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posted by martyb on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-stay-horizontal-and-wear-tight-spandex dept.

New research brings more bad news to astronauts thinking about long-haul space flights as spinal muscles shrink after months in space, scientists have found.

Floating around in space in an environment with little or no gravity is not good for the human body. Along with decreased bone density, nausea, a puffy face, possible cognitive deterioration, an astronaut's back starts to weaken too.

The research is part of NASA's wider project to study the physical effects space has on the body to prepare for long-haul flights to Mars.

Results from the NASA-funded research have been published in Spine, and show spinal damage persists months after the astronauts return to Earth.

Six NASA crew members were subjected to MRI scans before and after spending four to seven months floating around the microgravity conditions of the International Space Station.

NASA should send the astronauts into space with one of those inversion tables so they can hang upside down.


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  • (Score: 2) by Dunbal on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:17PM

    by Dunbal (3515) on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:17PM (#419569)

    Nasa refuses to consider implementing pseudo-gravity by having a rotating crew section.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:27PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:27PM (#419574) Journal

      They've had people on the ISS for up to a year and they're not completely fucked. We can just focus on getting to Mars faster with better propulsion.

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:28PM

      by wonkey_monkey (279) on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:28PM (#419575) Homepage

      Probably because it's a bit more complicated than you blithely assume it'll be.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk
      • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:49PM

        by bob_super (1357) on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:49PM (#419585)

        It's easy to do on the lunar sound stage ... Oh wait no, it's easy to do because the Earth is flat and space is a hoax... Dang, wrong one again!

        Should I go over keeping panels facing the sun on a completely rotating craft, or keeping seals vacuum-tight on a partially rotating craft?

        • (Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Thursday October 27 2016, @10:40PM

          by dyingtolive (952) on Thursday October 27 2016, @10:40PM (#419599)

          It's easy, line the entire thing with panels and then you just need to keep enough pressure in the cabin to counteract the loss through the seals. An infinitely large tank of compressed air should do the trick. Man, those eggheads at NASA make this seem SOOOO hard. Sheesh.

          --
          Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
        • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Dunbal on Thursday October 27 2016, @11:11PM

          by Dunbal (3515) on Thursday October 27 2016, @11:11PM (#419608)

          or keeping seals vacuum-tight on a partially rotating craft?

          If they can keep the propeller shaft seals on a submarine leak proof at 33 atmospheres, one atmosphere shouldn't be too hard to manage. I'm not saying it's easy. But the engineering is not impossible. As for the solar panels that's trivial - you have them on the non rotating section.

          • (Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday October 27 2016, @11:45PM

            by edIII (791) on Thursday October 27 2016, @11:45PM (#419627)

            I came here to say much the same thing. It's by no means a technically challenging project to create a crew habit with rotation. It's literally in nearly every single space movie simply because it's so logical to provide. I'm sure we originally got the idea from NASA. Your point is pretty good because in space it is less difficult to maintain an atmosphere than slightly above crush depth above the Laurentian Abyss.

            I'm surprised that they haven't tested that, and I was curious if there would be a difference between gravity provided that way, and gravity provided on Earth. The only difference I can imagine is the "gradient" between sections and from your feet to your head, but I imagine that represents a trivial amount of time per day.

            This isn't a small issue. If we send a thousand colonists to Mars without figuring this out, we're basically shipping a bunch of worker's compensation cases waiting to happen once they hit gravity and have to work.

            --
            Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
            • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Dunbal on Friday October 28 2016, @12:12AM

              by Dunbal (3515) on Friday October 28 2016, @12:12AM (#419644)

              And the best bit is you probably don't need the full 9.8ms^-2 to lose most of the harmful effects of zero G.

              • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday October 28 2016, @08:11AM

                by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Friday October 28 2016, @08:11AM (#419767) Homepage Journal

                And the best bit is you probably don't need the full 9.8ms^-2 to lose most of the harmful effects of zero G.

                An excellent point. Given that Mars gravity is ~0.4G (3.711 m/s2), probably something like 0.5 or 0.6G would be sufficient.

                This would be important even if there weren't physiological issues to deal with, since humans will need to move around with significant extra mass (P-suits, carrying instruments, perhaps even some construction) on them.

                In fact, even with 0.5 or 0.6G on the spacecraft, you'll probably want these folks doing exercise in a centrifuge as well, to maintain (or at least try to minimize loss of) muscle mass. This would probably be useful *on* Mars too.

                --
                No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @06:04PM

                  by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @06:04PM (#419906)

                  An excellent point. Given that Mars gravity is ~0.4G (3.711 m/s2), probably something like 0.5 or 0.6G would be sufficient.

                  Citation please? Any actual scientific evidence or studies showing that 0.6G would be sufficient? And what would the definition of "sufficient" be? e.g. normal healthy individuals could live indefinitely in that g and also return to Earth G without too much problems and recover to full after a month?

                  The last I checked this was cancelled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifuge_Accommodations_Module [wikipedia.org]

                  So there's probably not much science being done in that area.

            • (Score: 3, Insightful) by VanderDecken on Friday October 28 2016, @12:31AM

              by VanderDecken (5216) on Friday October 28 2016, @12:31AM (#419658)

              And here I thought it was in every space movie because the actors are easier to film that way

              --
              The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
              • (Score: 2) by edIII on Friday October 28 2016, @06:51PM

                by edIII (791) on Friday October 28 2016, @06:51PM (#419918)

                I thought it was because it was the only technically reasonable method (currently) to establish gravity in outer space, which is quite helpful to us. Yes, it does make it easier to film since we don't have Hollywood studios in orbit.

                You could just 'Star Trek' it and vaguely refer to the "gravity generators", but when kids are taught in school that you can simulate gravity with rotation, it becomes pretty obvious to put that in a movie... where you're trying to simulate gravity for the crew. It's fairly non-obvious that we have difficulty creating rotating crew habitats, although have we even tried?

                It's logical with strong scientific support, that's why I would think it would be in a movie. Otherwise animate it and refer to it as magic with elves in space :)

                --
                Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
            • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Friday October 28 2016, @01:20AM

              by bob_super (1357) on Friday October 28 2016, @01:20AM (#419678)

              There are the small issues of significantly accelerating the whole structure towards its destination, and negatively accelerating it when you get there, which interfere with building laterally. Solvable, but expensive.
              There is also the issue of a submerged submarine being exposed to temperatures varying from about 0C to at most 30C, which makes the mechanical engineering of moving parts a lot more trivial than space temperature variations.

              If engineers with a big budget haven't yet done something that seems obvious to you, it's highly likely that you don't know all the consequences as well as they do.

            • (Score: 2) by dry on Friday October 28 2016, @05:10AM

              by dry (223) on Friday October 28 2016, @05:10AM (#419735) Journal

              It's not really gravity though on a large enough scale it is pretty hard to tell the difference. The problem is that it won't be on that large of a scale. It has to be large enough that your head and feet (when standing) are moving about the same speed, otherwise you'll sense the difference, which leads to motion sickness and your body may just not respond correctly. As a worst case imagine a 12 foot spinning sphere. Your head would be in zero gravity and your feet at 1g.
              Not sure how large it should be and it is shame that they aren't taking advantage of the space station to do some experiments. Also be nice to know how little gravity it takes to stay relatively healthy.
              Walking even could be weird, especially when turning at a right angle. Drop something and it'll fall in an arc.
              One thought is to have 2 capsules tethered together (actually even better, tethered to the main rocket so the tethers would be half as long) and spin them. The longer the tether, the better, as long as the tether is strong enough.
              Other advantages could be having a spare spacecraft with you. One occupied and one full of supplies or both occupied, but only by half the possible crew. Things would have to kept in balance as well, easier with a central structure as one of the tethers could be shortened/lengthened.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @07:27AM

                by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @07:27AM (#419760)

                Not sure how large it should be and it is shame that they aren't taking advantage of the space station to do some experiments.

                If I recall, the last discussion on the subject came to the conclusion that the size necessary was somewhere between half a mile and a mile.

                Easy[1] solution: Launch three aircraft carriers, weld them together end to end, and set the whole thing in motion. Then only use the tiny portions at the ends, rather than the entire length of the resulting structure.

                [1] Calibrate sarcasm detector here.

          • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday October 28 2016, @05:56AM

            by mhajicek (51) on Friday October 28 2016, @05:56AM (#419744)

            Indeed. See "Smarter Every Day: Seven Holes In The International Space Station".

            --
            The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @10:23AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @10:23AM (#419785)

            If you're on a multi-month trip to mars, just rotate the whole damn craft.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @11:17AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @11:17AM (#419794)

            Shaft seals are completely different from a rotating crew compartment. How many wires and tubes are connected between the rotating section and the non-rotating section? The submarine would have few if any. A space station would need a lot going through that rotating connection. We can do that, but it isn't trivial. Even getting the extra components needed for that into space isn't trivial. The medical insurance is likely far less costly that the extra engineering and transport costs to get a rotating section and besides, we didn't even know of the medical need until recently.

            Second, 33 atmospheres is completely different from 0 atmospheres from an engineering perspectives. At 33 there's tons of pressure pushing in on the craft. That pressure will help seal any leaks in the frame. The pressure is helping you right up until it crushes you. With an outside pressure of 0, any leaks will be increased as the outward pressures forces them open even more. When you're inside a circle/dome/sphere, higher pressure on the outside helps maintain structural integrity where as higher pressure on the inside means you'll explode outward.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @05:56PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @05:56PM (#419904)

          Should I go over keeping panels facing the sun on a completely rotating craft, or keeping seals vacuum-tight on a partially rotating craft?

          1) You can't keep the panels facing the sun on much of the surface of Mars either and people still seem to think Mars is such a great destination.

          2) Firstly you don't need vacuum tight seals if the interfacing parts involved don't have to contain air. Secondly if you use tethers and counterweights the craft only needs the same seals as a non-rotating one.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:55PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:55PM (#419586)

      Just re-create the Gemini 8 problem.

    • (Score: 2) by driverless on Friday October 28 2016, @09:40AM

      by driverless (4770) on Friday October 28 2016, @09:40AM (#419778)

      I'm an old fart. Argggh, My Back!

      Don't need to go to Mars for that.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:27PM (#419572)

    It wouldn't be a Phoenix666 story without someone taking apart some piece of the submission!

    Inversion tables only work with gravity and wouldn't help strengthen the back anyway.

    • (Score: 2) by chromas on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:29PM

      by chromas (34) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:29PM (#419576) Journal

      I—I'm pretty sure it was a joke.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @10:39PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @10:39PM (#419597)

        Ya? Got your joke glasses on? Inversion tables help out people with serious injuries! Making lite of their situation is just low...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:55PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:55PM (#419587)

      ...but I've seen photos of in-orbit folks on the treadmill up there.
      They use springs attached to a body harness to add resistance.

      and wouldn't help strengthen the back anyway

      Yeah, I'd like to see the simple rig that -will- do that.
      As a previous comment noted, that was likely an attempt at mirth.

      Now, even with Mars' 0.38g, ISTM that spinning the interplanetary vehicle to achieve appreciable gravity during the trip is a healthy way to go.
      A tethered arrangement with a living space on one end and a counterweight/supply pod on the other would cut the cost relative to a complete ring structure.

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

      • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday October 27 2016, @10:52PM

        by bob_super (1357) on Thursday October 27 2016, @10:52PM (#419603)

        I'd go for padded harness over the shoulders with rubber ties to the "ground". Do a hundred squats to put pressure down the spine and the legs...
        I know that adding a kid a third of my weight on my shoulders is a decent exercise, so having springy stuff emulating half your body weight would be a start.

        > A tethered arrangement with a living space on one end and a counterweight/supply pod on the other

        "Hang on to your stomachs, guys, I'm roping it in to get more salt for dinner tonight! Weeeeeee!!!!"

      • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday October 28 2016, @12:19AM

        by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Friday October 28 2016, @12:19AM (#419650) Homepage

        Martian Women have an interesting adaptation to the problem, their backs are stronger than human woman because they have three [mondocine.net] breasts rather than just two. The extra support as a result of that adaptation counteracts the effects of different gravity on their physiology.

  • (Score: 2) by black6host on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:30PM

    by black6host (3827) on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:30PM (#419578) Journal

    Did I miss a whoosh? Damn! How you gonna have an upside down when there's no right side up? :) I better get back to honing my mental skills. Must have missed a whoosh... hehe

    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday October 28 2016, @12:58AM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday October 28 2016, @12:58AM (#419669) Journal

      That's the genius of it. When you use an inversion table in space you're hanging upside down no matter which way you're pointed. Couldn't be easier to use.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:43PM (#419583)

    ...argggh, my back!

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @10:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @10:38PM (#419596)

    The headline finding:

    Paraspinal lean muscle mass, as indicated by the FCSA, decreased from 86% of the total PSM cross-sectional area down to 72%, immediately after the mission. Recovery of 68% of the postflight loss...

    http://journals.lww.com/spinejournal/Documents/NASA-SPINE152831.pdf [lww.com]

    They do not report either way on whether the person estimating these areas was blinded, but they do cite a paper (ref 7 in the current Chang et al article) about how no one has been blinding themselves while doing these types of studies, and worse the researchers usually do not even say whether blinding was done or not, and how this is messing up all the studies and making it impossible to tell what is going on:

    As with all scientific studies, specific methodological safeguards must be followed to minimize bias in study results. A specific methodological criterion that has been reported to be often lacking in the report of imaging studies looking at patients with LBP is blinding.11 Blinding of the outcome assessors is important to ensure the internal validity of a study.12,13 The use of unblinded outcome assessors has been reported, in other research designs, to consistently overestimate the treatment effect as much as 17% to 40%.13–15 Similarly, it has been shown that when diagnostic studies are conducted without adequate blinding of assessors, the diagnostic odds ratio can be overestimated as much as 30%.16

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23504343 [nih.gov]

    So we can see that the current effects are within the variation we would expect due to lack of blinding. This is basic stuff people, why does medical research need to suck so bad? There is no excuse for this, none.

    Finally, this follows another awful piece of research about astronauts dying early published a few months ago: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/08/01/0234235. [soylentnews.org] Hanlon's razor, I know. But those two pieces of research are so bad I need to think there is some political or financial motivation to keep people from supporting space travel.

    • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday October 28 2016, @06:05AM

      by mhajicek (51) on Friday October 28 2016, @06:05AM (#419745)

      How are blind people supposed to accurately assess results? And wouldn't it be cruel to blind them? /s

      --
      The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @11:23AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @11:23AM (#419797)

      It looks like they're measuring something physical. When a pre-aligned ruler says 8 inches, does it really matter if the person reading that measurement knows what category they're measuring? Knowing if someone is on a diet or not doesn't change what their scale says. Well, you can press more against the scale to make it go up slightly and do the reverse effect to get it to go down slighly...

      • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @01:04PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @01:04PM (#419818)

        In their own reference it says this is an issue. The focus of that paper they cite is on the importance of blinding, it is in the title of the paper. Yet they do not mention blinding! Did they not read their own reference, is this a call for help, or what?

        Besides that, I have done work like this (anatomical tracing). Effects like seen here could easily be due to bias, or even training effects if the person traced the data as it came in, or just in order during one session. If you want to try, there have been a few kaggle competitions lately using fMRI and ultrasound images. Just read the forums about the inconsistent quality of the "ground truth".

        How hard would it have been to have someone relabel all the files and send it to the tracer in random order? Answer: it would take an hour or so. There is no excuse for wasting precious data like this on such shoddy methodology. I am totally unsurprised by the way, I found this problem in a few seconds due to experience with how medical research works. It will continue in this way until people from outside start holding them responsible for producing misinformation. In this case it would probably take a couple days max for them to share the data with an outside team and have them redo it correctly.

    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday October 28 2016, @02:00PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Friday October 28 2016, @02:00PM (#419837)

      Oh, you're talking about double-blind experiments. Here I thought you were talking about retinal flares [wikipedia.org] for the first half of your post.

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @06:57PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @06:57PM (#419922)

        How would you blind the astronauts as to whether it is before/after they have been in orbit? It makes sense it was not double blind, it is a travesty it was not single blind though.

        • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday October 31 2016, @02:57PM

          by tangomargarine (667) on Monday October 31 2016, @02:57PM (#420883)

          Oh, whatever. It's all statistics mumbo-jumbo. You know what I meant :P

          --
          "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday October 27 2016, @11:26PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 27 2016, @11:26PM (#419617) Journal

    Few if any stories have gone in depth on the changes the human body will undergo in different environments. But, when man moves off of the earth, he WILL adapt. Arguably, mankind's greatest talent is manipulating his environment, but we don't have the tools or the knowledge to do a lot of manipulating out there. So, man will adap, or he will die. Or, he may adpat, and die anyway - sometimes the dragon wins, after all.

    Spacers will diverge from planet bound men. That is to be expected. Given a few generations in microgravity, it's possible that spacers simply wouldn't survive a planetary landing. But, who would give up flying for walking, anyway?

    Of course, gravitational drives and gravity fields are probably on the horizon anyway. There won't be generations of humans living in microgravity if we get gravity fields. Or, more likely, only the poor will live in microgravity, while they perform the drudge work required by those people who can afford gravity fields.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @12:13AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @12:13AM (#419645)

      You're really not too adept at that whole "adapt" thing, are you?

      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 28 2016, @06:36AM

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday October 28 2016, @06:36AM (#419752) Journal

        *groan*

        To make matters worse, I commented on a spam site with terrible spelling and grammar recently.

    • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday October 28 2016, @02:31AM

      by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Friday October 28 2016, @02:31AM (#419696) Homepage Journal

      Here's one. [soylentnews.org]

      --
      mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
  • (Score: 4, Funny) by shortscreen on Friday October 28 2016, @04:13AM

    by shortscreen (2252) on Friday October 28 2016, @04:13AM (#419713) Journal

    If a lack of gravity is unhealthy, then extra gravity must be extra healthy. When does Jupiter open for medical tourism?