We've probably made this pretty clear by now, but if not, let us just reiterate: NASA spend money on weird things. One of their more stranger recent propositions came in the form of the bed rest study, where they were offering potential employment to people who would get paid $18,000 (roughly £11,000) to do....nothing. Literally nothing. They didn't even want people to move. For seventy days. The participants could read, watch television, take a study course or even carry on with their normal job, so long as they didn't get out of bed. Staying in bed was the crucial part. It wasn't some research into the depths of human procrastination, but a way for the space agency to study the effects of long-term spaceflight on the human body - like, say, one of those long-haul flights to Mars or another distant planet. So, for ten weeks, seventy people did absolutely nothing. And they did it in conditions designed to simulate weightlessness, to see what toll it takes on the human body after a prolonged period: the beds were be tilted back at a six-degree angle, with the head lower than the feet, to prompt cardiovascular stress similar to that experienced by astronauts in space. Which means it wasn't a total cake walk, since the participants would lose muscle mass and bone density, and then have to do a sort of rehabilitating set of exercises after the fact to get them back to normal. That is, once they've done some other exercises which simulate astronauts climbing out of a ship and onto an alien world, to ensure that they don't send them up there only for them to be stuck in bed.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
