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Astronauts' Skin Gets Thinner In Space, Scientists Say
An anonymous reader writes: Living in space can be hard on the human body. Muscles atrophy, bones lose density and new research suggests that spending time in space can make your skin thinner. Professor Karsten Koenig from the Department of Biophotonics and Laser Technology at Saarland University, has used high-resolution skin imaging tomography to look into the skin cells of several astronauts before and after a trip into space. "NASA and ESA came to us and asked, 'is it possible to also look in the skin of astronauts? Because we want to know if there's any ageing process going on or what kind of modifications happened to astronauts as they work for six months out in space.' Because many astronauts complain about skin problems," he said.
Should send all thick skinned people to space.
Bone & muscle density loss, circulation problems, and some yet undiscovered detrimental effects are all strong arguments for three things:
expand space exploration programs by artificial intelligence, continued extended human weightlessness studies, and experimentation with artificial gravity via a centrifuge system.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I wonder why this would be, though. We haven't sent people into space for long duration with gravity, so there is nothing to test against.
Perhaps it is not space at all, but constant exposure to an artificial atmosphere.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
In the movie The Matrix, people who died in the perceived reality died "in real life" even though their bodies had no physical trauma. "The body cannot live without the mind." was the explanation for this given in the movie.
I really wonder if the brain could live without the body. It seems to me this is far more difficult than simply keeping a person healthy without gravity: the body provides the brain with nutrition, sensory input, oxygen and CO2 removal, chemical input like hormones, etc., removal of wastes, fine temperature control, osmotic balance, and probably a lot more I have not mentioned. It seems easier to me to supply a body with gravity in space than to supply a brain with all of that.
Oh, and the brain would still need to be pressurized in space, as well as all the fluid input, so it's not clear you'd save a lot on cabin pressure.
Best,
--PeterM
I don't think that's a very good idea. If Slashdotters already have thin skin, in space, we will end up with no skin at all. Then we would look very creepy.
But then again, we probably look very creepy to with skin anyway.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I got to hear a lecture from Jerry Lettivin at MIT about physiology changes in space. Now, Jerry was frighteningly brilliant. An MD specializing in neurophysiology, he was also a professor of elecitrical engneering at MIT, and his course on "General Physiology" was a treat of some of the weirdest lectures, dirty stories, and adventures of human behavior and biology one could imagine. He also put the first individual electrodes on neurons and decoded a lot of how animal retinas detect edges and colors, by activation and suppression of surrounding nerve cells. *Amazing* stuff.
Jerry explained that the first female astronaut, a Soviet, had nearly died from the menstrual bleeding on landing. According to him, it wasn't much discussed, but one of the basic safety measures for female astronauts after that was that they'd all had hysterectomies. I'm not sure if this is still true: even The Straight Dope doesn't explore the issue in much depth, decades later, it just handwaves and says "NASA says there are lots of sanitary products available!". There are more than enough candidates for female astronauts that an undermentioned bias could easily be applied and still yield plenty of candidates, it's surprisingly common surgery.
But other problems abound what role does gravity have in fetal development? Is it critical to the formation of a notochord, or later a spine, and the array of organs inside the rib cage? Or would the fetus remain an undifferentiated and unviable mass of cells? There had been no attempts to ensure that animals flown for space experiments were infertile, but there's another problem. Many mammal testes dangle and are cooled, in zero gee they tend to retract, or at least fail to dangle. So the sperm are too warm and their fertility very low: it's why an old, somewhat effective form of birth control was a long, hot bath for men just before sex.
So when Jerry asked "How do you cool the rat testicles?", my shouted answer was:
"Ice!"
You could *see* every boy in class whince, and some of them turned quite alarming colors as they conjured mental images of rats wearing ice filled jock straps trying to fertilize the females as the image sank in.
The laughing grin of the middle aged, strikingly tall and attractive woman sitting nearby gratified me especially, I had no idea who she was and had meant to find out. Then I found out she was Jerry's wife. I became concerned I might have offended the spouse of a professor whose grade I needed. When Jerry mentioned in one of his lectures that she was Maggie of the "Maggie and the Beautiful Machine" exercise show, on Boston television before aerobics existed, and that Jerry had met her in Chicago in a strip club he frequented during medical school, I just gave up on ever being that cool and surrendered to being completely outclassed by the guy, and resolved to just enjoy life as it happens.
And brother, the 30 years since then have been one *hell* of a ride! I might drop another story here now and then, they've been fun.
Astronaut 1: could you hand me that fetzer valve?
Astronaut 2: FUCK YOU!
(yes, I know a lot about space travel. Tang. There is that. Also, robots.)
The size is a factor of amount of gravity, not size of sample. In order for something smaller to produce 1G, it would have to be spinning quite fast.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?