If you were born in the US after the mid 1990s,
you most likely ingested a spinoff of NASA technology.
Surprised?
NASA spinoffs are everywhere.
Ready?
Let's see how many of these you've heard of before.
Problem-- say you're an astronaut working
outside the ISS using a wrench for hours at a time
while wearing a bulky spacesuit.
What do you do with your hand inevitably gets tired
and you start losing grip strength?
NASA's answer?
How about not getting tired in the first place.
NASA has developed a prototype robo glove that actually
amplifies the human grip.
They modeled it on the robotic hand
of something else pretty cool-- the robotic astronaut,
or robonaut, which has already been tested on the ISS.
Anyway, the robo glove tries to improve dexterity and reduce
hand fatigue and repetitive motion stress for astronauts
working on equipment during space walks.
Next problem-- the space station orbits Earth
so fast that each new sunrise happens every 90 minutes.
Not the best for your circadian rhythms,
so how do astronauts get regular sleep?
All right, you know how driving a baby around in a car
helps put it to sleep?
Well, NASA funded researchers at Stony Brook University
to analyze that very phenomenon.
They found that hitting the ear with just the right vibrations
could sync up the electrical signals going
to the brain from the auditory system
and from the vestibular system in the inner ear, which
regulates balance.
They tested extensively on hamsters, which apparently
have really similar vestibular systems to humans,
and eventually they figured out how
to induce either wakefulness or sleep.
So what's a spinoff?
A downloadable insomnia app called Sleep Genius
that combines that vibration research with classical music.
Another spinoff?
Sleepy hamsters.
Next problem-- say you want to do
an interplanetary manned mission.
Ideally you'd want to make the spacecraft
a self-contained, closed ecosystem that
can produce its own oxygen, recycle its waste,
and generate its own food in order to keep fuel costs down.
So how do you do that?
Well, back in the '80s NASA experimented
to see if micro algae could help.
Think about it-- algae eat waste, make oxygen,
and some can even make nutritional molecules.
Now, after NASA's initial interest faded,
some of the researchers kept the project going
and realized that certain species of algae
could synthesize a compound found in human breast milk,
called DHA, which turns out to be important for brain
development in babies.
Today this microalgae derivative is
in over 90% of the baby formula sold in the US, and nearly 2/3
of the baby formula sold worldwide.
So if you were born after the mid 1990s
and went for the bottle over the boob,
even once, you, my friend, drank NASA techn.
Next up, you know those gantries on large platforms?
The ones that feed the rockets fuel and electricity
through these fat umbilical cables?
OK, just before and during blast off,
the vibrations from a rocket engine are insane.
So, how do you keep that gantry from shaking to pieces?
And not just that, how do you get
it to actually detach and fall away smoothly without swinging
all over the place?
Answer-- with the best shock absorbers ever.
And if you can dampen the vibrations from a firing
rocket, how about dampening the vibrations from earthquakes?
The same company that develop NASA's gantry shock absorbers
modified the technology and installed it
in buildings in places that get lots of tremors,
like Tokyo and San Francisco.
So that's right, the NASA spinoff in this case
is earthquake proof buildings.
And so far, of the hundreds of buildings
in which the dampeners have been installed,
none have suffered even minor damage during a quake.
Next problem, a space shuttle take off.
It feels like about 3 Gs for the astronauts on board.
Now, during takeoff they're all seated, kind of on their backs,
so what material do you make those seats out
of that would be firm enough to give support, but also
have enough give that it wouldn't apply weird pressure
points?
Memory foam sounds like a pretty good candidate, right?
Like in Tempurpedic beds?
Well, where do you think memory foam came from?
You got it-- NASA.
Now a really big problem-- astronauts in micro gravity
lose bone density 10 times faster than people on earth
with osteoporosis do.
Muscle loss is also a major problem.
So, how do you keep astronauts from falling apart in orbit?
Answer-- a chair that exercises for them.
NASA funded some university researchers to experiment
with targeted high frequency vibrations
that trick bones into thinking they're
carrying weight so they won't deteriorate.
While testing the system, the designers
realized the vibrations also caused muscles to contract
without voluntary effort.
It's kind of like those ab belts on late night infomercials,
except this thing actually works.
Now, right now it's just in the prototype phase,
being used for experimental physical therapy,
but in 10 years, I'm going to be jacked.
Here's a serious problem.
Inside a space suit, a rise in core body temperature
from overexertion could be incredibly dangerous
since there's no easy way to get that heat out.
So how do you monitor a person's core temperature
when that person is inside a space suit, floating in space?
How about a pill that takes your temperature?
That's right, ingestible thermometers.
Literally a pill with sensors and transmitters
that takes your temperature from the inside.
Next problem, how can you get pilots to see other planes
through fog?
Yeah, pilots.
Remember, the A in NASA is aeronautics.
Answer, infrared laser strobe lights
connected to a video camera.
See, fog is opaque to visible light, but somewhat transparent
to infrared light.
By timing the return time of the laser pulse echos
and using image rendering software,
NASA funded researchers helped develop a kind
of infrared sonar for fog.
Now, you know what else is also transparent to infrared light?
Smoke and fire.
So I think you can see the spinoff coming-- goggles
for firefighters that can see through walls
of smoke and flame, which is super bad ass.
Next problem, say you want to grow plants
in space for food and oxygen. Now,
plants need water, which is a precious resource on the space
station that you don't want to waste.
So, how do you know when to water plants in space?
With NASA funding, university researchers
developed a sensor that monitors plant leaf thickness,
sends a plant health update to a computer,
and then triggers automatic irrigation if needed.
The spinoff?
No brainer, put the system on farms.
The tech is still quite a ways from commercial viability,
but interestingly, the prototype systems being tested on farms
now can send status updates over text message.
That's right, text messaging plants.
All pretty cool, right?
If you want to learn more, NASA Spinoffs actually
has it own YouTube channel, magazine, and Twitter account,
all linked in the description.
Let us know your favorite spinoff,
or let us know any good ones we missed down in the comments.
We might shout you out on the next episode of "Spacetime."
Last week we asked whether the first Mars
mission should be all women.
I'll get to your comments in a second,
but first, two announcements.
One, we want to poll you guys about episode topic
categories for the show, so please click on the link
below and let us know the kind of material
that you'd like to see on "Spacetime."
Second, in next week's episode I'll
be explaining some more relativity stuff.
Not directly time and space things, something
else, but there will be a challenge question posed
at the end of next week's episode, so please tune in.
OK, now to your comments.
Magnus Wallentin and Jose Garcia both asked why
I don't use the metric system.
I do, almost always.
I was talking about metric tons the whole episode.
But NASA astronaut height requirements
happen to be quoted in inches, so I
reported them the same way.
SengoProductions21 checked a lot of our sources
and did some great additional research.
Awesome.
More of you should do that.
Not just on this show, but everything else
you see on YouTube.
But Sengo brought up two points I want to mention specifically.
First, Sengo said maybe all men would require less radiation
shielding, which would also reduce
massing costs of the trip.
I don't think it really works that way.
Radiation is more of an all or nothing proposition,
or close to that, so either you protect everyone,
or you can't send anyone.
But second, Sengo points out that the vision impairment
research could be interpreted as indicating
that vision issues are age related rather than sex
related, and that may be true.
We don't know.
Lack of data, particularly on women, is a major limitation.
Now, we don't know that women are
immune to vision problems, that's true,
and I didn't mean to imply that.
But they might be significantly less susceptible.
And the point of the episode was to stimulate discussion
about how you do cost benefit analysis
and weigh relative risks precisely when you
have limited data.
You know what I mean?
I think a lot of you missed this point.
For instance, Mark Arandjus and others
said that we should send the most qualified people, period.
But qualifications have never been the issue.
I assume from the outset that there
are ample numbers of equally qualified men and women
for every role.
The question is how you choose from within that pool
to minimize risk and maximize success.
[INAUDIBLE] pointed out that we should send men and women
in order to collect more data on long term space
travel for both sexes, and 99sins
said that this whole thing seems to boil down
to weighing the value of data collection
against minimizing mission risk and cost.
I fully agree.
But INSADreamFactory put a twist on this
by pointing out that an all woman crew might
increase mission risk.
There might be long term negative effects to which women
are more susceptible that we haven't even seen yet,
and a mixed sex crew could mitigate the risk
of these unknown unknowns.
That's an excellent argument.
ObanDerg asks why I didn't bring up osteoporosis
as a bigger negative for women, and the reason
is that spaceflight basically gives everyone
the equivalent of osteoporosis, and so far men and women
seem equally susceptible.
It's a tie.
Talia Enright pointed out that all these arguments
could apply to a #OccupyVenus Cloud City mission.
Agreed, but Venus missions are shorter,
so the relative cost savings of all female crews
start to become less significant.
Finally, Dylan Ballantyne brought up science rap topic
suggestions since I speak so fast,
but PBS already has a science rap show on YouTube.
It's called "Comaniddy," hosted by Mike Wilson.
The link is below.
You should check it out.