the mobile phone text costs were pretty astronomical!” Cellular-news.com quoted Bannister as saying.

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Russian cockroach named Nadezhda who spent 12 days in space as a part of a scientific research became a grandmother. According to local news agencies Scientists have sent Nadezhda along with other animals to space to test the survival skills and endurance of animals.

As Interfax news agency reports Nadezhda’s granchildren are descendants of those cockroaches who were conceived in space and were born after returning to Earth.

Namely Nadezhda conceived 30 healthy descendants last September in an orbiting laboratory named Foton-M. “They were normal and just like other cockroaches except for faster maturation rate in space compared to normal conditions,” Dmitry Atyakshin, a scientist at Voronezh Medical Academy, Russia said to the news agency.

Their children were brought back to earth and now Nadezhda has 30 grandchildren, who are growing and behaving just like other household cockroaches. Apparently the conditions of Space didn’t seem to have affected their growth or behavior at all.

The scientists proudly call Nadezhda, a pioneer, stating that studies like this are very useful considering that in the future, mankind has to spend a long time in space.

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