Methods of Research

Questionnaires – Simple, easy, cheap and effective. They can bring a lot of information on the public quickly, however it will be difficult to gain the amount of detail that you would in a personal interview. It seems unlikely that I will be using many in my project.

Interviewing by Email/ In Person – These are effective ways of gaining information. Personal interviews can be difficult to set up as the expert may have a busy schedule, so in that way email is better. On the other hand the information you can gain from an email is more limited as you can’t judge their reaction or follow up questions as effectively. Interviewing will be very useful for me as I will need to talk to specialists in the field to get the latest information.

Experiments – If applicable these can be a great way to conduct research as you can design it to fit exactly with your question. I may be able to do an experiment using a clinostat as I wrote in a previous post.

Ethnography – Gaining knowledge about a culture through observation, surveys, interviews and living with the ethnic group. This can give you a large amount of information but would take a long time to conduct. Let’s just say it’s unlikely that I will be using it.

Case studies – Studying previous events can be a very good way to extract information about a topic. I might be able to look at past or even future experiments conducted by a Space Agency.

What I've learnt so far and where i go next

Well i didn't actually know anything about my topic a few months ago. But now i know that the microgravity environment has severe effects on human health ranging from severe loss of bone density and muscle mass to heart atrophy with the consequenses of the astronauts returning from space with the health of an eighty year old after initially going into space in almost superhuman condition. I have also read about micro-robots which could be used in future space missions in case a surgical operation would be needed on board the space craft. There is also a very high risk of death to high doses of space radiation which is obviously a bit of a problem. Also, what seems obvious now but what i never realised before is that these long term missions into space can often have adverse phycological affects on the astronauts. They will be with the same people for months, in the same rooms, with the same routine every day and have very little communication to the world.

There are still more health hazards which I havn't looked into yet so obviously my next point of research is to look those up, but also to find in more detail about what i already know. Then afterwards i need to start thinking about the ways we can overcome these and find out about cutting edge research in the field.

Background Research For Sources

I have begun to do some initial research on my question. One website which I am finding of incredible help is http://www.newscientist.com/  I am able to look at articles posted over the last twenty years and there are always more coming. However, many of the articles i have read so far do not go into enough detail and therefore I'm going to have to look into other sources to compliment what I already know.
The NASA website http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2002/30sept_spacemedicine/ looks like it has a lot of information on, however it seems quite basic. There is some useful information on it and i do like some of the animations on the site.
http://www.esa.int/ is another useful website. Although it is sometimes difficult to get the exact information which i need, especially as most of what is posted on the site is meant to inform people about jobs or about the objectives of missions undertaken and not about the specifics and technicalities of said missions. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_medicine has a vast amount of information on my topic, and fortunatlely from what i've read its a wikipedia article which isn't bursting with ridiculous techincal terminology that make it incredibly difficult to understand. There is a lot of useful information on the site, more than I have been able to get through so far, however it focuses primarily on medical conditions with little mention of medical treatment.
http://www.nss.org/community/med/home.html this website is just an incredibly long list of all kinds of sources bases on aeromedicine. It was published 10 years ago and will obviously be slighlty out of date, but it just shows that there isn't a lack of information for me to go through.

Overall i think that internet research is going to be extremely useful to me as there is a wide variety of information available. However, obviously I'm still going to look through textbooks and email speacialists in the field and use other types of sources as I'm sure they will proove invaluable.

EPQ presentation night

What did I learn about the EPQ process?

I realised that for a successful project it would be better for me to narrow down my question so that I’m not completely overwhelmed. I saw a presentation on how war has affected modern medicine which I was told was originally titled how was has affected modern science. The speaker made it clear that he wouldn’t have been able to complete his project with such a wide topic. For this reason I am certain that I will specify my question about aeronautical medicine.  In addition, emailing professors and experts in their fields was highly recommended by the students. Many said they wish they had sent their emails earlier than they had, as it proved to be an invaluable source of information.

I was impressed by the way the students answered their questions after their talk.  They obviously had a thorough knowledge of their topic and were able to apply their knowledge in areas where they hadn’t thought of before.  

Useful skills that the students had were being able to communicate their points clearly and with confidence. Sometimes they had technical terminology which was difficult to understand for most of the audience, so I think awareness of your audience is also very important.

Reflections for my own project

                 As i have already written i will narrow down my question with a focus on medicine to make the project more manageable. I want to try to make my presentation as accessible and interesting as I can. I already have ideas with how I’m going introduce my topic. I want my title to be interesting as well, maybe something like: How are we going to keep the Neil Armstrongs of the future alive? But that is still to be decided on.

Captain's Log: Decisions and Deliveries

At the moment I'm trying to decide whether i should narrow my question to only focus on the biological and medical hazards and precautions that such a mission would need to take. If i do decide, as it seems likely i will, to study medicine at university this title would probably benefit me more in the application process. I'm not entirely sure about this however, as i don't want to limit it too much and there would be interesting things that i would miss out on.

This week in New Scientist the PERFECT article arrived at my door step. It was almost like a gift from the heavens! It turns out that ESA is conducting an experiment in which six people are staging a realistic simulation of a landing on Mars (although they wont experience any shift in gravity). Researchers hope to learn useful lessons about the psychological impact of the mission amongst other things. After reading i realised i should probably keep other useful articles i have read, so i went through some of the old issues i have and found some useful information such as an article about the potential for using a magnetic shield for defending against deadly high energy particles and cosmic radiation. I also found this which will be useful: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827843.700-superhero-suit-to-strengthen-astronauts-bones.html

Captain's Log: Planning The Journey

As far as my final project is concerned, i don't really have many ideas for it apart from an essay. Perhaps i will decide on something more interesting but at the moment an essay seems like the most logical choice.

After the meeting on balancing our research and using a variety of sources, I began to think about where i will be getting my information from. It's true that my information will be from predominantly secondary sources. If i could go to Mars to do an experiment about the suitability of life there, i would have already partly answered my question. Not that it really matters, its rather unlikely ill be there soon. Much of my information will be coming from magazine articles and interviews of scientists.

HOWEVER, i have had a eureka moment about an experiment that i can do. Using a clinostat in biology i can negate the effects of gravity. It works by spinning vertically so that gravity is averaged over 360 degrees, but at a slow pace to avoid a centralpetal force. Then i can put something in it. What that will be remains to be finalized. Obviously im not going to keep a human spinning for weeks. Although perhaps i can use colonies of bacteria or germinating plants, and see if this micrgravity environment affects their reproduction and respiration. Of course a bacteria is massively different to a human, but the core processes of life will still be similar, and perhaps i will be able to gain some knowledge from the experiment and attempt to apply it to our species. I have asked Mr Milne about doing this at some point in the future and he says that it sounds like a good idea.

Oh, and i bought a Buzz Aldrin App on my ipod about space science. Constantly Making Progress.

Captain's Log: Why I Chose This Research

I have always enjoyed sciences and i've always been fascinated by space and its many mysteries. A few years ago I watched a documentary about the 1969 moon landing when Neil Armstrong became the first human being to step out onto another celestial body. At the end of the documentary the narrator posed a simple question: How much farther can humans travel?

To me the concept of human spacetravel is amazing, yet up until this point i had never really given it much thought. I realized that this was my chance to really analyse the siuation to decide for myself how likely this event would be.