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from the the-final-frontier-is-dangerous dept.
Cristoforetti, of the European Space Agency (ESA), was scanned prior to her trip to the International Space Station (ISS) in November 2014. When Cristoforetti landed back on Earth on June 11 this year, her 199-day mission meant she became a new record-holder for the single longest spaceflight by a woman, eclipsing NASA's Sunita William's 195-day flight in 2006-2007. Cristoforetti's skin cells were subsequently re-scanned by Koenig, who explained how on the ISS skin physiology is different, leading to some surprising results.
"So far we've got interesting results from three astronauts. It seems that there is a strong production of collagen; so suddenly these astronauts have more collagen. It means there is some sort of anti-ageing effect, at least in the dermis - the lower part of the skin. And we found that the epidermis, in particular the part of the living cells, that this epidermis is shrinking, so the skin gets thinner," Koenig said.
Bone de-calcification? Check. Cancer from space radiation? Check. Thinner skin? Check. Perhaps we ought to go with exploration via telepresence robots for the time being?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2015, @12:03PM
Telepresence robots may be acceptable in low earth orbit, but for anything further out, I don't think this would work out well. Remember, signals are going with the speed of light. For the moon, that already means one second before you get the sensory information, and one further second before your reaction reaches the robot. So unless your telepresence robot is moved in extremely slow motion (which also will be very stressing to the people doing it), expect many accidents due to too long reaction time. Now imagine how telepresence would "work" on Mars.
No, any robots we send away from earth must be mostly autonomous, at least for the basic functionality.
On the other hand, if there's really an anti-ageing effect on the skin, I can see a bright future for space tourism. ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2015, @12:11PM
I remember playing Unreal Tournament on 56k.
Trust me, NASA can find people that will be happy to deal with controlling a space robot with lag.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Wednesday July 22 2015, @12:55PM
Oh yeah! One our our clan members got so used to the lag, he became much worse, when he finally switched to ISDN and then to DSL.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday July 22 2015, @03:27PM
Hell I do that right now, I play War Thunder (anybody else here play?) and when there is little activity on the US servers I go to the EU and RU servers and you quickly learn how much lead time you have to add to your shots to compensate for the lag. On my 1080P monitor I find its about half an inch ahead of where I want to land for the EU servers, a hair over an inch for the RU, with that adjustment I have dropped a Panzer IV running across the map full bore from nearly a Km away. In a way with the lag it feels a lot more like archery because of the hang time you have with the shell before it reaches its target.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday July 22 2015, @01:24PM
expect many accidents due to too long reaction time
But also expect it not to be as bad as you expect.
The human brain is remarkably adept at compensating for delays, so much so that you can do the following trick:
Rig up a button and a light, so the light lights up when the button is pushed. Have human push button repeatedly. Introduce, and increase a delay between button push and light. The brain will compensate (up to a point) so that the person thinks both things are still happening at the same time.
Suddenly remove the delay, and the next time the subject pushes the button, they will swear the light came on before they pushed.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk