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Skin-Tight Bodysuits Could Protect Astronauts From Bone Loss
jamie passes along a report about research from MIT's Man-Vehicle Laboratory into using "superhero-style" skinsuits to combat the effects of extended stays in microgravity on bone density in astronauts. (Abstract.) Quoting:
"Astronauts lose 1 to 2 percent of their bone mass for each month they spend in space. As far back as the Gemini missions, conditioning exercise regimes have been used to slow the rate of bone loss, but a 2001-2004 NASA-sponsored study showed that crew members aboard the International Space Station were still losing up to 2.7 percent of their interior bone material and 1.7 percent of outer hipbone material for each month they spent in space. ... With stirrups that loop around the feet, the elastic gravity skinsuit is purposely cut too short for the astronaut so that it stretches when put on — pulling the wearer's shoulders towards the feet. In normal gravity conditions on Earth, a human's legs bear more weight than the torso. Because the suit's legs stretch more than the torso section, the wearer's legs are subjected to a greater force — replicating gravity effects on Earth."
See? Seven of Nine's outfit was inspired by science after all.
Or does this sound like a bit of a stretch?
|Well then let's hope they start picking some sexier astronauts.
If we get hot female astronauts, skin tight bodysuits could protect from boner loss too.
thank you, thanks...I'll be here all week.
Zero gravity leather bondage is good for you!
Loss of Mojo
God is good all the time! -K
Star Trek has known this for years.
Its that bone loss in astronauts is usually caused by Predators and Aliens.
...valour?
It's always confirmation bias!
The article mentions wearing it in your sleep, but is that really necessary? I know I personally don't sleep standing up, so there's probably very little force-of-gravity effects on my legs.
It could be an issue if it's overly difficult to put on however, as that isn't mentioned.
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If it were rotating then we would lose a lot of the benefits of the experiments being done in space namely weightlessness. Also (from wikipedia) we don't know the long term effects of living in a centrifuge. Finally at a practical level the ISS isn't designed to be rotated, likely doesn't have the fuel to start the rotation and slow the rotation for the dockings and would introduce a whole new set of engineering problems.
If we get astronauts as sexy as 7/9 i'll be a happy camper.
Will we then get a Space Suit issue of Sport illustrated?
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
A for a traveling spaceship this could be useful. However, for the space station, most of the stuff we do is experiments in zero-gravity which couldn't be done if we're spinning it to simulate gravity.
fair enough if it wasn't designed for rotation, but there's no reason a ring couldn't be tacked on at a later date - probably when there's enough incentive to pay for the construction of one (it'd be quite expensive, not just for the rotating coupling with the rest of the station, but for the cost of 2 struts to connect the pods at the end of the arms to the hub, and the living quarter pods themselves. (I assume counter-rotating pods at the end of 2 arms would be a lot cheaper than a full ring)
Also you don't need to worry about docking - you dock at the centre that doesn't rotate.
No need to rotate the whole thing, just the non-lab areas.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
"Dude! What happened to your bones?"
'Lost them.'
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Well, you could have sections rotate and others remain relatively fixed. Kinda like a great, space-faring ferris wheel or carousel, there could be a center hub that is (effectively) weightless, and a larger outer living region that has artificial gravity...uh, I mean centrifugal/centripetal forces acting upon it.
My first thought is that this completely explains and legitimizes Col. Wilma Deering's wardrobe...
then I realized this also went for Cmdr. Rogers' and I threw up in my mouth a little.
The Digital Sorceress
Except instead of Rei or Asuka you get Buzz Aldrin... the future is a terrifying place children...
crazy dynamite monkey
See? Seven of Nine's outfit was inspired by science after all.
Yes, but it was inspired by reproductive science.
This has implications for exercise, no? Would you get stronger if you wear this all day, growing more bone and muscles than necessary?
The very important issue here is that while female astronauts are fit & clever, they're rarely hot. Most of them are in their late 30s / early 40s as they've spent 20+ years getting incredible credentials. The ones who have come from the military are somewhat butch, the civilians tend to be somewhat geeky. To wit -
http://www.google.ca/images?hl=en&source=imghp&biw=1424&bih=719&q=female+astronauts
Its funny that this type of thing has been in Sci-Fi movies and television shows for decades, and I am thinking that even the original Gemini suits were somewhat form-fitting, and yet we are just now starting to look at the possibility of using these for real
Suits + exercise should both be used. But if you look at the physiology of bone, it's easy to see why both won't be enough. Bone is continually being destroyed and rebuilt by your body. The proportion of destruction to construction is controlled by stress (ignoring hormones and blood chemistry for the moment).
Gravity puts stress on your bones even when you lay down. Even in water. Any bit of movement magnifies it. Exercise in space is meant to substitute for this continual stress, but can't provide for continual, low level stress. These suits provide continual, low level stress to the skeleton. But it's still not the same.
Low level plus high level stress work great together. This is why some schools encourage kids to jump up and down, hard, to strengthen bones by including some high stress each day. But exercise and suits in space won't provide the same level to the entire skeleton that even a few hops on Earth plus a day of video games will.
There is one more technology used on Earth to selectively strengthen bones. Maybe it can provide the final missing stress. It turns out sound waves stress bone too. Audible sound would be too loud. But ultrasound is commonly used to accelerate bone healing and strengthening. It's not inconceivable that the skin tight suit could incorporate PVDF sheets that could transmit ultrasound into an astronaut's bones, applying it to understressed areas. It could even work as a cap to reduce bone loss in the skull.
Or just build a big 'ol hamster wheel.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
No, F=kx (well for a spring) if you have a larger extension, you have a larger force. I assume they mean that the legs need to stretch more than the torso to fit in the human occupant, thereby giving a greater tension. The suit isn't deformed by a fixed force, but by a fixed extension to fit the person.
stupidity and bad engineering to create a long duration space station with no simply ring design for rotation and simulated gravity.
It's a not an easy thing to do. Particularly when viewed in terms of a man-rated piece of space habitat.
Adding a rotating ring/arm/etc presents multiple serious issues, among which are safety (many tons moving experiencing a sudden mechanical lock/freeze-up can tear things apart), engineering challenges both known and yet to be discovered that haven't been developed for as yet, and weight/lift abilities/costs as the structural beams and such strong enough to withstand the stresses they will encounter will have a good bit of mass, depending on the loads.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
So in the picture attached to the article, one of the guys is wearing a nearly transparent white suit. I am not sure which researcher though that making one of the prototypes be transparent was a good idea (probably one fantasizing about female astronauts), but I have ten bucks that says the guy modeling that particular outfit just wanted to get a near-nude picture of himself on the internet for shits and giggles.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
towards a sexy future!
velour excerpt: According to costumer designer William Blackburn, the uniforms on Star Trek: The Original Series were made of velour. They were always riding up on the actors, and what came to be known as "Command Gold" was originally "Command Green", but the green velour became varying shades of yellow and light greens under the studio lights.
Just for fun, I was surprised to see velour has been around for a while:
historyVelour was invented in 1844 in Lyons (France). The word "Velour" is derived from French which is a term for velvet.
Problem is, we're not really at that scale yet. Takes a pretty big station to achieve a reasonable gravity with spin.
Alright, the issue here is that if you don't make the ring fucking HUGE then you actually end up with the Coriolis effect causing extreme nausea and all the astronauts vomiting. So your "solution" would:
A) Cost a fuckload of money.
B) Be completely impractical to get into space and install
C) Not work anyway.
I find it funny that every Tom, Dick, and Harry without a high school education thinks that they're a brilliant engineer whenever they read about some problem that hundreds of experienced engineers couldn't solve. Seriously, take ten seconds and go google your idea BEFORE touting it as the magical solution that all of these foolish NASA engineers didn't think of.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
There is one somewhat related EVA suit, too: http://mvl.mit.edu/EVA/biosuit/index.html
The bottom line seems to be: since some...tissues can't really maintain shape when put under mechanical pressure (what those tight suits are about), this means big breasts seem to be destined to die out, confined to this planet.
Mwuahahaha.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Adding a rotating portion to the station would be introducing a gyroscope. Doing so would be problematic.
Take a bicycle wheel, spin it on its axis and then try to tilt it.
How much fuel are you willing to spend to keep the station oriented the right way?
How much mechanicals are you willing to spend money on to steer the solar panels if you aren't going to be using thrusters to orient the whole station?
How big is your budget? Funding isn't unlimited. You need to make choices. If you go with a rotating section, what are you going to eliminate elsewhere to compensate for the cost?
The only lack of thinking in this case is on your part.
--
BMO
If the force on their feet is greater than on their shoulders, the astronauts would accelerate "up". That's what happens on Earth, the ground is constantly accelerating us up because the space itself is being distorted by mass. But that's not the case with this suit. The author probably means that the pressure on their feet is higher than on their shoulders, ie., the "downward" force is applied over a bigger area.
Thus, NASA is one step closer to creating
Zero
Suit
Samus (!)
I mean, my GOD! Is this the best "scientists" can come up with? Is there no LONG TERM thinking anymore? ...
The effect of prolongued space travel (e.g., Mars and back) and the use of this new space suite will be that astronaughts WILL keep more of their bone mass HOWEVER, the Karenni people have taught us that clothing that pulls your shoulders down has a drastic side effect - long necks
Oh wait ... that's why the aliens in Close Encounter look that way. Never mind - press on.
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
... need to wear their underwear on the outside?
http://blogostuff.blogspot.com/
Skin-Tight Bodysuits Could Protect Astronauts From Bone Loss
"You're going out into space wearing that?!
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
So many science fiction stories have shown that one can simulate gravity with centrifugal force by rotating a craft/station. Why don't we do this with the international space station?
or should us "big boned" people just become astronauts?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
We can't afford to send much material up there, space stations have to be fairly small with sections having diameters of maybe 3-4 meters, you cannot make a centrifuge out of that.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
What happens if you stay in space a really long time? Do you just become a floating bag of boneless flesh? Why haven't we seen a dramatization of this, or did I miss something? I think it is a fascintating concept that the bones just disappear over time.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
> See? Seven of Nine's outfit was inspired by science after all.
That was a suit? I thought it was painted on?
Wonder if this suit could help osteoporosis sufferers?
Now their will be a legitimate reason for the Battlestar Galactica characters to where skin-tight uniforms in the new Syfy series. Tighten the suits and water down the writing. :( All in the quest to prevent bone density loss.
The publicity photo reminds me of Monty Python's Trim Jeans sketch, somehow.
I totally had this idea for a sci-fi story I was writing...I wasn't sure it was well-founded in science, it just seemed like a good idea. Turns out I rule.
Maybe the Minbari will help fund it.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
You've no understanding of history. Wizards come from out of the shadows all the time. You don't NEED a PHd to create magic. It just makes you look more publishable when you do have one.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I find it funny that every Tom, Dick, and Harry without a high school education thinks that they're a brilliant engineer whenever they read about some problem that hundreds of experienced engineers couldn't solve. Seriously, take ten seconds and go google your idea BEFORE touting it as the magical solution that all of these foolish NASA engineers didn't think of.
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
— Arthur C(harles) Clarke
"Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible. "
— Simon Newcomb
"Radio has no future."
- Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist.
"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming."
- Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer, 1926.
"Well informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value."
- Editorial in the Boston Post, 1865
"This `telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a practical form of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us. "
- Western Union internal memo, 1878
"What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice as fast as stagecoaches? "
- The Quarterly Review, England (March 1825)
"Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia."
- Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859)
"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value."
- Marshal Ferdinand Foch
"It is an idle dream to imagine that automobiles will take the place of railways in the long distance movement of passengers."
- American Railroad Congress, 1913
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home."
- Ken Olson, President of Digital Corporation, 1977
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
- Popular Mechanics, 1949
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
- Thomas J. Watson Snr., IBM Chairman, 1943
"There is no hope for the fanciful idea of reaching the Moon because of insurmountable barriers to escaping the Earth's gravity."
- Dr. Forest Ray Moulton, University of Chicago astronomer, 1932.
"Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is a ridiculous fiction."
- Pierre Pachet Professor Physiology, Toulouse, 1872
"‘With regard to the electric light, much has been said for and against it, but I think I may say without contradiction that when the Paris Exhibition closes, electric light will close with it, and no more will be heard of it.’"
- Erasmus Wilson Oxford University professor, 1878
"The so-called theories of Einstein are merely the ravings of a mind polluted with liberal, democratic nonsense which is utterly unacceptable to German men of science."
- Dr. Walter Gross, 1940
On Nuclear Power, "any one who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine... "
- Ernest Rutherford (1933)
"X-rays are a hoax. "
- Lord Kelvin, ca. 1900
One notes that after 1940, the real scientists disappear from your list, and you're left with literally the head of the Nazi eugenics program (btw, he had an MD, not a Ph.D. as you oh-so-subtly imply) and two businessmen who were of course speaking only about the current market. It is interesting...
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
(btw, he had an MD, not a Ph.D. as you oh-so-subtly imply)
So he had an MD, we can then assume he had made it through high school (which is what I was oh so subtly replying to)
One notes that after 1940, the real scientists disappear from your list,
The list is not mine, but stolen off the internet. However, it would only make sense as we get closer to the present there are fewer notable quotes as what "scientist" laugh at haven't been invented yet. But 100 years from now I'm sure we will have plenty of quotes from 1940 to present with "experts" telling us about the "impossible".
If a scientist was quoted today as saying, "We will never be able to create artificial gravity in space." Well, that wouldn't be on the list would it? Not until artificial gravity had been invented.
Look around for what "scientists" say are impossible today.
-Cold Fusion
-Anti-Gravity device
-Electronic Telepathy Device
-The Cloudbuster/Weather control
-A method for transmutation of elements
-System for sending power wirelessly
A lot of these sound like science fiction, much like a flying hunk of steel did 150 years ago. Or a human man walking on the moon. Fun to write about, but clearly impossible to the educated mind. A mind that could tell you 100 reasons why neither would not work and give some great laws and equations to back up their claims.
There are plenty of scientists that still scoff at the idea that sending power wirelessly will ever be "practical" or widely used. Yet small advances are made all the time. Just about every electronic retailer carries a "wireless" charging system today.
Anyone that has had a Sonicare Toothbrush knows that wireless charging using "wireless" inductive coupling has been around a long time now.
The Russian cosmonauts wore the TNK V-1, or "Penguin suit", which used elastic bands that would force the knees to bend up to the chest unless the wearer exerted force.
Let's look at your list.
"Cold Fusion" should be changed to "Cold Fusion the way Ponds and Fleischman" said it can happen.
Anti-gravity stands until we REALLY know how gravity works instead of just watching what it does. Trivial anti-gravity devices such as rope, elevators and helicopters etc are exempt.
As for electronic telepathy, once again WTF is telepathy? There is no answer right or wrong to examples of such a device and it could even be argued that we have such a thing now with radio, microphones and headphones since information gets from one brain to another with a bit of help from mouth, audio and radio.
Weather Control? I had the good fortune from when I was seven years old to go to a scout hall that had a "geiger vortex gun" cloud seeding device from the 1900s out the front, so I got an exposure to a silly example of psuedoscience bullshit at an early age. It's a very long running scam which is why it usually gets put on the "impossible" list. We don't yet know enough to make such a thing work but scammers getting money from the desperate have been pretending to do so for a very long time. Maybe it will happen some day, but for now it should just ring alarm bells and encourage people to take a close look at the scientific equivalent of the Nigerian spam scam before they lose their cash.
I don't understand why you have transmutation on that list. It happens in nature during radioactive decay, and if you look in the sky during the day you'll see an example of heavier elements being formed from light elements.
Wireless power - why is that on the list? Radio is an low wattage implementation of it and you can have a radio that works with nothing but what it picks up from it's antenna to drive a small speaker (1930's crystal radio). Your toothbrush charger is half of a transformer and Faraday would have be able to look at it and explain to you how it works in seconds - it's not the "wireless power" that is being dismissed as impractical by anyone just a transformer that has more losses with increasing distance.
Possible does not mean practical in all situations - Tesla's idea of setting up a current between a resonating earth and the newly discovered ionosphere had a few major practical problems but we only know that from hindsight. Being on the opposite side of the earth to such a generator would be shocking to say the least (arc from ionosphere to ground). The reason wireless power is on the list is every now and again somebody half understands very well known laws of physics, comes up with something completely wrong based on loophole that isn't there to think they can get far better transmission than we have, and then shouts it from the rooftops without checking first if reality agrees. It's also used in scams. The space elevator power transmission thing is a semi-scam that is amusing. You have theoretical material making up the beanstalk that is one of the best electrical conductors known and you make the elevator powered by a laser and photovoltaic? That's just a way to lose power and pretend you are making progress until the theoretical material for the beanstalk exists.
nobody said that using rotations to simulate gravity is impossible. It's just not practical today.
today, it's still simpler and cheaper to just put a spandex suit on a couple of astronauts rather than tackling the huge amount of engineering and incredible costs of building mega structures with gigantic rotating rings in space. Even if one day, probably this will be the best solution.
just as, in some point of time, cracking a match and lighting a candle was a much simple solution than tackling all the logistics of bringing electricity to every single home.
there's a slight difference between "one day that might turn out to be successful" and "in today's context, it's not worth pursuing. For now."
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Thank the heavens they've finally worked it all out, at last! Can you believe, all of this time, we actually thought skin already did that?
I didn't say that it was impossible to simulate gravity in space, moron.
I said that to make the idea work, the ring has to be HUGE. And that getting a HUGE ring into space is IMPRACTICAL.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Because the suit's legs stretch more than the torso section, the wearer's legs are subjected to a greater force — replicating gravity effects on Earth
This can only be true if the suit is split into two separate compartments of tension: feet to waist, and waist to shoulder.
This means that there will be an unbalanced force at around the waist, which will have to be counteracted by a very firm attachment to the waist so that the lower part of the suit does not slip down.
That, in turn, sounds very uncomfortable!
Imagine, say, wearing 100 pound pants with a belt tight enough so they don't slip (no use of suspenders: that would run the same 100 pound compression through your spine /and/ legs).
Also, is mere static compression really enough to prevent bone loss? I thought that bone responds to changing stresses. There is a theory that the piezo-electric effect is involved.
Placing the legs under a constant tension does not accurately simulate how they are actually loaded on earth: changing from sitting or lying to standing, shifting weight from one leg to the other during walking. and handling several times the body weight during activities like jumping and running.
Another thing: would stirrups be enough? You need density in the metatarsal bones of your feet, which are carrying your weight whenever you stand on your toes, which happens during walking, etc. What's the use of having good bone density in your femur and tibia, if you get a stress fracture in your foot.
Hmm ...
Extraordinary claims require extraordinarily credible citations.
You have demonstrated that you:
A) Do not know what you're talking about
B) Are unwilling to do even the most basic research.
Therefore, I will not waste my time responding to you in the future.
"Look around for what "scientists" say are impossible today.
-A method for transmutation of elements
-System for sending power wirelessly"
Absolutely incorrect. Transmutation of elements actually happens inside nuclear reactors and in nature during radioactive decay.
Transmitting power wirelessly is also done today. Radio, electric light, etc. are all applications of this. Electromagnetic induction was discovered one hell of a long time ago and has been used in many applications since.
No scientist today says that those things are impossible. You are either making shit up or you are not researching your argument. In either case, you should shut up.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
1 to 2 percent of their bone mass for each month they spend in space? then each year lost their interval 10 to 20 percent of their bone?