Spacemen How are saving our LIVES
From breast scans and heart pumps to Gordon Ramsay’s anti-gravity trousers, the NASA inventions that show . . .
Gordon ramsay isn’t someone you usually associate with the space age. But there he was last week, pictured working out on a nasa-inspired £30,000 treadmill.
The chef was using the machine to help with a football injury — the treadmill pumps air into a sealed container from the waist down during exercise, taking some of the load off injured joints. This is thought to allow inflammation to reduce quicker, speeding up recovery.
The treadmill was developed to help astronauts exercise in space to maintain their bone density, which deteriorates in a gravityfree atmosphere, but is being used to treat athletes and patients following surgery such as hip operations.
This anti-gravity technology is just one of the many cutting-edge medical breakthroughs based on research carried out by scientists studying space. many of these inventions originate from nasa, the national aeronautics and space administration in the U.s.
since its formation in 1958, it’s estimated nasa research has resulted in more than 2,000 inventions that have transformed modern life.
Here, we look at some of the ways space science has been used to help our health . . .
DIGITAL CANCER SCANS
EvEry year, more than two million women in Britain undergo breast cancer screening.
Conventional tests involve an X-ray known as a mammogram to look for signs of tumours. But the technique is not good at spotting small lumps when the breast tissue is dense, as is often the case in younger women.
now the nHs is phasing out traditional X-ray images and replacing them with digital scans inspired by nasa research.
scientists developed digital imaging 20 years ago to find ways to detect extremely faint objects millions of miles away in space.
a patient having a scan has an X-ray of the breast, but instead of being produced on film, the digital image is stored on a computer and can be enhanced to check for suspicious growths.
The system relies on a gadget that converts electrical charge (whether it’s space matter or human tissue) into colours that displays them in greater contrast than with X-rays.
It was developed so the Hubble space telescope could turn light from distant stars into electronic files to be stored and studied.
scientists realised this technology could also be used to scan for tiny tumours in a mass of otherwise healthy tissue. Tumours tend to be denser than surrounding healthy tissue, so that part of the image attracts more electrons — making the shade of the colour more vivid.
one study at oslo University Hospital involving 500,000 women given digital scans detected 1,500 more breast tumours than conventional X-ray technology.
developed ten years ago, 80 per cent of breast check clinics in Britain use digital scans.
THERMAL BLANKETS
THEsE days you often see marathon runners draped in a silvery foil ‘space blanket’ as they cross the finishing line. In cold conditions, their bodies cool rapidly once they have stopped and there is a risk of hypothermia.
The insulating blankets help by reflecting the heat that’s lost back into the body. They are also used in emergencies, such as earthquakes.
The technology was developed by space scientists 40 years ago — for a very different reason.
during take-off in 1973, nasa’s skylab space station lost part of the heat shield that protects it against heat and radiation from the sun and prevents burn-up on reentry to the Earth’s atmosphere.
Temperatures inside the station reached 54c as it orbited the Earth so nasa scientists built a kind of parasol made from thin plastic coated with a highly heat-resistant metallic agent, called metallised polyethylene terephthalate.
It repels 97 per cent of heat on the outside, but stops heat loss inside.
The parasol was attached to the station to lower temperatures. Within a few years, scientists had adapted the technology to produce emergency blankets.
INVISIBLE BRACES
SO-CALLED invisible braces favoured by stars such as Tom Cruise only came about because of space technology. In the seventies and Eighties, nasa experts developed a material called translucent polycrystalline alumina (TPa).
Flexible but stronger than steel, TPa was used to protect the infrared antennae put on missile trackers to trace enemy weapons using heat sensitivity. But as TPa absorbs light, it is also see-through. as a result, orthodontics firms began using it to develop ‘invisible’ braces to replace unattractive ‘train-track’ metal braces.
CARDIAC IMPLANTS
EaCH year, around 80 British patients are fitted with a heart implant called a left ventricular assist device (lvad).
not much bigger than an aa battery, it keeps blood flowing from the left ventricle — the main pumping chamber — when the cardiac muscle has been severely damaged by heart attack or disease.
They buy time until doctors can find a suitable heart donor.
These patients owe their lives to a nasa scientist. rocket engine expert david saucier, who worked on the huge turbo pumps that fed fuel to the space shuttle’s main engines, suffered a heart attack in 1983. His scarred heart failed and he later underwent a transplant. But during discussions with his cardiac surgeon, saucier realised the rocket fuel pump technology used on the space shuttle could work in the heart, too.
any artificial device would have to be powerful enough to pump 2,000 gallons of blood a day, but small enough to sit inside the heart.
saucier thought the design behind the shuttle’s turbo pumps could be the solution. The size of a desk, each helped pump 525,000 gallons of fuel to the engines in just eight minutes after take-off by forcing it through narrow channels at very high speed.
saucier set about downsizing the technology and 17 years later, in 2000, the first left ventricular assist device was implanted into a human.
EAR THERMOMETERS
For over a century, doctors used mercury-based thermometers to measure body temperature.
But these could take up to ten minutes to give a reading and always carried the risk that the toxic mercury could be swallowed if the glass broke. In the past 20 years, these have been overtaken by infrared ear thermometers — which work in seconds.
These devices, which cost as little as £10, measure the amount of energy emitted by the eardrum. They are based on the methods scientists use to measure the temperature of stars and planets.
They measure levels of heat energy using sensors that pick up faint traces of infrared radiation.
With ear thermometers, a probe is inserted into the ear canal and a sensor on the end records the level of infrared radiation emitted by the tympanic membrane — tissue at the end of the ear canal.
This gives a good indication of body temperature because it lies close to the temperature regulation centre in a part of the brain called the hypothalamus.
In the early nineties, nasa collaborated with commercial medical equipment firm diatek to develop the first such thermometer.
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS
In THE past two decades, artificial limbs have become more sophisticated, partly thanks to nasa.
space scientists needed to develop robotic devices capable of highly intricate movements while collecting rock or dust samples for study.
But they also had to withstand the rough and tumble of space travel.
The solutions they developed are widely used in the manufacture of prosthetic arms and legs.
They offer synthetic limbs that more closely resemble and perform like the real thing, thanks to artificial muscle systems built from man-made materials and memory foam that could be moulded to different shapes.
HEARING IMPLANTS
onE invention is not related to space technology, but to the skill of nasa engineers. adam Kissiah was a nasa scientist with severe hearing difficulties that failed to improve despite repeated surgery.
In 1977, with no medical training, he developed the prototype for today’s widely used cochlear implant — which has restored hearing to thousands in Britain with extreme deafness.
These implants bypass damage in the ear to transmit sound directly to the auditory nerve.
a microphone worn like a hearing aid relays sounds to a receiver before being converted into electrical signals and dispatched along the auditory nerve to the brain, which converts them into sound.