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SpinCam: High-Gravity (100G) Camera
An anonymous reader writes "Centrifuge-cameras began exploration of genetic changes at the extremes of high gravity-- in the only animal with a completely sequenced gene library. Students at Harvey Mudd designed the 100G camera, Stanford is doing the gene array and NASA is spinning the 1 millimeter worms that are the model system for how to adapt and survive 100-times your terrestrial weight. Accelerated aging and slowed DNA repair are just two biological consequences of gravity changes. The Japanese (NASDA) are building the space station centrifuge for 2006. What other garden-variety objects can be photographed in that kind of ultra-spindryer?"
From the same article: C. elegans is currently the only animal with a fully-sequenced genome, and DNA microarrays are available that contain nearly every one of the 19,000 genes in the C. elegans genome. Those microarrays don't contain the human genome, and the human genome has great uncertainties and gaps.
Well, actually,if you read the details, the worms do survive the spin. They don't have any bones to break and their structure is simple enough that it adapts to being squished.
It also occurs to me that if one was drowning, yelling "Help! I'm drowning and I lost my bikini top" would probably be m
sorry, that was my first post, and it doesn't seem to be making those into links...
http://www.hmc.edu
http://www.eng.hmc.edu (Engineering Department)