quote:

Study recommends mandatory 3-year vacation so astronauts' brains can recover

Scientists studying the brains of astronauts have discovered startling changes brought on by microgravity that has led them to recommend a three-year break between missions.

The study, published last week in Scientific Reports, looked at the brains of 30 astronauts before and after space travel, determining that the brain's cerebrospinal fluid-filled ventricles expand anywhere from 11 percent to an additional quarter of their original size the closer astronauts get to the six-month mark of their missions.

While the expansion tapers off around the six-month mark, it doesn't necessarily end, said Rachael Seidler, one of the study's authors and a professor of applied physiology at the University of Florida.

"Many astronauts travel to space more than one time, and our study shows it takes about three years between flights for the ventricles to fully recover," Seidler said. It's not all bad news, though: "We were happy to see that the changes don't increase exponentially, considering we will eventually have people in space for longer periods."

Complementing Seidler's team's discovery is previous findings which determined that spaceflight causes an "upward shift of the brain within the skull," leading to "cortical crowding and narrowing of the sulci at the top of the brain" that can be seen in a shift of gray matter volume at the top of the brain and a decrease at the base.

With that in mind, Seidler and company are urging caution. "We don't yet know for sure what the long-term consequences of this is on the health and behavioral health of space travelers, so allowing the brain time to recover seems like a good idea," the professor said.

[...]

ashpanash posted:

It always is, and the UFO guys always fall for it, like Lucy with the football. I understand why; they desperately want it to be true, so they hold on tightly to any justification they can find. And to be clear it's not like this is some important moral or character failing on their part, I'm just trying to describe their mindset.

You're not going to win a lot of friends among those types by dismissing their latest hullabaloo. But they hate skeptics for the same reason gamblers hate losing: the reality is, the odds are stacked against them in every sense.

mediaphage posted:

fluoride

anyway, the house is promising hearings about this so if nothing else that should be interesting

LanceHunter posted:

I'm not trying to say that I'm innovating here. I've known about Stanislaw Lem's works, for example. But these cases of "occasionally looking" are often large and expensive projects. Breakthrough Listen alone is going to waste $100 million before the decade is out. And worse than the waste of resources is the way that these pseudoscientific efforts have a negative impact on the culture and create the foot in the door through which conspiracy theorists like Leslie Kean make their careers.

At least if the people following these impulses are spending that money trying (and probably failing) to talk to whales that will mean some resources are going to conserving those at-risk species and maybe doing some environmental protection.

LanceHunter posted:

They might not have funded some other scientific project, no. But if I were a post-doc astrophysicist who couldn't manage to book time on a large radio telescope for my research because a well-funded boondoggle is going to use it to produce a paper saying "nope, nothing here", I would be kinda pissed.

LanceHunter posted:

I think this shows a limit of imagination. Maybe what is out there are some kind of hyper-tardigrade who can naturally survive in space and coast on propulsive blasts from massive water jets like those of Enceladus? Maybe they perceive with vision that is more akin to a spectroscope and they communicate with each other over interstellar distances by farting out specific molecules in a way that lets other members of the species read information from way the starlight passes through those farts?

Assuming that there are others out there that would be building spaceships and radio telescopes specifically because we have built spaceships and radio telescopes feels extremely limited. Especially since there are at least 1 million animal species on the planet currently and exactly one of them has built those things.

DrSunshine posted:

Little bit tangent to this but the trailer for the Three Body Problem Netflix adaptation dropped a few days ago. I just finished reading the series earlier this year, and I'm excited to see it come to a platform where I can actually stream it!

LanceHunter posted:

Or, you know, let's spend $100M on research that might move the needle on the crisis in cosmology and actually advance human understanding of the universe, rather than indulging in a fantasy.

In the background of all this is the fact that there is a real chance we could end up finding compelling signs of life existing outside of Earth within our lifetime (particularly given how many exoplanet-focused projects are getting approved for JWST time). But that will come in a form more like the work in this paper, rather than catching a stray broadcast from some aliens' radio.

cat botherer posted:

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-big-gravitational-wave-announcement-is-coming-thursday-heres-why-were-excited

This is cool: There's a major announcement coming soon about cosmic gravitational wave background - basically the same deal as cosmic background radiation, but gravity waves. CBR is from when the universe first became transparent, a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. However, the universe was always transparent to gravitational waves, so this could go back to 10^-32 seconds after the Big Bang.

cat botherer posted:

Oh cool. Sounds like that might happen during a galactic merger. I don't know of supermassive black holes that aren't at galactic centers, but I suppose they could be flung out occasionally into intergalactic space. That would make them hard to detect aside from gravitational lensing though.

asexual linuxmancer posted:

I have heard/seen rumblings that a supermassive black hole merger was detected.

mobby_6kl posted:

Virgin Galactic had their first commercial mission with some Italian air force guys. They've been working on this for so long I kind of forgot about the whole project until now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-bnaq9BKio&t=2307s

It's cool and I love the vehicles but man 2 minutes in microgravity is super underwhelming. What's the main limiting factor that's preventing them from going higher? It seems like there's plenty of space for more fuel so they should be able to accelerate it quite a bit more than that.

Raenir Salazar posted:

A lot I imagine. They wouldn't be paying a lot of money to do an experiment like that in microgravity if the results weren't worth it one way or another.

DrSunshine posted: