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Spinal Fluid Changes In Space May Impair Astronauts' Vision, Study Finds (sciencealert.com)
A condition called visual impairment inter cranial pressure syndrome (VIIP) that has been impairing astronauts' vision on the International Space Station is believed to be caused by a build up of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in their brains. The long-duration astronauts had significantly more CSF in their brains than the short-trip astronauts. Previously, NASA suspected that the condition was caused by the lack of gravity in space. Science Alert reports: The researchers compared before and after brain scans from seven astronauts who had spent many months in the ISS, and compared them to nine astronauts who had just made short trips to and from the U.S. space shuttle, which was decommissioned in 2011. The one big difference between the two was that the long-duration astronauts had significantly more cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in their brains than the short-trip astronauts, and the researchers say this - not vascular fluid - is the cause of the vision loss. Under normal circumstances, CSF is important for cushioning the brain and spinal cord, while also distributing nutrients around the body and helping to remove waste. It can easily adjust to changes in pressure that our bodies experience when transitioning from lying down to sitting or standing, but in the constant microgravity of space, it starts to falter. "On earth, the CSF system is built to accommodate these pressure changes, but in space the system is confused by the lack of the posture-related pressure changes," says one of the team, Noam Alperin. Based on the high-resolution orbit and brain MRI scans taken of their 16 astronauts, the team found that the long-duration astronauts had far higher orbital CSF volume - CSF pooling around the optic nerves in the part of the skull that holds the eye. They also had significantly higher ventricular CSF volume, which means they had more CSF accumulating in the cavities of the brain where the fluid is produced.
Facepalming for a few minutes per day will solve this.
This seems like very good news, to me. They can now finally try methods that address the source of the problem (posture-related pressure changes), just like they do for microgravity bone loss.
Musky will invent artificial gravity, that's why he's worth billions, because Musky is a superdupergenius.
In space, no one can hear you scream, no one can see you scream.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
United NEGROE college fund.
Wow. You sure showed those stupid Space Nutters. KO'ed them on the first round. You're awesome, man, just so brilliant! I masturbate to each and everyone of your posts, it's better than the usual german scat porn I used to be addicted to.
What if I made a WHITE college fund. All the embearded lefties would be going ballistic. But it's OK to make a BLACK college fund.
Explain --
I'd be interested in seeing the results of saturation divers vs recreational divers.
https://theophthalmologist.com...
https://theophthalmologist.com...
https://theophthalmologist.com...
Ooooh another beautiful anti-Space Nutter post! Christmas came early (and I did too)!
So the next interesting question is how much gravity (artificial or real) would be required to mitigate this problem? At what percentage of 1g does the problem dissipate?
I'm also wondering when we are going to get a space station or other craft into space which has a rotating cylinder that can provide artificial gravity. We need to know that the effects of long term exposure to microgravity is but we also should be working on technology to provide artificial gravity for long duration space travel since we know our bodies don't do well without gravity. This should be well within our capability to achieve and is one of the necessary technologies we would need to develop for serious manned exploration of space.
Poor Space Nutters can't face the fact they won't be living on a Mars Utopia and are stuck here with the rest of us commoners.
Who peed in your cereal? Every time there is a space discussion I see you making idiotic trolls calling anyone who shows the least enthusiasm for manned space flight "space nutters". If you don't like talking about it then go away and find some discussion that does interest you. You're a cynic about space travel. We get it. Move on. You aren't adding any insight to the discussion and your trolls are vacuous and unconvincing.
Humans didn't evolve in zero gravity.
Tough, but true.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Why don't they just change the astronauts' fluids before the mission instead.
Only dumb birds land downwind.
Your CSF is hugely important in maintaining overall health.
Impacting it in any way usually leads to pretty horrible health outcomes in the short- and long-term.
This is also why sedentary lifestyles are hugely damaging to the mind and body, the CSFs activity is a mechanistic one. It is tied to physical activity.
Equally, lack of sleep preventing the clearing of waste from the CSF during those long-phases at night. This is why polyphasic sleep is stupid, humans at most can manage bi- or tri-phasic sleep, more is hugely detrimental. It should only ever be done in extreme situations where life depends on it.
The slowdown of movement of CSF leads to all kinds of gunk sitting around in the brain, considerably increasing the chance of neural fuck-ups like plaque formation, over-exposure to certain transmitters leading to all kinds of mental illness and, as we can now see in this case, even full-on sensory impairments
We seriously need to take artificial gravity more seriously if we ever want to get anywhere in space.
We already know the physics and biology behind it. We know how to make a capsule that is large enough to prevent the rotational nausea issues. There's even an equation for the size requirements. (some triple digit number I forgot, in meters)
But more and more, space research budgets are being cut around the world. It's fucking depressing.
Instead, we get MORE GUNS, WAR, ROOTY TOOTY POINT AND SHOOTY.
Why not get a stable space society going so we can have epic space battles instead? Don't you want to be a space commander, warmongers? God damn it, let me be a space pirate!
It's "intracranial" not "inter cranial" for those who need to Google it.
What if you could just edit out that deficiency?
Lot of issues there. First is the assumption that it is a "deficiency". It's not clear that such a term is appropriate. Second, there are a HUGE number of ethical issues to sort through when we are talking about altering the human genome. It's not that it's immoral per se but it has the potential to become so if we aren't careful. Third, is that it is unclear at present if such an edit to the genome is possible, practical, or even desirable. It's also unclear what second and third order effects might result. Few medical treatments come with no side effects.
The biggest difference is that artificial gravity carries no ethical baggage with it and there is in all likelihood far less risk. It's not likely to be as simple as changing one gene to fix a very particular problem with no side effects. We evolved in a particular way and actions that tinker with that finely tuned system rarely come without complications or difficulties.
...to confirm that long term space travel will require artificial gravity of some sort. Fair enough, it should hardly come as a surprise that if you send a bunch of premium monkeys evolved for life deep down in a gravity well into long term zero G, Trouble Will Ensue.
But we have at least one seemingly workable idea of how to do this, so this is not a deal breaker to interplanetary travel. Rotating spaceships of some sort (cylinders, wheel-type habitats) don't require much in terms of science fiction to pull off, and should cover this problem nicely.
It does seem, though, that no one has any even medium term plans to pull anything of the sort off. At least I haven't seen any concrete plans to build any rotating space stations - all I ever came across were hypothetical studies of some sort. But my guess is that this is only because the ISS was already gigantically expensive, and is not used all that intensively. So successor space stations are a long way out anyway. And the non-rotating design of the ISS allowed for incremental construction. There do not seem to be any big drawbacks to a rotating station in principle, right?
It does seem, though, that no one has any even medium term plans to pull anything of the sort off.
I think the reasons for that are almost entirely economic in origin. Technologically it doesn't seem to be a terrible difficult problem. But currently getting the materials into space to work on the problem is tremendously expensive at present. The ISS cost about $150Billion to build. To put that in perspective the GDP of Iraq is $156Billion in 2016 dollars and Iraq has the 56th largest economy in the world. Making a rotating version of the ISS would undoubtedly be even more expensive with current technology.
There do not seem to be any big drawbacks to a rotating station in principle, right?
Technologically none that I'm aware of. Economically there are some showstoppers currently.
We have the technology to do this, but there are a couple problems. For one, rotational force is still not the same thing as gravity and still may not address this or other medical issues. But the real problem is that to get an acceptable head-to-foot gravitational differential you need a fairly large spacecraft, well outside the range of what we can actually launch. Having to do multiple launches and space-based assembly is going to push your costs into the tens-of-billions range no matter what you're building, and you may note that the world's space agencies already have such a project on their hands. You're right, this is within our capability to achieve, but no one is interested in paying for it.
This is why I hate Space Nutters: they talk like gene editing is even a potential solution. It isn't.
This is why you shouldn't talk out your ass about things you clearly don't understand. Seriously. You have no idea what you are talking about. Your "space nutter" trolling is both wrong and tiresome.
There is no such thing as gene editing
Curious because my wife who is an MD just attended a conference were they discussed existing technology for gene editing. It's real, available today, and you have no idea what you are talking about.
You guys are anti-science and ignorant.
is this some sort of George Orwell doublespeak? You spout off ignorant and demonstrably wrong statements about science and then claim everyone who doesn't go along with your idiocy is "anti-science and ignorant". Go away troll.
So ... have we tried a power-chair in space, where the astronauts are jolted about in different directions to promote the movement of the humours? "Be back in 10 martha, going to go for a quick space-walk around the station in my powersuit to get the juices flowing."
To put that perspective in perspective, the Iraq war cost $1.7 trillion -- an order of magnitude more than the ISS, so probably enough to try a lot of interesting designs.
Good luck getting Congress to pony up $1.7trillion for anything science related unless it directly involves killing foreigners, particularly those with brown skin. Especially a republican controlled congress.
Or is there another solution? I'm certainly not anything close to an expert in this field, but maybe there's a biological or chemical solution rather than a physics solution.
Nothing that we know how to do at this time. There may be medical treatments possible some day but we're still at the stage where we are figuring out the physiology of what is happening. Developing a treatment from that data is going to take quite a long time given the expense and limited number of subjects available to study.
I don't think we actually have a realistic way of generating artificial gravity. Right now the closest thing is to use centrifugal force by spinning a spacecraft,
That IS what we are talking about when we discuss "artificial gravity" in terms of current technology. Simulated gravity would be a better term. But there are other potential technologies if you want to get a little more exotic.
which we haven't actually done and apparently would require a much larger spacecraft as well as extra fuel to spin up and then adjust the spin over time.
We absolutely HAVE rotated spacecraft to simulate gravity. We just haven't figured out how to do it very well.
Which implies that they no longer think it's caused by lack of gravity. Apparently it's a subtle difference, but they seem to think it's due to microgravity in space and how it behaves, rather than the lack of gravity.
I think that is just a bad summary. There is little practical difference between free falling and being in a space with no gravity. If I put you in a box you would have no way to tell the difference and the effects on your body would be identical.
I'm not a cynic. I'm a realist
No, you are a troll and not a very good one either.
I like talking about it. Don't tell me what I should discuss.
So you admit you are trolling. You certainly aren't "discussing" anything. You are just calling people "space nutters". That makes you an ass. Or if by some chance you actually believe the nonsense you are spouting it means you are an idiot AND an ass.
Other than the fact that they are science fiction?
Thirty years ago smart phones as we know them today were science fiction. 100 years ago space travel was science fiction. Just because we haven't done something yet doesn't mean it cannot be done. The barriers to building a rotating space stations are primarily economic. We largely already possess the technology to build one. We just haven't gone to the trouble because it makes sense to reduce cost to orbit (by a lot) first. A rotating space station would probably have to be quite robust and heavy (due to the fast rotation) and cost to orbit is rather high currently. We'll probably get to the rotating space craft in a few decades. I'd be surprised to see anything substantial before 2040 at the earliest and I think that is very optimistic.
There is a reason you don't see large rotating space stations or people on other planets.
Of course there are reasons you twit. Stop wasting everyone's time pointing out the obvious.
The transit time to Mars is less than the time numerous astronauts have spent on the ISS, so it's not really a relevant problem to interplanetary travel.
It's a VERY relevant problem. Remember that the astronauts have to be able to function once they reach Mars and so far we really aren't sure they would be up to the task. Physically they are kind of a wreck when they have to deal with gravity after that long without it even with exercising vigorously.
Especially since it's not fatal, like some of the other problems are.
Astronauts that come back to Earth after a 6 month journey in space are nearly unable to function unassisted for a significant period after re-entering the gravity well. I've listened to astronauts describe what it's like and it sounds very unpleasant. They feel absolutely terrible for quite a few days after landing and their body takes months to fully recover.
The physical effects of microgravity might not be the biggest problem but it is a serious one if you want to get a functioning person to actually do useful things on another planet and get them back alive.
In astronauts the term is actually cerebrospacial fluid (CSF). Everything to do with astronauts must have the word space in it, and space makes all things better!
Space pens? Better than regular pens.
Space ice cream? Better than regular ice cream.
Cerebrospacial fluid? Better than cerebrospinal fluid.
It's a fact!
Rotational force not the same as gravity? Sort of. If the scale is sufficient, and you are not accelerating perpendicular to the "ground" then it's close enough. While there will always be a slight difference between the force at your head and your feet, a big enough toroid for example can make this small enough to ignore.
Good points. But, hey, 150B USD have been spent on the pretty much pointless ISS. Surely humanity can afford another 50B or 100B or so to keep the handful of inhabitants healthier. I'm not against man in space BTW, but I think the Skylab approach of a lab that was staffed for a few months every now and then to perform experiments that actually had some merit would be a lot more cost effective.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
There are bigger challenges to overcome in space than enthusiasts acknowledge, but you seem to be going beyond that to what exactly?
Black Privilege.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6AcLgF9LX0
I think this basically means that some nerves are trying to detect pressure from the weight of body compressing them but failing.
If so, all we need will be shoes and bands with rubber bumps to push nerves and make them think that there is gravity.
Astronauts can take them off during time of sleep or relaxation (such as eating).