Author: Sabrina Imbler / Source: Atlas Obscura
For approximately $207 a day, the job doesn’t sound very hard. All you have to do is lie down in a precisely angled bed in a private room for a breezy 60 days (plus 29 extra days to transition and rehabilitate).
Two months of absolute, compulsory rest and relaxation, all in the name of space exploration. For couch potatoes, it’s a highly regulated dream.To better understand how to counteract the effects of microgravity on the human body, scientists from the German Aerospace Center, the European Space Agency, and NASA are recruiting women for an upcoming bed rest study in fall 2019. The study will observe people reclining for 60 days on beds that angle their head to rest six degrees below their bodies. Microgravity breaks down muscles and bones in space and shift body fluids toward the head, resulting in what NASA calls “puffy-head, bird-legs” syndrome. It’s also one of the most difficult space-based challenges to simulate in a lab. So NASA researchers devised the head-down tilt as a way to mimic this sensation of weightlessness.
A lucky two-thirds of the participants will also take part in…
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