A Cut Above: Surgery In Space, Now And In The Future

September 30, 2025 by Dan Maloney 3 Comments

In case you hadn’t noticed, we live in a dangerous world. While our soft, fleshy selves are remarkably good at absorbing kinetic energy and healing the damage that results, there are very definite limits to what we humans can deal with, beyond which we’ll need some help. Car crashes, falls from height, or even penetrating trauma such as gunshot wounds — events such as these will often land you in a trauma center where, if things are desperate enough, you’ll be on the operating table within the so-called “Golden Hour” of maximum survivability, to patch the holes and plug the leaks.

While the Golden Hour may be less of a hard limit than the name implies, it remains true that the sooner someone with a major traumatic injury gets into surgery, the better their chances of survival. Here on planet Earth, most urban locations can support one or more Level 1 trauma centers, putting huge swathes of the population within that 60-minute goal. Even in rural areas, EMS systems with Advanced Life Support crews can stabilize the severely wounded until they can be evacuated to a trauma center by helicopter, putting even more of the population within this protective bubble.

But ironically, residents in the highest-priced neighborhood in human history enjoy no such luxury. Despite only being the equivalent of a quick helicopter ride away, the astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station are pretty much on their own when it comes to any traumatic injuries or medical emergencies that might crop up in orbit. While the ISS crews are well-prepared for that eventuality, as we’ll see, there’s only so much we can do right now, and we have a long way to go before we’re ready to perform surgery in space

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Hackaday Links: July 25, 2021

July 25, 2021 by Dan Maloney 10 Comments

Everyone makes mistakes in their job, but very few of us get the chance to make a one-character mistake with the potential to brick millions of devices. But that’s what happened to a hapless Google developer, who made an understandable typo in the ChromeOS code that ended up making it all the way to production. The error, which was in the OS encryption keys vault, was supposed to include the “&&” operator for a logical AND. The developer instead used a single ampersand, which broke the who conditional statement. This meant the OS evaluated even correct passwords as invalid, leaving users locked out of their Chromebooks. To be fair to the developer there should be a lot of QA steps between that typo and production, but it still has to sting.

Speaking of whoopsies, sometimes it just doesn’t pay to be right on the internet. It started when a player of the popular tank battle simulator “War Thunder” took issue with the in-game 3D model of the British Challenger 2 main battle tank. The player argued that the model was inaccurate to the point of affecting gameplay, and thought the model should be changed to make things more realistic. There seemed to be some basis for this, as the player claimed to have been a Challenger 2 commander and gunnery instructor. What’s more, like any good Netizen, the player cited sources to back up the claims, including excerpts from the official Challenger 2 instruction manual. Players on the War Thunder forum flagged this as likely classified material, but the player insisted that it wasn’t — right up to the point where the UK Ministry of Defence said, “Not so fast.” It turns out that the manual hasn’t been declassified, and that releasing the material potentially runs afoul of the Official Secrets Act, which carries with it up to 14 years detention at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

For fans of pinball, the announcement that the Museum of Pinball in Banning, California is closing its doors for good is probably a mix of good news and bad. It’s obviously bad news for any museum to close, especially one that curates collections from popular culture. And there’s no denying that pinball has been a big part of that culture, and that the machines themselves are often works of electromechanical art. But it appears that the museum just couldn’t make a go of it, and now its cavernous space will be sold off to a cannabis grower. But the sad news is tempered by the potential for private collectors and other pinball aficionados to score one of the estimated 1,100 pins the museum now needs to find a home for. We’ve never been to the museum, so it’s hard to say what kinds of machines they have and how collectible they are, but regardless, the market is about to be flooded. If you’re nearby, you might want to take a chance to see and play some of these machines one last time, before they get shipped off to private game rooms around the world.

And finally, exciting news from Hackaday superfriend Fran Blanche, who will soon tick an item off her bucket list with a zero-G ride on “G-Force 1”. Not to be confused with its military cousin the “Vomit Comet”, the weightlessness-simulating aircraft will afford Fran a total of about five minutes of free-fall when she takes the ride in a couple of months. There will also be periods of the flight that will simulate the gravity on both the Moon and Mars, so Fran has promised some Matt Damon mythbusting and Buzz Aldrin moonbouncing. And always one to share, Fran will bring along a professional video crew, so she can concentrate on the experience rather than filming it. We’ve actually scheduled Fran for a Hack Chat in August, to talk about the flight and some of her other cool goings-on, so watch out for that.

Zero-G Experiments Will Make Some Pretty Pictures

November 16, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

Does a yo-yo work in zero-g? How about a paper airplane? These questions were answered in 1985 on the Space Shuttle Discovery, but reproduction of results is the cornerstone of the scientific method. [Rob] is about to reproduce some of the awesome zero-g pictures by riding on a vomit comet and taking a few pictures of water globes colliding.

For the last few months, [Rob] has had a standby ticket on the G-Force One, a plane that takes passengers on parabolic arcs to simulate microgravity. He was lucky as his standby ticket allowed him to take a few experiments on board, so [Rob] decided there’s just not enough awesome pictures of water colliding in zero-g.

He built a rig out of micro t-slot aluminum. A DSLR is mounted to the frame along with a few ‘test tubes’ containing water. When [Rob] blows through a tube, a small sphere of water will be released to collide with other object. Think of it as the nerd’s version of water splash photography.

Of course, a trip through zero-g wouldn’t be complete without a few more experiments. [Rob] plans on testing a few toys to see if yo-yos ‘sleep’ without gravity (they don’t), and if a grandfather clock works on the moon (there’s a month-long day, so kind of). We can’t wait to see [Rob]’s pictures once he comes back to Earth.