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Will astronauts traveling to Mars remember much of it? That's the question concerning University of California, Irvine scientists probing a phenomenon called "space brain."
UCI's Charles Limoli and colleagues found that exposure to highly energetic charged particles – much like those found in the galactic cosmic rays that will bombard astronauts during extended spaceflights – causes significant long-term brain damage in test rodents, resulting in cognitive impairments and dementia.
Their study appears today in Nature's Scientific Reports. It follows one last year showing somewhat shorter-term brain effects of galactic cosmic rays. The current findings, Limoli said, raise much greater alarm. (Link to study: www.nature.com/articles/srep34774)
"This is not positive news for astronauts deployed on a two-to-three-year round trip to Mars," said the professor of radiation oncology in UCI's School of Medicine. "The space environment poses unique hazards to astronauts. Exposure to these particles can lead to a range of potential central nervous system complications that can occur during and persist long after actual space travel – such as various performance decrements, memory deficits, anxiety, depression and impaired decision-making. Many of these adverse consequences to cognition may continue and progress throughout life."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 05 2017, @07:09PM (6 children)
It would be worse in humans. The extra shielding that we have is more or less nothing compared with the penetration power of cosmic rays. To make matters worse, we have a significantly larger brain which means that at any given moment we're going to have more cosmic rays interfering with our brains in ways that we don't fully understand.
One of the big problems that has to be solved is figuring out how to effectively shield ourselves in order to not wind up with cancer and brain damage. These are high energy particles that are also relatively large and unlike neutrinos they have a significant interaction with matter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 05 2017, @07:57PM (5 children)
You may believe this. Someone else may believe otherwise. Problem is, no hard evidence either way.
For dealing in beliefs, we have religions. Science exists for providing us with facts. Which it failed to do in this case.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 05 2017, @09:12PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 05 2017, @10:07PM (1 child)
And more likely to be countered by protective mechanisms. No real need for Stepmother Nature to prolong a mouse's life beyond its first litter, now is there? Not so with long-lived, slow-increasing species.
Longer lifespan in a species is never an accident, but an evolved trait conferring a selective advantage. And it is not as if early humans' cave dwellings didn't have radon in them. Note this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4030667/ [nih.gov]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 06 2017, @01:13AM
Well, there's going to be more than three orders of magnitude more radiation events in absolute number that would need to be compensated for.
Background radiation exposure on Earth is very different from cosmic ray exposure in space, and those two are in turn somewhat different from radon exposure on Earth. Radon exposure is mostly to respiratory system and surface organs (skin/eyes). Background radiation can also come via food. Neither results in significant radiation exposure for the human brain aside from radiative elements like potassium that are taken up via digestion and used in the brain. In any case, the lower energy of such radiation tends to mean that radiation damage is local with poor particle penetration (for example, the primary decay modes of radon 222 and its decay products is via a bunch of charged particles, which have poor tissue penetration).
Cosmic rays are both much higher energy than background radiation and radon exposure on Earth, and harder to shield against (due to the sprays of high energy secondary particles that are generated when the cosmic ray hits anything including shielding). So unlike radon, the larger the brain and its mass are, the more cosmic rays and secondary particles it will intercept. So despite being mostly charged particles, cosmic rays have considerable penetration of tissues and are more likely to create multiple areas of damage when they do strike.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 05 2017, @09:29PM (1 child)
This isn't a matter of faith, we know the humans are more susceptible to cancer from this sort of damage than smaller animals are. As has been mentioned already, humans live a lot longer than rats and it's not even close, the difference is roughly an order of magnitude. We also have a larger brain, which means that there's more of it to catch a particle. While brains don't generate many new cells in adults, it's not zero and if any of those dividing cells gets hit, there's a substantial risk of cancer or death of the cells.
In this case, science hasn't failed to prove anything. Humans haven't been sent to the moon, which is the only way that we could meet the standard you're proposing. Otherwise, what we do is expose laboratory animals to the cosmic rays and see what happens and then use that to extrapolate to what that would likely result in for humans. It's the system for a great number of decades now that you do testing on animals first to extrapolate what the likely result would be for a human before deciding whether or not to expand trials to involve humans.
I think it's somewhat ironic that the skeptics tend to be the only people on earth less intelligent than the true believers. Both groups are completely incompetent, but they both fail to recognize their own lack of competence or really value.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 05 2017, @10:13PM
Now go learn some actual biology. It may surprise your pop-science right out of your larger brain. ;)