The YouTube Space Lab competition asked students aged 14 to 18 to send their ideas for experiments to be performed on the International Space Station as a two minute video. Six regional winners were selected to go to Washington D.C., USA, where they were taken on a zero-G flight. Then two winners were selected from that group to have their experiments performed in space.

Global finalist Amr Mohamed, an 18-year-old student from Alexandria, Egypt, will see how spiders catch their prey in microgravity. Zebra spiders jump on their pray instead of catching them in a web; could they adopt their behavior and hunt in a different way?

Global finalist Dorothy Chen and Sara Ma, USA, want to send bacteria to the space station to see if introducing different nutrients and compounds can block their growth. If their hypothesis is correct, they suggest further studies could give us new tools to fight germs on Earth.

Scientists and astronauts were impressed by the variety of ideas and the different backgrounds of the participants.

^{Image: ©: ESA}

• Watch all videos at the YouTube Space Lab