Reminds me of surgery teams trying to argue (with pre-/post-menopausal and trans women) that estrogen shouldn’t be taken before surgery because of the clotting risks — of a hormone that has simple coin-flip odds of being irreversibly present in their patients, and is also considered by many surgical teams to correlate with different clotting behaviors than men. (Not necessarily more clots, but certainly not the same ones they’re accustomed to.)
Long-term, I expect the headline would likely be improved by stating instead:
“NASA zero-gee sim reaffirms that women have different clotting behaviors than men”
But selling that argument to U.S. researchers is an entire problem of its own; perhaps another presidential cycle.
the way that female phisiology is optimised for child bearing centers on blood flow to the placenta (and a whole new human), and then the very sudden removal of that WHOLE system in a survivable way is focused on two things, one is that the internal structure of the womb, literaly acts as a mechanical shear to sever the placenta, and two, instant powerfull but highly controlled, clotting, which as we all know can sometimes
over or under react. that such a complex system can continue to function at all in zero gravity is a testement to how conservative natural design and engineering is,and "solving" the problem faced by female astronauts is going to require a much deeper understanding than throwing a hormone at it.
Nature has solved problems like this many times, by the simple expedient of throwing more males at it untill the problem goes away. or as I like to answer sometimes as to how I am going to solve a problem I say
"I will use anger and stupidity, wish me luck"
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 20.5 ms ] threadLong-term, I expect the headline would likely be improved by stating instead:
“NASA zero-gee sim reaffirms that women have different clotting behaviors than men”
But selling that argument to U.S. researchers is an entire problem of its own; perhaps another presidential cycle.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crew_of_the_Internatio...