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?"

Comments

Re:"accelerated aging"

[tid242]

A lot of the science fiction stories i read speak of living longer in zero/low g, since obviously theres less strain on most of the systems of the body.

i was sort of wondering about this as well, from the article ilnked to in the post on astrobio.net (link) it stated the following: Astronauts can suffer from motion sickness, bone loss, muscle degeneration (atrophy) and blood vessel problems during weightlessness.

so apparently the sci.fi is er. sci.fi... :) although if i remember correctly JR Hadden from "Contact" the movie based upon Sagan's book had said that the 0 gravity slowed his cancer, which probably has some biological merit if it were actually in the book (instead of just the movie), which it probably was as Sagan worked very closely with the screen writers et al. (i personally haven't read the book, but believe the movie was one of the last things Sagan took part in, and unfortunately he was unable to see the movie as he died of cancer shortly before its debut...). hmmm... offtopic, but yea, :)

to the best of my [limited] knowledge anyway, please correct me if i'm wrong.

-tid242