Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for October 5, 2019
A SpaceX animation of their plans for an interplanetary transport hub; Retraction of a high-visibility paper that found a link between lower generosity and religious upbringing; You can't prevent concussions with pseudo-science; The moon as a "fishing net" for extraterrestrial life; and a Steem essay on prostate cancer
Straight from my RSS feed | Whatever gets my attention |
Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.
- A stirring new SpaceX animation of Starship launching shows how the rocket company plans to turn Texas into Earth's interplanetary transport hub - After Saturday's introduction of SpaceX's Starship rocket, SpaceX has placed a 2 minute youtube animation on their web site to show what staging for interplanetary travel might look like. CEO, Elon Musk, says that Starship may be the first fully reusable rocket, which will lower the cost of interplanetary travel by a factor of 100 to 1,000. The two-tier system would have a 164 foot tall Starship Proper with a 223 foot tall booster - known as Super Heavy - that gets the ship through the atmosphere, then returns to its landing pad on Earth for reuse. The vehicle would be powered by 37 car-sized Raptor rocket engines, and it will have at least three variants, customized for crews, cargo, or fuel tankers. Once in orbit, the crew and cargo variants of Starship Proper, low on fuel would wait for a refueling tanker before continuing their journeys. At full production, Musk says that a launch site could support three or four launches per day, and to support that level of traffic the firm is trying to buy out the Boca Chica Village, where the current launch facility is located.
Video here: - Authors retract paper claiming religious upbringing is linked to less generosity - The 2015 paper received extensive coverage in the press, but the authors have now retracted it because of a coding error. Instead of coding discrete categorical variables for the country locations, they coded them as ordinal values. For example, Canada was coded as "2" and the United States was coded as "1". In their coding scheme, instead of merely categorizing the data, this meant that Canada's entry was (incorrectly) weighted twice as heavily.
- Football’s Concussion Crisis Is Awash With Pseudoscience - Products from mouthpieces to foam collars have been deployed to protect players against concussions. Unfortunately, the desire to do something doesn't always mean doing something useful. Concussions are caused by sudden acceleration or deceleration inside of the skull, and most of the products being deployed do nothing to alter that phenomenon. It's a hard problem. According to this article, concussion is more often caused by rotating or stretching while in motion than by slamming against the skull. The article also notes that even diagnosing concussion is hard, since the damage doesn't show up under standard imaging, so it's a judgment call by the physician. Also, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is almost certainly caused by repeated concussions, and that a study last year found a loss of white brain matter in college players after just a year of playing football. Helmets, it says, were first made to reduce skull fractures, and they are fairly good at that. They don't do much, however, for the rotational forces that cause concussions. In the end, the article says that the only sure-fire way to reduce concussions in football is to reduce the head-bashing. h/t RealClear Science
- Could the Moon Act As a Fishing Net for Extraterrestrial Life? - In a new paper, Abraham Loeb and Manasvi Lingam argue that the absence of atmosphere and geographical stability of the moon mean that it might be able to provide insights into extraterrestrial life. Objects from space would have landed on the moon's surface without burning up in the atmosphere, and they would continue to exist, unchanged, for billions of years. Techniques for finding evidence could include searching for generic biomarkers of life, searching for biogenetic markers of extinct species on earth, and searching for isotope signatures that don't match our own solar system. h/t RealClear Science
- STEEM Prostate Cancer with Extension to Vertebral Bodies - In this post, @anaestrada12 points out that after the age of 45, men are at increasing risk from prostate cancer, but they often don't get the necessary screenings, which can delay necessary treatment. The post says that it's normal for an aging man's prostate to grow to 20 or 30cm, but the tissue sometimes becomes cancerous and grows without restraint. The post lists a number of symptoms, some of which include difficulty urinating, painful ejaculation, and a feeling of a full bladder - even after urination. Most forms of prostate cancer, it says, are slow growing, but when it reaches an advanced stage, it may spread to other parts of the body and grow more quickly. The post also contains a case study and medical imaging from an actual patient. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @anaestrada12.)
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