[QUOTE=Xyzzy;448036][url]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/11/29/pooping-in-deep-space-has-nasa-stumped-the-space-poop-challenge-is-your-way-to-help/[/url][/QUOTE]

Catheters. Catheters up the wazoo (literally).

[QUOTE=Dubslow;448056]Catheters. Catheters up the wazoo (literally).[/QUOTE]
This could potentially work, but I think the risk of infection for the length of time required would be high. You need some kind of LIDAR guided probed that self aligns, expands once inserted, applies a vacuum on the other end… You'll need some kind of storage and compression sack but just plump the vacuum pump on a bag. Dyson has probably worked out the power specs.

If you suck out all the air and keep suit pressure at nominal, can you vent? Is clean-up on return a design criterion?

[QUOTE=flagrantflowers;448058]This could potentially work, but I think the risk of infection for the length of time required would be high. You need some kind of LIDAR guided probed that self aligns, expands once inserted, applies a vacuum on the other end… You'll need some kind of storage and compression sack but just plump the vacuum pump on a bag. Dyson has probably worked out the power specs.

If you suck out all the air and keep suit pressure at nominal, can you vent? Is clean-up on return a design criterion?[/QUOTE]
Certainly I was glossing over 90% of the details. I was just going for the easy play on words.

I wasn't thinking there would need to be an actively guided probe, it could just be seated as part of putting the suit on. But there would need to be sufficiently powerful airflow control, yes. The system all told could take up several kilograms of mass, maybe more.

[QUOTE=Dubslow;448062]Certainly I was glossing over 90% of the details. I was just going for the easy play on words.

I wasn't thinking there would need to be an actively guided probe, it could just be seated as part of putting the suit on. .[/QUOTE]

Just allow the astronaut to remove their arms from the arms of the suit, reach down inside the suit and insert it themselves.

[QUOTE=Xyzzy;448036][url]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/11/29/pooping-in-deep-space-has-nasa-stumped-the-space-poop-challenge-is-your-way-to-help/[/url][/QUOTE]

Another spacey waste story:
[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/science/space-junk-astroscale.html[/url]

Bad business this potty stuff...
[QUOTE]"There's a problem of separation," Roberts said. "Whatever comes out of you doesn't know it's supposed to come away from you." Each fecal collection bag came with a "finger cot" to allow the astronauts to manually move things along. Then they had to knead a germicide into their waste so that gas-expelling bacteria wouldn't flourish inside the sealed bag and cause it to explode.
The entire ordeal often took 45 minutes to an hour to complete in the Apollo spacecraft, Roberts said. To minimize their bowel movements, astronauts had a high-protein, low-residue diet — think steak and eggs and other foods that are don't make a lot of waste after they are absorbed by the body.
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=LaurV;448117]Bad business this potty stuff...[/QUOTE]On the Voyager airplane flight around the world they used the same technology. There was a rough patch of air :wraithx: over Africa when Dick Rutan was about to go, while Jenna Yeager was flying. Because of his greater strength and piloting skill, he took the pilot seat. He wound up sticking the (empty, not yet used) bag to the ceiling and sitting in the pilot seat with his sweat pants around his ankles. :sick:

They also used a 'relief tube' system. They would extend it into the slipstream when in use, then retract it afterward, to reduce drag (and thus fuel consumption).

On one of the Apollo flights, an astronaut took so much of a particular medication, that he had to have manual help on the ground to :poop:

The new freezing point of water is above 100C
[url]http://newatlas.com/water-weird-freezing-mit/46665/[/url]

[url]http://www.techtimes.com/articles/187473/20161201/new-mdma-trials-moving-forward-test-ecstasy-treatment-ptsd.htm[/url][QUOTE]MDMA, the pure form of ecstasy, will be employed in treating patients who suffer from PTSD. The drug is also tested for its properties when it comes to treating terminally ill patients.[/QUOTE][url]https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/hallucinogenic-drugs-relieved-cancer-patients-of-existential-distress/2016/11/30/fed60968-b1ab-11e6-8616-52b15787add0_story.html[/url][QUOTE]A single dose of psilocybin, the long-banned active compound in “magic mushrooms,” significantly reduced anxiety, depression and the fear of death among cancer patients for months at a time, according to two studies published Thursday.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Uncwilly;448136]On the Voyager airplane flight around the world they used the same technology.[/QUOTE]

Key difference is that Rutan had a gravity assist. Due to the innumerable problems resulting from long-term exposure to 0g of a gravity-evolved species, I suggest killing multiple birds (bone loss, poop-tech, etc) with one stone and going with spinning-torus tech for deep space missions. You'd think more NASA geeks would have watched [i]2001: A Space Odyssey[/i] and treated is at more than mere fantasy. The 50s 'conquest of space' popular books by Von Braun and Willy Ley consider all this stuff and induced-gravity is fundamental there. Why go creating problems for yourself when a ready solution is at hand?

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[url=www.sciencealert.com/we-just-got-the-first-real-evidence-of-a-strange-quantum-distortion-in-empty-space]We just got the first real evidence of a strange quantum distortion in empty space[/url] - ScienceAlert

Quantum vacuum birefringence (as evidenced by polarization of passing starlight) due to the colossally strong magnetic field around a nearby neutron star.

[QUOTE=Uncwilly;448153]The new freezing point of water is above 100C[/QUOTE]
Nothing new under the Holy Sun... some guys did it with methane long time ago. The point is to use CNG (NGV for some people here) to power cars. I am driving a Toyota CNG car for the last 6 years and I am extremely happy with it, except for the fact that you have to refill it every 2 days (I do about 100 km per day for job and daily stuff, occasional shopping, etc). The car uses also gasoline, and you can drive it as a "normal car" when you run out of methane, but that is 2-3 times more expensive to drive, and it was a time, before the oil prices went down last years, when it was 4-5 times (!!) more expensive to drive on gasoline. All in all, I said few times [URL="http://www.mersenneforum.org/showpost.php?p=411693&postcount=7"]here around[/URL], I believe the future of cars is not electric, as some say, but methane. Abundance, easiness in producing it, safety, etc., will play an important role. What is only missing, is a reliable way to store it on board. Therefore, people around the world invested millions in research to find a way to store it. The problem is that the methane molecule is not polarized, like the[URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_polarity"] water molecule[/URL], for example. In water, there are some forces between the two hydrogen atoms, but those atoms are really small comparing with the oxygen atom (not like in the figures, more like an apple and two peanuts), and they can not repel each-other so much, like in the carbon dioxide, for example, where the two oxygen atoms are comparable in size with the carbon atom, and they stay diameterally opposite (in the same link as above). Because of the two hydrogen atoms in the water molecule are not situated on perfect opposite sides, the water molecule is polarized, with the oxygen in one side and the hydrogen on the other side. When you put more molecules together, they align each-other as little magnets, causing attraction between opposite poles and repulsion between similar poles, which will cause "contraction" of the substance, the molecules stay together like good brothers. Therefore water is easy to liquefy at high temperatures (like the room temperature). Gasoline and LPG are quite the same. But for methane, the molecule is a tetrahedron with the carbon in the middle and the four hydrogens on the corners. The molecules are symmetric on all possible and impossible axes, and repelling each-other in all directions, like reputable enemies. Therefore, you can not liquefy it by compression (decrease the distance between molecules), unless you also cool it enough (decrease the agitation of those molecules). Otherwise, let by themselves, they will repel each-other and expand into gaseous state, as billions of little springs in a popup clown box.. This makes the methane very difficult to store efficiently. You need to create a very strong (therefore heavy) container to resist the tremendous pressure that develops inside of liquefied methane containers, or you need to invest energy in keep it cool to stay liquid. In the past you could see trucks transporting LNG, having an open-fire always burning on top of a little pipe coming from the gas cistern. That was because by natural evaporation, the temperature of the liquid decreases enough to keep the methane liquid, and to avoid the cistern boiling, you have to let it evaporate (or add a fridge to it, inefficient). But if you let it evaporate, you need to avoid building the pressure, and then you let it out. But letting it out is dangerous, somebody lights a cigarette on the side of the street and there it goes half of the city... So, you burn it. I remember some old trucks used to transport liquid methane, they didn't have a gasoline tank, and they run on methane they transported, and they must let the engine running continuously to burn the gas that evaporates... And if the engine stops, there is an automatic burner (like your cooking machine at home) that starts under your car, burning out the gas (and keeping the engine warm, as the methane as I said, only burns over a certain temperature - my car starts on gasoline and switches to CNG after one kilometer or so, when the motor gets hot).

In the nowadays cars, to avoid problems with LNG, they use it in gaseous form, as compressed gas, at a lower pressure, for safety, but this makes your car run only 200 km with a full tank. That is why you buy LPG and gasoline by liter (or gallon) but you buy CNG by kilogram. The gases do not have a proper volume, remember? The quantity per volume depends on compression, that is why you buy it in kilograms.

And your car does not have much autonomy on CNG itself, without the attached gasoline tank.

Therefore people invest huge amount of money trying to find solutions to store the natural gas efficiently. One such solution published some time ago, involved storing the gas in a stack of carbon sheets. Imagine millions of pingpong balls that repel each-other such as you can not put two of them closer than a meter each-other. You will need a city to store your pingpong balls. But if you put them into very small drawers, each drawer holding a single layer of molecules, you can then stack the drawers more efficiently, as the pingpong balls will not repel each-other through the drawers' walls. This method could store a huge amount of methane, it "freezes" the methane in layers and layers, drawers and drawers, it is sooo efficient... but then you have another problem: if something is too tight packed, you can not unpack it easily. That is, how to take the pingpong balls out of the drawers when you need them?... It turned out this is not easy and the method can not be used for cars. You can not do it by heating the carbon foam, or shaking it, whatever (which should be easy), you need to destroy the structure, etc., to recover the stored methane... But people still try, and we are optimists that their success will come. So that we can drive two thousand miles on a "baton" of carbon foam filled with methane...

That is why I say, find a method to do that, and you are billionaire next day... We tried too, but for whatever reason we stopped at the phase "reading wikipedia articles about the subject".

The method itself is not new either. Something similar is done with metal hydrides in the NiMH accumulators, for example. Hydrogen by itself, is a different fish, but still same difficult to compress and store, for other reasons: the hydrogen molecule is so small it can escape through the smallest cracks (like between the pistons and walls), it can combine with many oils used for greasing the pistons, it even can escape through metals, because no matter how tough is that metal, its atomic structure is just pingpong balls, separated by meters of empty space. Therefore hydrogen is difficult to compress, store, handle, whatever. And clever people came with clever solutions, they mix hydrogen with metal powders. Very small metallic particle will retain hydrogen, in fact, hydrogen "diffuses" inside the heap of the metal powder as the ink diffuses in water. But that is already a different story, and I have to go right now...