Author: administración

Scott Kelly spent a year in orbit while his identical twin brother stayed on Earth, and when he came home NASA discovered his gene expression had changed in ways that didn’t fully reverse

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In March 2015, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly launched to the International Space Station for a 340-day stay, the longest single spaceflight ever made by a NASA astronaut. His identical twin brother, Mark Kelly, a retired astronaut himself (and now a US senator), stayed on the ground. That setup gave scientists something they had never had before: two people with the same DNA, the same training, and most of the same life history, with one sent to orbit for almost a year and the other kept on Earth as a comparison. The result was the NASA Twins Study, one of the…

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Cognitive scientists have a name for the moment you finish a page and realize you took in none of it, and a Harvard study that caught people’s thoughts at random found the mind wanders off from whatever the body is doing for almost half of waking life.

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Most people know the experience. You reach the bottom of a page, and you realise you have absorbed nothing. Your eyes moved across every line. The words were in focus. Somewhere around the second paragraph your attention left the room, and you did not notice it go. You have to track back up the page and start again. Cognitive scientists have studied this closely, and the part they find most telling is not that the mind left. It is that you did not catch it leaving. The name, and what it actually points to The broad term for thinking about…

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When General James Mattis joined the Theranos board in 2013, he had already spent a year pushing Elizabeth Holmes’s fingerprick blood analyser toward soldiers in Afghanistan, and the only reason it never reached the battlefield was an Army regulatory officer named David Shoemaker who kept warning the FDA the device was not approved.

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General James Mattis joined the Theranos board of directors in July 2013, a few months after retiring as head of US Central Command, and the first thing he had been trying to do for more than a year by that point was put Elizabeth Holmes’s fingerprick blood analyser into the hands of soldiers in Afghanistan. The device was called the Edison. It was meant to run hundreds of tests on a single drop of blood drawn from a finger. The reason it never reached a forward operating base was not a failed proficiency test, not a board revolt, and not…

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Most astronauts are trained for the science of spaceflight, but many come home changed by something nobody can fully prepare them for

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Astronaut training is, by design, a long campaign against surprise. A crew member preparing for the International Space Station will spend years rehearsing failures: depressurisation drills, emergency procedures, the operation of systems they hope never to need. The point of all that repetition is to make the extraordinary feel procedural, so that nothing in orbit arrives unrehearsed. And then there is the window. Astronauts return again and again to one experience that the training did not, and arguably could not, prepare them for. They look down at Earth, and something shifts in how they understand it. The accounts are consistent…

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