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from the just-stay-horizontal-and-wear-tight-spandex dept.
New research brings more bad news to astronauts thinking about long-haul space flights as spinal muscles shrink after months in space, scientists have found.
Floating around in space in an environment with little or no gravity is not good for the human body. Along with decreased bone density, nausea, a puffy face, possible cognitive deterioration, an astronaut's back starts to weaken too.
The research is part of NASA's wider project to study the physical effects space has on the body to prepare for long-haul flights to Mars.
Results from the NASA-funded research have been published in Spine, and show spinal damage persists months after the astronauts return to Earth.
Six NASA crew members were subjected to MRI scans before and after spending four to seven months floating around the microgravity conditions of the International Space Station.
NASA should send the astronauts into space with one of those inversion tables so they can hang upside down.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @01:04PM
In their own reference it says this is an issue. The focus of that paper they cite is on the importance of blinding, it is in the title of the paper. Yet they do not mention blinding! Did they not read their own reference, is this a call for help, or what?
Besides that, I have done work like this (anatomical tracing). Effects like seen here could easily be due to bias, or even training effects if the person traced the data as it came in, or just in order during one session. If you want to try, there have been a few kaggle competitions lately using fMRI and ultrasound images. Just read the forums about the inconsistent quality of the "ground truth".
How hard would it have been to have someone relabel all the files and send it to the tracer in random order? Answer: it would take an hour or so. There is no excuse for wasting precious data like this on such shoddy methodology. I am totally unsurprised by the way, I found this problem in a few seconds due to experience with how medical research works. It will continue in this way until people from outside start holding them responsible for producing misinformation. In this case it would probably take a couple days max for them to share the data with an outside team and have them redo it correctly.