NASA, ASU Team Finds a New Test For Osteoporosis 46
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC has an article about scientists at NASA who believe that they have found a new test that can detect osteoporosis earlier than existing tests. Their test involved having healthy volunteers confined to bed rest for 30 days; 'the technique was able to detect bone loss after as little as one week of bed rest.' Bone loss is an issue for astronauts as well as people affected by osteoporosis. They expect this test will help detect bone loss as a symptom of osteoporosis, but have not yet done a trial to confirm this. This is another point against anyone who claims NASA, and going to space in general, is a complete waste of money."
Going to space might still be a waste of money (Score:4, Insightful)
This is another point against anyone who claims NASA, and going to space in general, is a complete waste of money.
It might prove NASA has some use. But it doesn't sound like going into space was necessary for this research, so that could, in principle, still be a waste.
Re:Going to space might still be a waste of money (Score:2, Insightful)
totally bogus argument (Score:5, Insightful)
This has always been a totally bogus argument, because you can't do a controlled experiment. Suppose that the US had never engaged in the Cold War propaganda exercise known as the space race. Later, suppose that the US had never gotten into pork-barrel projects such as the space shuttle and the ISS. What would the world have been like? We have no way of figuring out what scientific advances would have been made in this alternate history.
Maybe more tax money would have been directed toward unmanned space exploration, which, unlike human spaceflight, provides scientific results in reasonable proportion to what it costs.
Maybe the nonexistence of a government monopoly on human spaceflight would have encouraged the private sector to start up a space tourism industry decades ago, and my wife and I would have celebrated out 20th anniversary last year in orbit.
Maybe, simply by reducing the size of government, we would have boosted the over-all economy a little bit, and through exponential growth (the "butterfly effect") that small change would have made the economy significantly bigger today, say by 10%. In a 10% bigger economy, a fixed percentage of taxes spent on cancer research means 10% more cancer research, so maybe we'd have a cure for cancer now.
Maybe one smart person, rather than becoming an engineer on the Apollo program, would instead have gone into fundamental research in physics, and we'd have a theory of quantum gravity today.
We just have no way of knowing. You could just as easily say that World War II was a good thing, because without it we would never have invented radar.