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Spaceflight Grinches Your Heart

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Human Heart - Deposit Photos

What do extreme long-distance swimming and spaceflight have in common? They can both shrink the heart, according to a new study. Both activities reduce the pressure of gravity on the heart, making it so that it doesn’t have to work as hard to pump blood upwards through the body. The heart is a muscle, and just like any other muscle in the body, if it’s not used as much as it used to be, it will shrink. To understand what effect weightlessness has on the heart, a group of researchers analyzed health data from retired astronaut Scott Kelly’s year aboard … Read more

What If: The Moon Were Twice as Close to the Earth?

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moon - pixabay

In the 2003 Jim Carrey movie “Bruce Almighty,” Carrey’s character suddenly acquires God-like powers, and uses those powers to lasso the full moon and pull it closer to Earth to woo his beloved. Later in the movie, background shots show TV news reports about massive, unprecedented flooding around the world. While the film is obviously fantastical, it does raise a question: What would happen if the moon were twice as close to Earth than it is today? In fact, the flooding scenario from the movie isn’t far from what might actually happen if the moon were suddenly much closer to … Read more