I thought this one was fun.

Author: * Sokni Hvitaskald - 10 Posts on this thread out of 1,073 Posts sitewide.
Date: May 20, 2006 - 23:15

Flashy goggles combat space sickness

* 15:20 19 May 2006
* NewScientist.com news service
* Kelly Young
Goggles that simulate a strobe-lighting effect could prevent the nauseating effects of space sickness – and that of more down-to-Earth travel.
The goggles were honoured at the Inventors' Luncheon 2006 at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, US, on Thursday. They were designed by Millard Reschke at JSC, with George Ford and Jeffrey Somers at Wyle Laboratories in Houston.
Space sickness affects many astronauts for the first few days of their space missions, reducing what they are able to accomplish. Even after returning to Earth, between 60% and 70% of all astronauts still feel the ill effects of space travel.
Reschke came up with the idea for the glasses after observing a particular astronaut who had returned from a long stay on Russia's former space station, Mir.
In a test that involved identifying symbols while walking on a treadmill, all the other astronauts previously tested performed less well after their space missions than before. But this astronaut performed surprisingly well – reproducing his pre-flight levels – and he also reported less space sickness than other long-duration space flyers.
Reschke's team noticed that the astronaut's eyes darted back and forth more than normal. The team suspected these eye jitters – known as square wave jerks – were helping to "freeze" the moving visual scene on his retina, protecting him from space sickness.
Black out
The symptoms of travel sickness are thought to result from a disagreement between visual information from the eyes and balance information from the inner ears, caused by the rattles and shakes of a vehicle's movement.
A 1981 study suggested that strobe lighting might help with motion sickness, but it was not clear why. After Reschke saw the Mir astronaut, he wondered whether strobe lighting might also be freezing images on the retina.
So his team created glasses with lenses made of LCD "shutters" that switch from dark to clear very quickly, providing a strobe effect. In a study published in January 2006, Reschke's team tested a pair of the glasses. The LCD shutters allowed four 10-millisecond "flashes" of light to come through each second.
The subjects using the glasses were able to endure simulated motion sickness for the entire 30-minute duration of the study – those without the goggles lasted only 24 minutes on average.
Read the rest at:
http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=dn9196