ISS Rodent Habitat (2014) | Hacker News Reader

ISS Rodent Habitat (2014)

spaceflight101.com

77 points1970-01-0154 comments

> The remaining eight mice are euthanized and preserved (formalin, ethanol or MELFI) for return to Earth to be weighed in order to ensure the mice have not lost weight over the course of their stay aboard the Rodent Habitat which will confirm that the supply of water and food was sufficient.

At first I thought "shouldn't you weigh them before altering their weight with preservatives?" but then I remembered that this is in a zero-g environment, making weighing mice a bit more difficult than on Earth. Maybe a "space scale" measuring inertial mass instead could work?

> Maybe a "space scale" measuring inertial mass instead could work?

Yeah. The obvious thing would be a centrifuge where the sample is placed in a "ball on a wire" contraption, the assembly is spun up to a known RPM, and the tension in the wire is measured directly.

As the Mythbusters almost said, the only difference between whirling a mouse's corpse around tied to the end of a string in space, and science, is writing it down.

I thought they could measure it like they measure humans using SLAMMD, but apparently that’s only accurate to 0.5 lbs

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/how-do-ast...

I imagine one can build a two-plated centrifuge that works the same way as an equilibrium balance works on Earth.

You could maybe power it with the surviving mice and a piece of cheese floating on a string.

If you add a known fixed mass of preservative, then it's just some math back on earth...

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: When Arthur encounters Slartibartfast on the planet Magrathea it is explained that mice have spent a lot of their time in laboratories running complex experiments on humans, contrary to the humans thinking that it was them running experiments using mice. Slartibartfast explains to Arthur that "the business with the cheese and squeaking" was just a front for their true intelligence, and that they allowed humans to perform some "primitively staged" experiments on them in order to check how much humans had learned, and to give them "the odd prod in the right direction".

It's a massive spoiler with no warning, and very unnecessary too. Next time consider simply alluding to HGTTG and something about mice?

> “It's a massive spoiler …”

I’m the sort of person who says out loud—“lalala”— when someone talks about a piece of entertainment I’ve not yet seen/read.

However this bit about mice in HGTTG isn’t a “massive spoiler” for a book full of similar jokes or inversions. It’s just a joke, and not revealing of a major *plot twist*, which is the generally accepted definition of a spoiler—there are more things like this in the book. By the end, hardly one is more shocking than another.

Now, if you want a real good spoiler, M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense”... lalalalala

I admit you have a point. You could say in a sense it's not that type of book where plot matters lots, maybe it's just how I read it as a child... though I still don't get why someone would describe straight up what happened in the book.

Thanks for not spoiling btw, I should add 6th sense to the list, heard the title before but didn't know it's by Shyalaman

> "I still don't get why someone would describe straight up what happened in the book."

I'm going to assume you're referring to online spoilers (in text). Most people I know don't have patience to speak about books in person.

It really has to do with the community and their standards. Over at Metafilter.com that community is focused mostly on culture and entertainment topics. They're conscious of spoilers. Posters are hoping to introduce the community to new content or to think of older content in a new light. They want to share, entice and peak your interest to seek, find and enjoy the content they're posting about--if they tell you the punch line, then they've ruined the joke. And this permeates to the comments as well.

What about HN? I see a lot of science, mathematics, engineering, technology, computing topics. What's the community standard for these disciplines? Prove you did the work. Share your sources. Explain what you mean. Quote. Link. And this permeates to the comments as well. Overwhelming detail is the standard. It's a feature, and not a bug (lalalala).

But if that explanation is too much of a stretch for you, let me share the immortal words of Chris Farley, "Remember when... [...] that was Awesome!" https://youtu.be/iK-04wOy2BM?si=mym_q0ZxxfD887a1&t=46

Dammit! I recorded that episode in 1978 and was going to listen to it tonight for the very first time. Now it's been ruined for me!

Do you expect people to be born already with all books published up until Date.now() in their heads?

I can't believe this needs to even be explained but the reason spoilers are spoilers and are discouraged is that some people sometimes save something very good for later (and guess what that's disproportionately the classics because they tend to be good) and some people are too young and have not had time to read all of what you read (even if they wanted to for some reason)

In this case additionally the spoiler (detailing plot point and revealing what work it's in) was not necessary at all

Next people will be telling us that we shouldn't reveal that the answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything is '42'

Plot twist: KineticLensman is your fa.. [please stop reading here as this is a spoiler].

You allude but you don't spoil. If the original comment was something like "ah the sacrifices that the mice had to take as part of their experiments on humans" without revealing it as plot point in specific classic work it would not be a spoiler and could be way funnier

Consider the implications of your demands.

The implications of considering others before blurting stuff out are strictly positive! But maybe what you wrote is a reference that I didn't get:)

The pet-store Habitrail system of modular tubes and compartments for small rodents was always a little reminiscent of a space station.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitrail

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vintage+habitrail&va=n&t=h_&iar=im...

If I were a 'General System Vehicle' of the 'Culture' and permanently hosting human guests, I would call myself 'GSV Rodent Habitat John Calhoun' just to make fun of them and offend my fellow minds.

This is one of those topics that make me feel sadness from an emotional perspective.

But I also understand the need to do science, and these animals are essentially “taking one for the team”.

Cool setup, from an engineering perspective though.

> these animals are essentially “taking one for the team”.

"Taking one for the team": "to agree to do something unpleasant that you do not really want to do, or not have something that you want, in order to help or be kind to other people in a group."

Note the word "agree" there...

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/take-...

So what is this no-animals no-humans alternative?

The argument against animal testing is not necessarily that we should find an alternative, but that maybe the experiments themselves aren't worth it to begin with. That maybe the moral cost of the knowledge we gain from them is too high.

You don't have to be an absolutist on the matter in either direction, but surely each instance deserves this discussion, right? Because there has to be a difference between using animals to develop life-saving drugs, and whatever the hell Neuralink is doing to those poor monkeys.

While I agree that not every experiment may be worth it, my point is that there aren't good alternatives for a lot of things. But, like, nature is a cruel mistress. At every level of survival comes the suffering of other animals, whether for food, luck, or experimentation. We're not going to get to a point of harmony without somehow transcending this and completely rebuilding civilization, which is something most of us don't want.

And even then, a gazelle somewhere is going to be gored and eaten alive by a pack of wild hyenas. There's still going to be that tree with the glue-like sap that dooms any bird that perches on it to die of starvation. And so on...

> But, like, nature is a cruel mistress.

Two objections:

A) The inability to completely remove suffering from the world does not absolve us from wantonly contributing to it without cause. We do still need to ask whether the results of each particular experiment justify the suffering we inflict, even with the knowledge that suffering is a part of life. Death and pain are parts of life that we will never eliminate, but we've still tried to cut down on infant mortality and we still invented anesthesia.

B) I don't think it's a controversial take for me to say that human beings should have higher moral standards than hyenas do?

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I would argue that the majority of human achievement from medicine and surgery, to cooperative political structures that reduce war, to sanitation that allows human beings to group together on a level that other animals can't, to agriculture and domestication is the result of humans looking at natural processes and saying, "wow, those suck, we could do way better than that."

The experiment in question is about the health effects of zero-gravity on the body. There is nothing natural about that, human bodies are not evolved to survive in space. So it just feels weird to me to be turning around and saying "but what about the lions who eat gazelles, why are people trying to defy nature?" We're defying nature by building a rocketship and putting it into orbit; what we do or don't do to the mice on board the rocketship isn't going to change that.

So while some experiments are going to be worth the cost of inflicting suffering on animals, we have to ask that question about each experiment because we're not completely bound by nature and we've advanced as a species to the point where we can ask that question. We aren't lions or hyenas, we have evolved to the point where we can ask moral questions about our actions and we can take steps to minimize suffering even if we can't completely remove it. The cruelty of nature is not an excuse for us anymore to ignore that moral responsibility.

And to be kind of blunt, I don't think that most people believe the "nature is cruel" argument anyway. I think it gets brought up specifically in topics around animal welfare that make people uncomfortable because it provides an excuse to reframe animal suffering as something to be admired rather than mitigated; it's a way of saying that we don't have to feel bad about this because this is how the world is supposed to work -- animals are supposed to suffer.

But nobody argues that "nature is cruel" when it comes time to put a baby in an oxygen tank, or when they're getting anesthesia before a dental operation, or when we're setting up mosquito nets to stop the spread of malaria. Nobody asks, "why build mosquito nets, even if you completely eradicate malaria people will still die, it's unavoidable." We are very selective about where we use the argument that suffering is an inherent part of nature. Everywhere else, we understand that suffering is something to mitigate when possible and to avoid inflicting without good reason.

If only. Is it still looked down upon to say that most "experiments" on ISS are "X but in space" and have very limited scientific value?

There is no other way to test microgravity effects.

(2014), or thereabouts?

Looks like it: https://www.nasa.gov/general/rodent-research-1-spacex-4/. Year added above. Thanks!

Right - date on top is not right. References to SpX-6 etc.

Extrapolating this, it seems like future spacecraft interior planning and design will need to consider the hygiene and safety implications of flying pets.

Generally, disinfection/cleaning in zero-g must be much harder, because bacteria/dust go into all directions, not just primarily to the ground and top surfaces.

> Each Rodent Habitat can support up to ten mice or six rats providing sufficient room for the animals.

Given that the animals are going to be euthanized, their health and wellbeing probably isn't the biggest concern for the scientists involved -- but unless this is hooking into a much larger habitat than the pictures indicate, lol this is not even close to sufficient space for 6 rats to live in for several months. It's not sufficient space for 1 rat. Again, I'm trying to figure out if there's a larger environment and the article just isn't indicating it? So maybe I'm wrong and there's an actual environment here that just isn't pictured? But if the pictures of the habitat are the actual habitat... keeping 6 rats in a space the size of one of these containers for a month is very literally torture for the animals involved, plain and simple.

In most cases a group of 2-3 rats should have at least a full-height human-sized cage with multiple levels (and they should still regularly be given time outside of that cage in a larger environment), and ideally for 4-5 rats they should have double that space.

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And for this research where they're basically just asking "did space do anything to their organs" I doubt the scientists care, but there is a reproducibility problem surrounding rat research that boils down to "animals act differently when they're cooped up in inhumane conditions for months at a time." The most famous of these examples off the top of my head being the "rat utopia" experiment where a scientist stuck around 40 rats into a habitat that was barely big enough for 2 rats, then gave them literally zero stimulation of any kind, and when they predictably freaked the heck out out he then tried to pass it off as some kind of novel insight into the nature of societal collapse, population limits, and an intrinsic psychological need for competition. In fact the more obvious conclusion would have been "when actively tortured, animals act weird."

It's kind of a wild experiment because if you're not familiar at all with rats it sounds insightful -- to the point where researchers actually called the environment a "rat utopia". But if you are at all familiar with rat behavior it has all of the scientific credibility of Jigsaw writing up a formal paper about what the barbed wire maze he built in his basement proves about the human condition and urban planning.

If the only thing you're doing to rats is dissecting them, then unless the stress increases disease it won't mess with results. For determining the impact of space on a rat's body, I don't know how much the rat's quality of care changes anything about the outcome. The cage being shown isn't big enough for them to exercise, but I don't know if them being able to exercise is even relevant to the test.

But for any experiments that are more extensive, how the animals are cared for can significantly change the results you get: it can affect the likelihood of disease in the rodents, it can affect what problems they're more prone to exhibiting and how quickly they recover from operations and how they react to treatments. And of course it affects behavior.

> Given that the animals are going to be euthanized, their health and wellbeing probably isn't the biggest concern for the scientists involved

But it should be. Saying "it doesn't matter because they'd be dead anyway" opens all sorts of slippery slopes if you apply it to other animals (eg. humans). We make moral tradeoffs to cause suffering when required in the name of science but it should be imperative to try to avoid it in other cases.

> how the animals are cared for can significantly change the results you get

Recall how they raised lab temperature by 1 degree and had reduced rates of cancer in mice... or something like that.

> But it should be. Saying "it doesn't matter because they'd be dead anyway" opens all sorts of slippery slopes if you apply it to other animals (eg. humans).

You'll get no argument from me on the morals and implications, I completely agree.

But I'm less making a moral statement about how research should be conducted and more just acknowledging the fact that a lot of people don't care about whether or not rats are tortured in the first place. Not that they're going out of their way to induce suffering (with the exception of experiments like the rat utopia which was basically Cave Johnson levels of arbitrary cruelty for no reason masked under the guise of science) -- but if the choice is between torturing a rat for a month or building much more complicated housing on a space station, a lot of people will shrug their shoulders and say "stinks for them, but they're rats, who cares."

The darkly humorous thing about this article is that the page is describing these containers almost with a sense of pride about how advanced and humane they are. I think we like to have this mental model of animal research where animals are well cared for and they do have this final sacrifice at the end, but we're doing the best we can otherwise. And I want research to be as humane as possible, but I'm not naive about the reality of how animals are often treated during research and how low the standards we have on animal welfare actually are -- humane research is a goal and ideal more than it is a reality. I'm not going to get into the ethics of it, I'm just saying that keeping rats in a container this size for a month is with no exaggeration psychological torture for the animals involved; anyone who has any experience with rat behavior will tell you that a rat will be absolutely miserable in that environment. The euthanasia at the end is the kindest part of the experiment.

And people can take away whatever conclusions they want from that. I'm not telling anyone they have to care whether the experiments are humane, and I don't want to ignore that there are plenty of people who don't really care about rats. I'm not telling anyone what their response should be, I just don't want people lying to themselves and pretending that the experiments are in any way humane if they're not.

Cages so small even PetSmart is waving it's hands and saying "That's too cruel for me"

I was intrigued by the poop/urine issue. They mention a grid, but what would cause the poop pellets or urine ro to float in the right direction????

An extractor fan. It doesn't need much because it doesn't need to overcome gravity.

I saw that, but wouldn’t the urine get all over their fur? I’m quite curious about how they groom…

the spleen recovery glovebox has real ash wednesday energy

> It is this which recovers My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions Which the leopards reject

those looks like one of my old Pentium Pro tower cases

There are an enormous number of animals, rodents included, that are used in scientific experiments. Most of us believe it would be unethical to conduct the same experiments on humans without their consent.

Of course, these animals are not humans, and our ethics don't exactly map to their lives. It may ethically justified to use their lives for many types of scientific experiments. I am sometimes in this camp. Especially for medical science purposes, where the results of the research can be used to enrich all lives, even non-human lives.

It's hard for me to ethically justify this. Maybe I'd change my mind if it could be shown to me that this had potential to lead to important medical knowledge for humans and non-humans alike.

Testing medication intake in space compared to on Earth, or the progression of diseases in space are a couple of examples that I can think of where having animals at ISS over longer periods of time could help tons of lives down the line. It's not a certainty, of course, but then again neither was any of the research done until now.

(I'm not here to start up a heated or judgmental comment thread here, because I do think conversations like these about ethics are illuminating, and that the interplay between general principles and an intuitive sense of justice is hard, and that I do want to genuinely engage in good faith with you...)

I hope, as a species, that we do become a spacefaring, exploring civilization – so that these mice will not have been euthanized in vain. It would be tragic if these mice died, for example, so that space can be militarized. My feelings tell me that so much relies on what this knowledge ends up being used for – which is intimately linked with what we end up doing with the fantastically expensive investment that is spaceflight.

Militarization is one aspect of becoming a space faring species. Like it or not it’s an aspect of social organisms competing with one another.

But would it make us more militarized than we already are? There's at least some chance we'll cooperate in space (like the ISS, for example).

I've worked on studies of mice that went to ISS. I understand the ethical concern. Ultimately, mice are used regularly as a model of human disease. The study I worked on specifically considered whether a particular treatment could help people in space avoid muscle and bone loss.

I agree, yet it still makes me feel a bit sick and sad. Thank you for your contributions to medical science.

I'm not weighing in on animal testing in general, but that goes for testing animal-targeted medications too. Rabies shots, heart worm, etc - no animals gave their consent for testing those.

And in this situation, the effects of weightlessness are being tested on humans as well, at the same time. This isn't animals being a buffer for humans. Will testing the effects of weightlessness on humans lead to important medical knowledge for humans?

If the average wild mouse lives a much shorter life does that help with the moral calculus? Nature is pretty brutal. I've seen crows get into a burrow of baby rabbits and it didn't end well for the bunnies. I'm guessing your average wild mouse has a pretty short life.

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