Stimulating Bone Growth In Astronauts

Anonymous Coward writes: "This story will be very interesting for women and space geeks. A State University of New York at Stonybrook researcher has invented a machine that stimulates bone growth in subjects by just having them stand on a vibrating platform. A sheep using the gizmo 20 minutes a day had 20% denser bones after only a year. The idea was to help post-menopausal women, but now it might be used to strengthen astronauts' bones before and during flights. As you know, bones in zero gravity tend to get weaker and more brittle. The weird part is how the device works. Muscle builds by responding to damage, but that's apparently not how bone gets stimulated into growing. It seems that muscle contractions occur within frequencies of 20-50Hz and bones "hear" that oscillation as a message to build up. According to the article, the platform mimics that signal by vibrating undetectably within those frequencies. Cool, huh? Here's the story."

Comments

Re:This is just going to increase the world's pop.

[BeanThere]

You'd swear those seats were designed to hold munchkins

Its not just the seats, its everything. You get a tiny meal on a tiny plate which you have to eat with tiny knives and forks. You get drinks in tiny little cups, and Coke from tiny cans.

I can't help but get the feeling that if one ever gets to take a tour of Boeing's engineering department, you'll find hundreds of really small engineers toiling away to build better planes for people, all seemingly unaware that real people are much bigger.

20Hz-50Hz?

[bpd1069]

Hmmm... so that means if I strap a subwoofer to my ass my bones will get stronger?