5 ms·
ISS Rodent Habitat (2014)
- yorwba 3y ago> The remaining eight mice are euthanized and preserved (formalin, ethanol or MELFI) for return to Earth to be weighed in order to ensure the mice have not lost weight over the course of their stay aboard the Rodent Habitat which will confirm that the supply of water and food was sufficient. At first I thought "shouldn't you weigh them before altering their weight with preservatives?" but then I remembered that this is in a zero-g environment, making weighing mice a bit more difficult than on Earth. Maybe a "space scale" measuring inertial mass instead could work?
- nwiswell 3y ago> Maybe a "space scale" measuring inertial mass instead could work? Yeah. The obvious thing would be a centrifuge where the sample is placed in a "ball on a wire" contraption, the assembly is spun up to a known RPM, and the tension in the wire is measured directly.
- amomchilov 3y agoI thought they could measure it like they measure humans using SLAMMD, but apparently that’s only accurate to 0.5 lbs https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/how-do-astronauts-weigh-themselves-space-180953884/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/how-do-ast...
- jameshart 3y agoAs the Mythbusters almost said, the only difference between whirling a mouse's corpse around tied to the end of a string in space, and science, is writing it down.
- marcosdumay 3y agoI imagine one can build a two-plated centrifuge that works the same way as an equilibrium balance works on Earth.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- troyvit 3y agoYou could maybe power it with the surviving mice and a piece of cheese floating on a string.
- insaneirish 3y agoIf you add a known fixed mass of preservative, then it's just some math back on earth...
- beebmam 3y agoThere are an enormous number of animals, rodents included, that are used in scientific experiments. Most of us believe it would be unethical to conduct the same experiments on humans without their consent. Of course, these animals are not humans, and our ethics don't exactly map to their lives. It may ethically justified to use their lives for many types of scientific experiments. I am sometimes in this camp. Especially for medical science purposes, where the results of the research can be used to enrich all lives, even non-human lives. It's hard for me to ethically justify this. Maybe I'd change my mind if it could be shown to me that this had potential to lead to important medical knowledge for humans and non-humans alike.
- nxobject 3y ago(I'm not here to start up a heated or judgmental comment thread here, because I do think conversations like these about ethics are illuminating, and that the interplay between general principles and an intuitive sense of justice is hard, and that I do want to genuinely engage in good faith with you...) I hope, as a species, that we do become a spacefaring, exploring civilization – so that these mice will not have been euthanized in vain. It would be tragic if these mice died, for example, so that space can be militarized. My feelings tell me that so much relies on what this knowledge ends up being used for – which is intimately linked with what we end up doing with the fantastically expensive investment that is spaceflight.
- edgyquant 3y agoMilitarization is one aspect of becoming a space faring species. Like it or not it’s an aspect of social organisms competing with one another.
- blacksmith_tb 3y agoBut would it make us more militarized than we already are? There's at least some chance we'll cooperate in space (like the ISS, for example).
- BowBun 3y ago
- quink 3y ago(2014), or thereabouts?
- Sporktacular 3y agoRight - date on top is not right. References to SpX-6 etc.
- dang 3y agoLooks like it: https://www.nasa.gov/general/rodent-research-1-spacex-4/ https://www.nasa.gov/general/rodent-research-1-spacex-4/. Year added above. Thanks!
- neilv 3y agoThe pet-store Habitrail system of modular tubes and compartments for small rodents was always a little reminiscent of a space station. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitrail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitrail https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vintage+habitrail&va=n&t=h_&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vintage+habitrail&va=n&t=h_&iar=im...
- LASR 3y agoThis is one of those topics that make me feel sadness from an emotional perspective. But I also understand the need to do science, and these animals are essentially “taking one for the team”. Cool setup, from an engineering perspective though.
- stefan_ 3y agoIf only. Is it still looked down upon to say that most "experiments" on ISS are "X but in space" and have very limited scientific value?
- Robotbeat 3y agoThere is no other way to test microgravity effects.
- dtgriscom 3y ago> these animals are essentially “taking one for the team”. "Taking one for the team": "to agree to do something unpleasant that you do not really want to do, or not have something that you want, in order to help or be kind to other people in a group." Note the word "agree" there... https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/take-one-for-the-team https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/take-...
- pdntspa 3y agoSo what is this no-animals no-humans alternative?
- victorstanciu 3y agoThe argument against animal testing is not necessarily that we should find an alternative, but that maybe the experiments themselves aren't worth it to begin with. That maybe the moral cost of the knowledge we gain from them is too high. You don't have to be an absolutist on the matter in either direction, but surely each instance deserves this discussion, right? Because there has to be a difference between using animals to develop life-saving drugs, and whatever the hell Neuralink is doing to those poor monkeys.
- danShumway 3y ago> Each Rodent Habitat can support up to ten mice or six rats providing sufficient room for the animals. Given that the animals are going to be euthanized, their health and wellbeing probably isn't the biggest concern for the scientists involved -- but unless this is hooking into a much larger habitat than the pictures indicate, lol this is not even close to sufficient space for 6 rats to live in for several months. It's not sufficient space for 1 rat. Again, I'm trying to figure out if there's a larger environment and the article just isn't indicating it? So maybe I'm wrong and there's an actual environment here that just isn't pictured? But if the pictures of the habitat are the actual habitat... keeping 6 rats in a space the size of one of these containers for a month is very literally torture for the animals involved, plain and simple. In most cases a group of 2-3 rats should have at least a full-height human-sized cage with multiple levels (and they should still regularly be given time outside of that cage in a larger environment), and ideally for 4-5 rats they should have double that space. ---- And for this research where they're basically just asking "did space do anything to their organs" I doubt the scientists care, but there is a reproducibility problem surrounding rat research that boils down to "animals act differently when they're cooped up in inhumane conditions for months at a time." The most famous of these examples off the top of my head being the "rat utopia" experiment where a scientist stuck around 40 rats into a habitat that was barely big enough for 2 rats, then gave them literally zero stimulation of any kind, and when they predictably freaked the heck out out he then tried to pass it off as some kind of novel insight into the nature of societal collapse, population limits, and an intrinsic psychological need for competition. In fact the more obvious conclusion would have been "when actively tortured, animals act weird." It's kind of a wild experiment because if you're not familiar at all with rats it sounds insightful -- to the point where researchers actually called the environment a "rat utopia". But if you are at all familiar with rat behavior it has all of the scientific credibility of Jigsaw writing up a formal paper about what the barbed wire maze he built in his basement proves about the human condition and urban planning. If the only thing you're doing to rats is dissecting them, then unless the stress increases disease it won't mess with results. For determining the impact of space on a rat's body, I don't know how much the rat's quality of care changes anything about the outcome. The cage being shown isn't big enough for them to exercise, but I don't know if them being able to exercise is even relevant to the test. But for any experiments that are more extensive, how the animals are cared for can significantly change the results you get: it can affect the likelihood of disease in the rodents, it can affect what problems they're more prone to exhibiting and how quickly they recover from operations and how they react to treatments. And of course it affects behavior.
- bcardarella 3y agothose looks like one of my old Pentium Pro tower cases
- 7373737373 3y agoExtrapolating this, it seems like future spacecraft interior planning and design will need to consider the hygiene and safety implications of flying pets. Generally, disinfection/cleaning in zero-g must be much harder, because bacteria/dust go into all directions, not just primarily to the ground and top surfaces.
- awinter-py 3y agothe spleen recovery glovebox has real ash wednesday energy > It is this which recovers My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions Which the leopards reject
- ckemere 3y agoI was intrigued by the poop/urine issue. They mention a grid, but what would cause the poop pellets or urine ro to float in the right direction????
- thelastgallon 3y agoThe Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: When Arthur encounters Slartibartfast on the planet Magrathea it is explained that mice have spent a lot of their time in laboratories running complex experiments on humans, contrary to the humans thinking that it was them running experiments using mice. Slartibartfast explains to Arthur that "the business with the cheese and squeaking" was just a front for their true intelligence, and that they allowed humans to perform some "primitively staged" experiments on them in order to check how much humans had learned, and to give them "the odd prod in the right direction".
- throwaway290 3y agoIt's a massive spoiler with no warning, and very unnecessary too. Next time consider simply alluding to HGTTG and something about mice?
- tapland 3y agoConsider the implications of your demands.
- throwaway290 3y agoThe implications of considering others before blurting stuff out are strictly positive! But maybe what you wrote is a reference that I didn't get:)
- KineticLensman 3y agoDammit! I recorded that episode in 1978 and was going to listen to it tonight for the very first time. Now it's been ruined for me!
- throwaway290 3y agoDo you expect people to be born already with all books published up until Date.now() in their heads? I can't believe this needs to even be explained but the reason spoilers are spoilers and are discouraged is that some people sometimes save something very good for later (and guess what that's disproportionately the classics because they tend to be good) and some people are too young and have not had time to read all of what you read (even if they wanted to for some reason) In this case additionally the spoiler (detailing plot point and revealing what work it's in) was not necessary at all
- Borrible 3y agoIf I were a 'General System Vehicle' of the 'Culture' and permanently hosting human guests, I would call myself 'GSV Rodent Habitat John Calhoun' just to make fun of them and offend my fellow minds.