Red Bull may be sending dudes to jump from the stratosphere, but NASA’s still out there doing stuff too. It’s not quite as flashy as livestreamed sky-diving, by NASA is currently working on a fast-acting, anti-nausea nasal spray. Talk about technology we could all benefit from.
It turns out that over half of astronauts develop a kind of space motion-sickness, which is accompanied by all those light-headed, “Oh god I am going to vomit” feelings we all know too well, except in space. The drug NASA’s has its eye on is called intranasal scopolamine, or INSCOP, and can work as a pill or a patch, but it’s nasal spray that goes to work the quickest to keep you from throwing up, or down, or everywhere.
Epiomed Therapeutics, the company that’s been working with NASA on the project, is also working with the US Navy, because the military is pretty keen on nasal sprays too, like ones that battle depression. The drug will still have to undergo FDA testing, and there’s no word on whether or not it will be prescription, but it would definitely be a boon for us Earth-bound folks too. [Reuters via DVICE]
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