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NASA Offers $5000 a Month For You to Lie in Bed
tracer818 writes "In order to study a person as if they were in space without gravity, NASA scientists are paying subjects $17,000 to stay in bed for 90 straight days. The study will follow the Bed Rest Project standard model and be conducted at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. Participants will live in a special research unit for the entire study and be fed a carefully controlled diet."
Can I bring a friend? In all seriousness, what if you need to rub one out?
I lie in bed all the time:
"Yes, I love you"
"Yes, it was good"
"No, I was not thinking about _her_"
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Is there a retroactive program?
Is it just me or did anyone else imagine a test subject waking up one day to see a big black monolith standing at the foot of his bed?
Things to do today:
Find out if NASA will let me have a laptop in that bed.
Find out if my boss will let me telecommute for the next 90 days.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
Will they also pay to rehabilitate you and your degenerated muscles afterwards?
Look, you know and I know that NASA has probably got better things to do than pay some labrats to learn how to eat, piss, and shit sitting down. The effects are, as you say, well known and obvious to anyone who has ever studied space travel and microgravity environments. Muscular atrophy, loss of balance, and other problems are well known.
But the department needs to spend its budget or else face cuts next year. With Obama already looking for ways to divert NASA funds into edumacation, the need is dire and if NASA engineers and scientists can't be busy, at least they can look busy.
I get paid a lot of money to do what I do. But sometimes I just sit around and stare at the monitor and space out. In order to not look like I'm wasting time, I run a Perl script in a command window that prints the text of random files on the filesystem until I stop it. It makes me look like I'm waiting for a compile to finish, and that's enough to keep me in the green.
You can lie all you want, I'm pretty sure Rosey knows you're seeing other hands.
Actually, on a more serious note, I saw something like this on Discovery (or NatGeo, I can't remember). The purpose of the study wasn't just to observe patients suffering from bed sores and blood clots. They were subjected to 2 minute exercise regimens every day which were designed to keep them in good physical health even though the rest of the day they were bedridden. The goal was to create exercise devices that could be used quickly and simply without the need for gravity that would provide enough exercise to replace the amount we normally perform here on Earth.
It looked pretty grueling, even if only for 2 minutes a day.
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