When you've had a stressful day, sometimes a nice hot bath with lots of bubbles is the best thing to soothe your cares and make you forget all about your troubles. Sometimes the experience is so welcome that it's enough to make you wish that you could stay in there indefinitely.
But now, it turns out you might well be paid to do so. That's right: it seems as though the European Space Agency (ESA) is looking for paid participants to take part in their latest study, which involves you lying in a bath for five whole days.
Watch actor Henry Cavill talk about how he prepared for his bath scene from the TV series The Witcher:Per Space Daily, the bath-based research is scheduled to commence later this year, at the Institute for Space Medicine and Physiology Toulouse in France.
The space agency needs 20 women to lie in a dry-immersion bath for five days. The research is designed to help test the effects of weightlessness on the human body for a sustained period of time, in order to stimulate the effects of zero-gravity on the body of an astronaut.
Commenting on the research per Space Daily, ESA science coordinator for human research Angelique Van Ombergen stated: "The goal is to definitively test measures that reduce the unwanted effects of living in weightlessness. We have a long history at ESA of conducting bedrest studies and this round will put all our knowledge gained towards fine-tuning and working out the best techniques."
Meanwhile, human spaceflight team leader, Jennifer Ngo-Anh, stated: "We get many requests to be a volunteer for these studies, but they are no joke. Lying in bed sounds fun but the pleasure wears off very quickly - especially when blood is drawn and muscle biopsies are involved - we constantly salute the volunteers that sacrifice their daily lives for the benefit of human exploration!"
So if you'd like to get involved, then why not send an application off to the ESA via the following link. Go on: do it for science!
