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Space Science

Astronauts' Skin Gets Thinner In Space, Scientists Say 60

Posted by samzenpus from the wafer-thin dept.
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.
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Astronauts' Skin Gets Thinner In Space, Scientists Say More

Astronauts' Skin Gets Thinner In Space, Scientists Say

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  • Thick? (Score:4, Funny)

    by invictusvoyd ( 3546069 ) on Thursday July 23, 2015 @08:20AM (#50166929)
    Should send all thick skinned people to space.
    • They are not thinned skinned they just get upity because some yahoos think they faked the moon landings

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jd2112 ( 1535857 )
      No, too many thin skinned people already. We need to figure out how to reverse the process and apply it to the entire Internet.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ncc74656 ( 45571 ) *

        We need to figure out how to reverse the process and apply it to the entire Internet.

        ...or at least to the SJWs. :-P

    • It's no wonder they are thin skinned. Being couped up in a small tin can, no where to go, the same view day after day, listening to your roommate tell the same story AGAIN and AGAIN, with someone you don't even know calling you every few hours telling you "Do this! Do That!" and knowing you're not going to have any chance for escape for months. You'd be thin skinned too!

    • Surely the problem is too many thin skinned people... possibly we should send all the thin skinned people to the center of the earth... worth a try.

  • So when they get back, is it a good time to start telling "Yo Mama" jokes?

  • Expect some hurdles (Score:3)

    by rmdingler ( 1955220 ) on Thursday July 23, 2015 @08:38AM (#50166997) Journal
    It is less than surprising that a mortal physique evolved and modified in earthly gravity would encounter some strife in an environment void of g.

    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.

    • Re: Expect some hurdles (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Fourth: find out how to wire up brains. A brain is much smaller than a human, and you dont need manual user interfaces, or things like maintaining cabin pressure.

      • 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 w

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by hawkfish ( 8978 )

          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.

          This artificial distinction between the brain and the body is a favourite trope of computer nerds, but really, there is no boundary between the body and the brain (except in the minds of people who are used to well-designed hardware interfaces.) In order to convince a brain that it is in a body, you need a lot of simulation inputs, including some very complex chemistry. The simplest and most compact machinery we have for providing this is... a human body!

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by robi5 ( 1261542 )

            Your point makes sense w.r.t. how the entire body is innervated, especially the sensors, and the guts have massive amounts of neurons. Also, pretty much all organs that exist, in part, to sustain the brain.

            However the interface between the brain and the rest of the body feels so tangible, that we can say it's part interface (certainly a complex one), part resource and defense supply.

            Nerves:
            - Eyes: the retina and the optic nerves are part of the brain, or we could consider the optic nerve analogous to the cr

      • Fourth: find out how to wire up brains. A brain is much smaller than a human, and you dont need manual user interfaces, or things like maintaining cabin pressure.

        "Brain and brain! What is BRAIN? It is Controller, is it not?"

  • People living in low-humidity conditions often have skin troubles.

  • Just send Slashdotters, we've already got thin skin.

    • 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.

  • Bigger problem is reproductoin (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23, 2015 @09:47AM (#50167393)

    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.

  • Proof.. (Score:3)

    by ThatsDrDangerToYou ( 3480047 ) on Thursday July 23, 2015 @10:15AM (#50167643)
    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.)
  • People have called Buzz Aldrin thin-skinned and he only spent 12 days in space... To be fair he had a pretty annoyingly goofy person provoking him, not sure who could keep their cool under those conditions.

  • Cells are bombarded with slightly greasy solar atoms which forces the body cells to react, to protect themselves. That means growing skin.
    Told you. Perfect.

  • They can send back the bodies from the Mars mission in zip-lock bags!
  • Why push human space flight at all when it is so obvious that humans as profoundly maladapted to such environmental conditions? Surely our money and efforts would be better focused on advancing robotics and quantum communications so as to advance remote avatar technology options? Why go anywhere if you can send your senses in a machine that will do you bidding in real-time without lag?

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