"Cosmonaut brains are 'rewired' by space missions, scientists find"

[modeltrains]

Hey y'all; Just learned of this article in a Space Colonization Discussion group on MeWe.

https://www.space.com/cosmonaut-brains-rewired-by-spaceflight

"Structural analyses [of astronaut brains] have been done already, but not yet connectivity research," Wuyts said. "With this paper [on] connectivity, we finally approach the answers regarding this neuroplasticity."

To accomplish this, the team used a brain imaging technique called fiber tractography, a 3D reconstruction technique that uses data from diffusion MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), or dMRI scans to study the structure and connectivity within the brain.

"Fiber tractography gives a sort of wiring scheme of the brain. Our study is the first to use this specific method to detect changes in brain structure after spaceflight," Wuyts said in an emailed statement.

The end of this bit is kind of interesting,

The researchers also "found changes in the neural connections between several motor areas of the brain," lead author Andrei Doroshin, a researcher at Drexel University in Pennsylvania, said in the statement. "Motor areas are brain centers where commands for movements are initiated. In weightlessness, an astronaut needs to adapt his or her movement strategies drastically, compared to Earth. Our study shows that their brain is rewired, so to speak."

"From previous studies, we know that these motor areas show signs of adaptation after spaceflight. Now, we have a first indication that it is also reflected at the level of connections between those regions," Wuyts added in the statement.

But these changes weren't just noticed immediately after cosmonauts returned to Earth. In the brain scans taken of the subjects seven months after landing, the team found that these changes were still present.

 

[Funkworks]

1. Build 2 identical ISS-sized space stations.
2. Link them together with many steel cables.
3. Fire up a few rocket motors in opposite directions to make them spin like a tiny double star system.

Result: Artificial gravity.

No need for that huge Kubrick/von Braun donut. Start smaller at least.

 

[modeltrains]

The way I see it, those wheels with hub docking, be it with spin or especially with a despun hub, significantly reduces the number of potential failure points when docking as the arriving spacecraft's need to maintain angular momentum in each of 3 dimensions to stay relative to a moving point on station 'rim' is gone. Spacecraft must apply thrust to start that angular movement and to adjust displacement & each application of thrust in a given vector is a potential failure point and each bit of machinery which provides that thrust is a potential failure point moreso than an approach to a nonrotating hub.

Then once an arriving spacecraft has docked to an outboard point at a rotating station as opposed to a nonrotating central point, what does that now connected off center mass do to the station's rotation?