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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.
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.