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from the is-dark-matter-like-dark-energon dept.
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.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 01 2016, @02:50AM
If you're so smart that you think you can do a Copernicus to Einstein's Ptolemy, by all means, publish your theory that does not include dark matter and dark energy. Be sure that your theory accounts for all of the known data, because your theory has to agree with the data at least as well as the Lambda-CDM model. All attempts at modifying gravity so far to account for all of the known cosmological data have produced unwieldy contraptions that look even more like deferents and epicycles than Lambda-CDM, and some of them still require some form of dark matter! Astrophysicists and cosmologists did not postulate dark matter just to be cute. It's the simplest hypothesis that fits all the available data. If you have a better hypothesis, please publish your paper, and let's see how well it stands up. I'm not holding my breath.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 01 2016, @05:21AM
No. The simplest theory is this:
God did it.
Throwing in magic invisible stuff so the prevailing equations that were invented before discovering the invisible stuff keep working after observations have proved them wrong is more absurd than just claiming god did everything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 01 2016, @12:55PM
It could be right, still sounds like epicycles though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 01 2016, @03:53PM
This is a misconception. Modern physicists do not agree that DM/DE exist as actual physical elements of reality, only that the universe behaves as if they do.
It's the simplest hypothesis that fits all the available data.
No, that is a presumption, a hypothesis is the model which explains a given effect.