Name: The Artificial Gravity Lab
Uploaded: 2020-04-01T01:05:59.000Z
Duration: 6 min 18 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

- Last video, I was at the Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Lab at Brandeis University,

Adverbs of degree

and while I was there one of the team just casually mentioned

that they have an artificial gravity laboratory.

Artificial Gravity Facility sounds like something out of science fiction,

but it's not, and there's very much a reason why

I'm keeping my head straight and forward at the moment.

This is the Artificial Gravity Facility, otherwise known as the rotating room.

This is unscripted. I don't know what's going to happen now,

other than things are going very weird when I move my arms.

No one has invented science fiction gravity generators yet,

but if you have a theoretical spaceship going to Mars

and you wanted to generate apparent gravity

to keep astronauts healthy, that's what you'd do.

You would spin up the ship and use centrifugal force.

How do humans deal with a very strange gravitational environment?

- The first thing that you should do is try to push yourself off the wall

and align your body with the direction of the resultant.

- No, don't walk, it's a little dangerous.

long duration space flight without artificial gravity.

The best way to study artificial gravity on Earth

Ideally we want to study its effects on the human body

and we want to learn also how to pre-adapt astronauts

99.9% of those will be highly dysfunctional individuals until adapted.

- They have NASA-standard sick bags for everyone, by the way.

I was required to keep one in my back pocket throughout just in case,

your inner ear has no idea what's going on and things go... wrong, very quickly.

- And now move your arm and try to go as straight as you can.

- You shouldn't move your head. - Do you get used to this?

- Yeah, yeah, you get used to it, yeah. You can adapt.

Move your arms and try to feel this force that is...

Okay, just to be clear, I'm not putting this on,

the signals I'm giving to my muscles are, 'move my arms forward'.

But I'm pushing against a force here, you know.

- If you keep going, at some point you won't feel the force anymore.

- That's weird, right? - That's so weird.

- So if I try to do anything else, I haven't adjusted to it.

But that specific movement, my body's got used to.

is for me to try and throw a little tennis ball at you.

Because, in my head, this is a normal reference frame.

All those artefacts are from the Coriolis force.

It's not a real force acting on the ball, but it looks like one

when you're in that weird rotating environment.

Have a look at this 360° image of the lab.

Now, it's a little distorted because it's from a single camera in the middle,

but it's close enough. Here's the tricky part:

the circumference of a circle is longer the further out you go from the middle.

But because everything in that circle is rotating at the same speed,

things on the outside have farther to travel, so they're

moving at a faster speed than things on the inside.

On the outside, we're moving pretty fast, but that camera in the middle

So let's mark the sideways speed that everything

is moving at, relative to the rest of the world.

When you throw a ball across that room it keeps that

sideways speed that it had when it left your hand

as it travels into slower moving areas of the room.

It was going the same speed as everything around it,

so it looked like it aimed for the centre.

But by the time it starts to get there, it's a missile,

flying outwards compared to everything around it.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

The Artificial Gravity Lab

weird

struggle

ridiculous

straight