Dark_Believer

Dark_Believer t1_jdgu5pu wrote

This issue isn't fully understood, and would be tough to reproduce outside of space flight. From reports I've read it takes up to a full 24 hours of being in zero G before the effect kicks in. That would be too long to simulate in most experiments on Earth ( such as on parabolic flights which give zero G in bursts of like 30 seconds). Personally I doubt you would need a full 1 G to mitigate this smell and taste issue, but realistically if you were going to use rotational simulated gravity, you would want something closer to a full 1G for the other benefits (such as keeping up bone density and muscle mass).

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Dark_Believer t1_jdgrazo wrote

One common issue with most astronauts in zero g is that they tend to lose or lessen their sense of smell and taste. This causes them to crave spicier food more while on the ISS than when on Earth.

Here's an article about the topic

In summary, with blood and fluids not being pulled down by gravity, your head tends to be more full of fluids than normal, and it feels like a mild cold congestion all the time. This doesn't seriously impact your digestion or anything, but is just a minor annoyance. Keeping morale high on stressful missions is important, so having good spicy food in space is still important.

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Dark_Believer t1_j92u5ql wrote

I believe that one of the biggest challenges\causes in regards to news bias is how news is made profitable compared to the past. Different demographics want different news sources because of their own internal viewpoints. Advertisers sponsor news agendas for their demographics targets. Watch the types of commercials and brands from Fox news vs MSNBC. They are different audiences, both politically, and what they buy.

Unfortunately due to money and people wanting news that confirms their existing biases it is difficult to get "fair" reporting. I don't think news has ever been fair and bias free in the past, but it appears be be getting worse, and thus public trust is dropping in news truth.

It would be nice if journalists could still be fairly paid, but we could get rid of all advertising associated with news specifically. I don't think that there is any realistic way to do this however without radical government overreach that I would personally disagree with.

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Dark_Believer t1_j8vwrtk wrote

I think that using survey data for this type of statistic is going to be much, MUCH less accurate than other forms of data gathering. Different social pressures, human memory, and biases will skew the results heavily.

One could easily request data from multiple snack\sweets manufacturers, look at sales numbers per capita across a variety of brands, and then come to much better conclusions. This would require contacts and influence with many big companies though.

Sure using Google surveys will be cheap and easy so that even a college student could knock out a report for their health class in a week, but I wouldn't put any stock into this data.

I'm from Utah, and I have no idea how we ranked bottom on the list. Utah probably consumes more sweets than average due to cultural pressure to avoid other vices, such as alcohol and cigarettes. Maybe Utah parents don't feed as much to their kids(unknown), but Utah adults eat a ton of sugar.

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Dark_Believer t1_itpp3wc wrote

Issac Asimov wrote a short story about this very idea called Nightfall. It deals with a planet that has several suns due to stars being so clumped together near a galactic core. Once every long time period ( like 1000 years or so) the suns have a conjunction and allow nighttime to occur. The story deals mostly with how people on this planet deal psychologically with seeing stars only once an epoch. I strongly recommend reading this short story as it is quite thought provoking.

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