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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday December 30 2017, @12:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the encouraging-women-in-science dept.

NASA is collaborating with a Mattel subsidiary to create Luciana, a character who wants to become the first human to step on Mars:

NASA is collaborating with a well-known doll and book company to inspire children to dream big and reach for the stars. Through a Space Act Agreement, NASA partnered with American Girl to share the excitement of space with the public, and in particular, inspire young girls to learn about science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

[...] American Girl is known for their series of dolls created to encourage girls to think about who they want to be when they grow up. The focus of the collaboration is the Girl of the Year doll for 2018, an 11-year-old aspiring astronaut named Luciana who wants to be the first person to put boots on Mars. As NASA's human spaceflight focus shifts to deep space, including a return to the Moon, and ultimately, Mars, the collaboration with American Girl is timely.

The partnership with American Girl affords NASA an opportunity to educate through Luciana's story the value of learning from mistakes, teamwork and remaining goal-oriented even through challenging moments. Luciana's experiences may be familiar for many of the Women@NASA, including astronauts like Megan, who have overcome obstacles to pursue their dreams.

You can buy Luciana and whisper to her about all of the frightening health effects of long-term space travel outside the comfort of the Van Allen belts.

Remember that women are lighter and less metabolically active than men, which could translate into significant mass savings for a Mars-bound crewed spacecraft.

Also at Engadget and ABC.


Original Submission

Related Stories

Five Key Findings From 15 Years of the International Space Station 44 comments

The Conversation has a story about five key findings from 15 years of the International Space Station:

1. The fragility of the human body — there is considerable loss of strength and bone mass without intervention. Mitigating this is key to making it possible to have manned trips to mars.

2. Interplanetary contamination — spores of Bacillus subtilis were exposed to space upon the ISS (but shielded from solar UV radiation). "The space vacuum and temperature extremes alone were not enough to kill them off."

3. Growing crystals for medicine — "Crystals in a microgravity environment may be grown to much larger sizes than on Earth, enabling easier analysis of their micro-structure. Protein crystals grown on the ISS are being used in the development of new drugs for diseases such as muscular dystrophy and cancer."

4. Cosmic rays and dark matter — early results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) support the theory that a halo of dark matter surrounds the Milky Way.

5. Efficient combustion — flames burn more efficiently in space with much less soot produced. Understanding this may lead to more efficient combustion in vehicles.


Original Submission

The Many Horrors Of Space Surgery 21 comments

Wired has a story about the challenging (and largely unexplored) area of surgery and traumatic injury in space.

Currently shorter term, near earth missions concentrate training on how to stabilize and restrain injured astronauts, and then contact a specialist on the ground and work out a plan to get them home for treatment.

However as longer term Moon and Mars missions become a more realistic prospect this is an area where the need to deal with major injuries in space, and handle the communications lag to specialist support, introduce a new set of problems.

Over decades of Apollo, Mir, Skylab, space shuttle, and International Space Station missions, astronauts have had medical concerns and problems—and, of course, there have been deadly catastrophes. But no astronaut has ever had a major injury or needed surgery in space. If humans ever again venture past low Earth orbit and outward toward, say, Mars, someone is going to get hurt. A 2002 ESA report put the chances of a bad medical problem on a space mission at 0.06 per person-year. As Komorowski wrote in a journal article last year, for a crew of six on a 900-day mission to Mars, that's pretty much one major emergency all but guaranteed.

The article also contains a link to an article on the ISS medical equipment, obtained by Vice through a Freedom Of Information request.


Original Submission

Mars-Bound Astronauts Face Chronic Dementia Risk From Cosmic Ray Exposure 17 comments

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

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."

Source: https://news.uci.edu/2016/10/10/mars-bound-astronauts-face-chronic-dementia-risk-from-galactic-cosmic-ray-exposure/


Original Submission

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday December 30 2017, @01:27AM (11 children)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Saturday December 30 2017, @01:27AM (#615697) Homepage

    She looks as if she'll snort a bunch of meth and cobble together a rocket from duct tape and stolen parts, and be the first woman to get pregnant three times in space by Martians whose names she doesn't even remember.

    Oy Vey, this is pretty bad pandering, but not as bad as that time Google tried to engage in historical revisionism. [amazonaws.com]

    Hint: The team who conducted that mission from the ground were all clean-shaven white men, not Blacks with a token White bimbo and hipster fuck.

    • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:00AM (9 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:00AM (#615704)

      Insightful?? gheeze has S/N really become a white boy only club? Upgrading snarky comments about women and people with different skin color.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:13AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:13AM (#615705)

        Have you ever known anyone who had an American Girl doll? Hint for you, it is little spoiled white princesses who will someday have daddy or authority fetishes, or inflated expectations of their own self worth.

        Forget white boy's club. It is literally the little spoiled white girls club.

        And it is owned by Mattel, whose only claim to fame is: 'At least we're not those assholes over at Hasbro!'

      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by qzm on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:40AM (5 children)

        by qzm (3260) on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:40AM (#615710)

        Its ethanol-fueled, are you new around here?

        But more to the point, I suggest you go and read the article lined to under the claim women are less metabolically active.
        THAT is a sign of what parts of NASA are now.
        'Our food, water, power, and communications were limited, and we were only allowed to exit the habitat if we wore mock spacesuits. So many Martian hassles, so little glory.'
        Oh dear, hassles! and no glory! terrible.
        but then we get on to the core of the claims:
        'Drysdale found that a fifth-percentile woman would use less than half the resources of a 95th-percentile man. '
        Really? a woman in the bottom 5% of size uses less than half the resources of a man in the top 5%? Equality!
        I have an idea, if you want science, how about measuring two similar people? no? too difficult? doesnt give the right outcome?

        Of course women wont be sent first to mars, for one simple reason - if a man dies on the trip it will be 'heroic', if a woman dies it will be 'a disaster'.
        Men are, after all, now second-rate disposable citizens.

        Of course it is most likely that when NASA gets there they will get a good welcome from the Chinese, and perhaps a ride from the landing pad in a nice red Tesla, but hey..

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 30 2017, @03:01AM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday December 30 2017, @03:01AM (#615719)

          Drysdale found that a fifth-percentile woman would use less than half the resources of a 95th-percentile man.

          Yep, that's a bad one... Sounds like Drysdale was given some gender spin mandate to make it sound like women should still aspire to be astronauts, even though they're historically heavily under-represented. Here's an article from maybe a year ago pitching the same:

          http://www.iflscience.com/space/50-percent-nasas-latest-class-astronauts-female/ [iflscience.com]

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          🌻🌻 [google.com]
        • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday December 30 2017, @04:31AM (3 children)

          by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 30 2017, @04:31AM (#615742) Journal

          Men are, after all, now second-rate disposable citizens.

          Always have been, always will be. Back in the mists of prehistory, men were more expendable than women. Nothing has changed, and nothing is likely to change. If you find a time travel machine, you can jump a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand years into the future, and it will not have changed. Around the time that man evolves into some other kind of creature, it may change. Of course, you're talking about millions of years, not mere thousands.

          Consider genetics and reproduction. Women make intensive investments into reproduction. Women also represent huge investments by culture/society. A woman lost translates into some number of future citizens lost. A guy lost? No big deal. So long as a couple guys remain they can inseminate hundreds, even thousands of women. Millions, even, with artificial insemination. Society just doesn't need a lot of guys around. They are expendable.

          • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 30 2017, @05:35AM (2 children)

            by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday December 30 2017, @05:35AM (#615755) Journal

            If you find a time travel machine, you can jump a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand years into the future, and it will not have changed. Around the time that man evolves into some other kind of creature, it may change. Of course, you're talking about millions of years, not mere thousands.

            Your timeline is just waaay off.

            Humans are already mostly artificially selected. Birth defects, pregnancy complications, and many illnesses that would have been a death sentence for most children are now treatable. Now we are beginning to move into the realm of genetic engineering. The scumbag Francis Collins put some feeble roadblocks in place, but research will continue and China and the rich will create designer babies with heritable genetic enhancements.

            The first designer babies will mostly be drawing upon known genes. Optimization rather than the creation of a new species. But if we wanted to create a new species of human with major changes, it could be done within 100 years. Not millions of years, not even thousands.

            That's not taking into account whatever computing advances we get within that timeframe. Stacked neuromorphic processors could enable a real intelligent machine. Quantum processors could also play a role. These advances will accelerate our ability to make genomes from scratch to create any life forms we want. And we'll see a convergence of human and machine intelligence in the form of cyborgs, brain-computer interfaces, and weirder forms of life.

            In the labs, we already seeing good progress towards creating synthetic embryos and artificial wombs. That would enable 1-2 men to have children without any female involvement, and of course females could do the same.

            This doesn't mean that men will be any less expendable. Instead, both men and women will be relatively expendable and the size of your wallet will determine your true worth as a human being. Part of Homo Sapiens 1.0? Upgrade with some gene therapy. Want intelligent and attractive designer babies? You can get them made, with no risk of paying any alimony or child support. Want to live indefinitely? Take your anti-aging treatments and make sure to hire physical security to prevent you from getting shot up.

            Everyone without inherited wealth or capital is expendable. Automation will continue wiping out jobs and the global population will increase by at least 3-4 billion despite less need for workers. Sure, plumbers and movie stars will still be around, although maybe a plumbing robot will come along and dead or fake movie stars can be brought to life by supercomputers. There will simply be a lot of people around that are expendable. Shipping them off to space to colonize or die is an interesting plan. It requires reusable SpaceX BFR/ITS to be realized with tens of thousands of routine launches to Mars or other locations, and a lot of funding from somewhere. And this would barely put a dent in Earth's population.

            There's a use case for extreme genetic engineering right there: optimize humans with gene therapy or edited babies to better adapt to lower gravity environments and much higher radiation. If you're willing to get rid of the human form entirely, the results could look a lot different.

            But back to the main point: artificial wombs will be incredibly transformative and erode the worth of women. Consider surrogacy [wikipedia.org]. While it has existed since ancient times, "gestational surrogate pregnancy" has only been around for 32 years. Now you can use some poor third world woman to endure the burden of childbirth. Designer babies are already technically in existence given that preimplantation genetic diagnosis is routinely used, but germline engineering will take that a step further. Synthetic embryos [technologyreview.com] are well on the way and could be the basis for creating a genetic child of two fathers, or of any DNA you have the ability to remix and synthesize. You could have a clone made this way, or a baby with you as the parent and various designer genes / virtual mother genes thrown in. Finally, the artificial womb takes the surrogate out of the picture. Some countries have cracked down on the practice. With the artificial womb perfected, it's like you are holding a surrogate mother hostage in your basement who can't say "no" and has zero claim over the embryo/child. If someone believes motherhood to be sacred, then the artificial womb is like the ultimate defilement of Gaia. I'm extremely bullish on my timeline for this set of advances. 100 years? Nah, maybe 50 at most, with significant improvements after the process is realized.

            All the pieces of the puzzle are in place for an extreme transformation of the species. Too many deadbeat humans around, females made relatively powerless (although we could argue that there will still be higher demand for female rather than male sex workers......... assuming the wealthy still get off on sexploitation and don't turn to advanced sex robots instead), complete mastery over the human genome. The only thing that would make your timeline feasible would be a series of Dark Ages in which the poor terrorists manage to claw back power from the rich and wreck technological civilization...... but without destroying everything entirely. Maybe some nukes will go off, but a significant amount of humans will make it through the turmoil and start over. This scenario can be partially averted by the rich getting into the doomdsday prepper trend or sending their handiwork to space or Mars.

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            • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday December 30 2017, @06:23AM (1 child)

              by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 30 2017, @06:23AM (#615771) Journal

              Science and science fiction, together and separately, make for some very interesting possible futures. But, I think that some people make some unwarranted assumptions. Will society accept all of these things you envision? Will society accept that it's proper role is to support those rich people who can afford all of the rich people who will benefit from your vision? You don't foresee villagers with torches and pitchforks having a say in matters? And, where do philosophy, religion, and law all fit into this?

              It is true that mankind - rather, western society - has just blindly followed along wherever research has led, so far. Personally, I don't think the masses are going to just follow along with the vision you see.

              Of course, you and I are just like all of our great-great-greats-ad nauseum. We can't see the future, and we can't know where our descendants are going. It's only safe to say that I don't like the future you see. Only time will tell what our descendants have to say on the matter.

              • (Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday December 30 2017, @07:06AM

                by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday December 30 2017, @07:06AM (#615781) Journal

                Will society accept all of these things you envision?

                Maybe not, but the explosion of capability could overwhelm society's ability to stop it. Bioengineering-related technologies are getting very cheap and the expectation is that it will continue to become cheaper and easier to do many incredible things.

                Will society accept that it's proper role is to support those rich people who can afford all of the rich people who will benefit from your vision?

                Rich people own the government and set most of the rules. If setting or relaxing the rules is impossible, they simply need to set up shop in Bermuda or somewhere [techcrunch.com].

                You don't foresee villagers with torches and pitchforks having a say in matters?

                I think this is an important question. We live in age where if you really wanted to go full Bond villain, you could procure snipers, anti-personnel mines, infra-red sensors, and whatnot. The peasants with torches and pitchforks may have upgraded to handguns and Molotov cocktails, but they are no match for a machine gun. Their best chance at offing someone is to catch them unaware, and they have to know this evil person exists first. There are many multimillionaires and billionaires out there. Good luck keeping track of what all of them are doing in the back of their mansion, or why their kids grow up to be supermodels and geniuses.

                The Unabomber looked at the world, hated what technology was doing to mankind, and tried to change it... with a series of bombs that killed a small handful of targets. He severely injured a single geneticist. A few biotech and nanotech scientists got killed in Mexico [wired.com] by ecoterrorists. That's about as successful as I see the backlash being. Because despite there being so many unneeded people in a country like the U.S., many of them have access to cheap calories, air conditioning, television, and Facebook. They are increasingly obese. They need to do some real legwork if they want to burn the system down. But they are easily distracted and will probably get caught up in the culture wars or some other outrage while missing the biotech trends going on right in full public view.

                And, where do philosophy, religion, and law all fit into this?

                Philosophy: Bioethicists continue to screech, and are ignored or routed around.

                Religion: Continually marginalized. The power of Christianity is weakening in the West, and in the U.S., despite some Evangelical high points like the elections of George W. and Trump, the religious are going to find it difficult to stifle the relevant research until it's too late. You see it already with the first human embryo editing and various chimeral experiments. Islam's power is mostly elsewhere; it doesn't control much of the world's science output.

                Law: Go global. Find somewhere that is either not restrictive or looks the other way often despite laws in the books. China might be a good choice, but smaller countries might be better.

                We can't see the future, and we can't know where our descendants are going.

                Look to the almighty trends. Cheaper, faster computers. Cheaper, better gene sequencing and synthesis. More advanced technology over time, not less. And a number [soylentnews.org] of [soylentnews.org] fertility [soylentnews.org] advancements [soylentnews.org] that I've reported on. I prefer to make guesses that are obvious.

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      • (Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday December 30 2017, @03:10AM

        by looorg (578) on Saturday December 30 2017, @03:10AM (#615724)

        What exactly was wrong with it? First sentence was highly subjective but beyond that it did appear to be factually correct. It's hardly a surprise the decided to make a little brown girl doll for their STEM-effort, even thou it's more or less as far from the current STEM-reality you can come today. Is the problem that he (I assume) pointed out how obviously they are trying to present an image that is quite clearly false and made entirely of wishful thinking? Or is your objection just that you didn't approve of the tone and language?

      • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday December 30 2017, @04:12AM

        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Saturday December 30 2017, @04:12AM (#615737) Journal

        This is Eth's stock in trade. He's a jenkem merchant who's been getting high off his own supply (just...picture that for a few moments...) for at least a year now.

        He's passed the event horizon of shitty-human-being-ness where "ironic/trolling" and meaning it for real ceases to be a meaningful distinction.

        --
        I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:57AM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:57AM (#615717)

      Sorry, I'm lost - are you talking about Megan McArthur, or the featureless quasi-Hispanic Disney princess in the cartoon?

      And, with Laura Dern rockin' the purple wig in Disney's latest blockbuster SciFi exploitation, is it any wonder that NASA's heroine girl has purple streaks?

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:53AM (3 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:53AM (#615716)

    Remember that women are lighter and less metabolically active than men

    Tom Cruise, and most real fighter pilots, buck that trend. It wouldn't be unreasonable to select the first Mars crew from among the lower quartile of size candidates.

    They'll also spend less time growing potatoes once they get there if they're physically smaller people.

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    • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:59AM (2 children)

      by Gaaark (41) on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:59AM (#615718) Journal

      But women use less oxygen than men at the same task: this is why male scuba divers will have 2 tanks while the female only has one.

      So.... if there is a malfunction, the male astronaut grabs the females oxygen mask 'cause she certainly won't need it as much as he will! :)

      --
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      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 30 2017, @03:06AM (1 child)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday December 30 2017, @03:06AM (#615722)

        There, so much depends on how you go about the task. I weighed ~140lbs when I used to go SCUBA diving with a buddy who weighed ~190. We'd start with identical tanks and he would almost always hit 500psi reserve when I had like 8-900psi remaining. Except, one dive I went chasing the pufferfish actively around the coral heads while he just sat still and caught them when they came around... the air-burndown profile was reversed that dive.

        If they want to make it about male-female, they should at least compare subjects of equal weight - and even then, due to higher female fat content - they might compare a slightly lighter male to a female with equivalent muscle capability.

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        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 31 2017, @12:52PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 31 2017, @12:52PM (#616127)

          ARE YOU SAYING THIS SPACESUIT MAKES ME LOOK FAT????!!!

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