Sask. professor to build ankle MRI to monitor astronauts' health in space


READ MORE

In the eyes of many, being an astronaut is simply a cool job. Like everything, though, it has its downsides — but a University of Saskatchewan researcher wants to help understand, and hopefully prevent, one of them.


When astronauts go into space, they lose muscle and bone mass. Gordon Sarty, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan, hopes that he’ll soon learn more about the mechanics of how that happens, thanks to a $100,000 grant from the Canadian Space Agency announced late last week.


Sarty is working on a magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, device that will fit around the ankles of astronauts. The portable MRI scanner will weigh around 30 kilograms, while regular MRI scanners can weigh up to 15 tonnes. 


“[We’re] hoping to learn what the mechanisms behind muscle loss and bone loss are, the rates at which these these things are lost,” he said. 


“Bone, for example is continuously breaking down and rebuilding in our body,” he said


“Cells get destroyed, new cells grow in their place and in space, that balance is offset. So we want to try and understand why, what’s the physiology behind that.”


The hope is to be testing the mini-MRI on the space station by 2020. 


After he and his team of students complete this project, Sarty is hoping to build a helmet MRI device that could possibly be used in remote areas of northern Saskatchewan, where access to this type of potentially lifesaving medical imaging is limited. 




Article source: http://www.france24.com/en/20180506-macron-france-foreign-policy-one-year-trump-planet-great-again-eu-merkel


Best Wordpress Plugin development company in India     Best Web development company in India

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Canadian expected to be aboard Russia's 1st manned space mission since rocket failure

READ MORE The first manned mission to the International Space Station since a Russian rocket failed to launch successfully earlier this month may take off on Dec. 3, space agency Roscosmos said on Wednesday. And the crew is expected to include Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques, Agence France-Press reported. A Russian cosmonaut and U.S. astronaut were forced to abort their mission on Oct. 11 and perform an emergency landing after a launch accident that Roscomos said was caused by a faulty sensor. The accident was the first serious launch problem experienced by a manned Soyuz space mission since 1983, when a crew narrowly escaped before a launch pad explosion. Sergei Krikalyov, a senior Roscosmos official, was quoted by state news agency Tass as saying the next manned launch had been planned for mid-December, but that Russia was trying to bring the date forward so that the ISS is not briefly left without a crew. “The industry is making significant efforts to move the launch t...
Read more

Getting the dope on pot stocks is becoming easier as media groups invest in content: Don Pittis

Image
READ MORE “What’s the buzz? Tell me what’s happening,” goes the ’70s rock anthem. Part of the catchiness of the lyric — from the rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar  — was that in that era the term “buzz” had developed a second spicy meaning. It described the high that people got from smoking cannabis. In the 1970s, the magazine High Times was a brand new title keeping an eye on the illegal but growing business of marijuana pricing and sales. It ran centrefolds of glistening pot plants and of an apartment filled to the windows with what the magazine insisted was an entire ton of cannabis. Now some of Canada’s most staid media voices are looking for ways to go toe to toe with High Times and its U.S. competitors, hoping to profit from Canada’s global head start in legal recreational cannabis. But when it comes to making a killing from spreading the buzz on the cannabis biz, to q...
Read more

Toronto man denies conspiring with Marvel CEO in alleged hate mail scheme

Image
READ MORE A Toronto man accused of conspiring with the head of Marvel Entertainment in a bizarre hate mail campaign against his wealthy former employer has denied any role in the alleged scheme. David Smith, along with Marvel CEO Isaac (Ike) Perlmutter, is the target of a slander lawsuit launched earlier this year by Canadian businessman Harold Peerenboom. Now Smith — a former employee of Peerenboom’s Toronto-based executive search firm, Mandrake Management — has filed a motion to dismiss the U.S. civil suit. It’s the latest development in the years-long legal battle between Peerenboom and Perlmutter, a notoriously reclusive American billionaire and personal friend of U.S. President Donald Trump. The hate mail campaign, which ran   between 2012 to 2015, saw anonymous letters falsely accusing Peerenboom of being a child molester, murderer and anti-Semite...
Read more