You forgot the narcissists ...

For starters, I suspect that someone who spends years 0-18 in a low-gravity environment (38% of Earth's) will wind up with lower bone density and muscle mass and would have problems when transported back to a higher-gravity environment like Earth. Loosely speaking, they'd probably wind up only half as strong as they needed to be. It might be possible to prevent brittle bones with Vitamin D supplementation and techniques like requiring them to spend part of each day on a vibrating platform, which has been proposed for prevention of brittle bones on Earth in children who don't get exercise and drink lots of carbonated beverages that bind to calcium. They could also work out a LOT with resistance training to try to make themselves stronger. But I wouldn't bet on this all working out smoothly. Once a Martian, always a Martian is my guess ...

The release notes I was given at my birth state that conception in a microgravity environment is not certified or supported. It *might* work, but the manufacturer won't provide technical support if it doesn't ...

There are a few more questions to answer. (1) How long did subjects spend reading the Comic Sans documents vs. the Arial documents? If they spent more time reading the Comic Sans documents, that could explain the difference. (2) If they spent longer reading the Comic Sans versions, what was their net learning productivity after factoring the additional time in? (3) Could novelty explain the effect by obtaining greater attention? If we reprinted all textbooks in Comic Sans and similar fonts from hell, would the effect go away? (4) What would be the effect on children of a childhood spent reading books in Comic Sans? Would they be willing to put up with reading if all their books were printed in fonts designed to slow and torment the reader?

The only way you'll get my Arial is by prying it out of my cold, dead hands!!!

The invention and proliferation of Comic Sans was essentially an accident. This study takes "unintended consequences" to a whole new level!

I'd forgotten about the hot space vampire until you mentioned her, but yes, that's the one, and Patrick Stewart hopes no one else notices he was in it either!

See also "Life Force" for a closely related scenario (and the bonus benefit of seeing certifiably the Worst Patrick Stewart Movie Ever).

> I really don't think NASA has done anything on human sexuality in space

Actually, they sent a married couple of astronauts into space on the same shuttle together. No word on whether they conducted any zero-G research ...

OK, that's a nice nitpicking clarification. Yes, if we're going to be painfully precise, a vaccine prepares your body so that it will be able to rapidly respond to later infection from a virus. Vaccination primes the host's immune system so that it can respond to infection "by (1) neutralizing the target agent before it can enter cells, and (2) by recognizing and destroying infected cells before that agent can multiply to vast numbers." (Wikipedia, "Vaccine") When the host produces an effective immune response to the vaccination, when later exposed to the virus, the host will on average either have no perceptible signs and symptoms of infection or will have signs and symptoms that are reduced compared to what they would have been without vaccination.

All that being said, it's critical to realize that "reduced signs and symptoms of infection" includes absolutely critical things like:
1) reduced likelihood of death or disability from the primary viral infection and its side effects (which in the case of flu can include organ failure!)
2) reduced likelihood of death or disability from secondary infections that are side effects of the primary infection (such as bacterial pneumonia as a follow-on consequence of primary viral flu infection)
3) reduced risk of the body entering a state where it is capable of infecting others
4) reduced risk of death or disability in others who are exposed to the host since the host never becomes capable of infecting them in the first place

So although "minimizing the effects of the virus" may sound on the face of it like a minor thing, it can actually be tremendously important or even lifesaving!

I experienced the benefits of partial immunity a couple of seasons ago. I get vaccinated against seasonal flu every year. A friend of mine is skeptical of vaccines and didn't get vaccinated against flu; neither did his girlfriend, as far as I know. They came on a ski trip and stayed in a small ski cabin with me and friends while the girlfriend was coughing and hacking in the midst of full-blown flu infection. That year, the flu vaccine only provided partial protection against some, but not all of the strains that ultimately predominated that year. I knew I was going to contract flu given the confined cabin, state of her infection, and infectiousness of the flu. Sure enough, I came down with the flu, BUT it was mild and only lasted about three days vs. the much longer course it can frequently run otherwise, which was likely a result of the partial effective immunity I received via vaccination.

I wish my friends would get vaccinated for my benefit as well as their own!

"What you seem to forget is that seasonal flu -*any* year's seasonal flu, is demonstrably lethal to children, healthy young adults, and people under 65 with common preexisting health conditions like asthma or HIV." I didn't forget that at all. I simply pointed out that even if it's true that seasonal or H1N1 flu vaccination doesn't reduce the mortality rate of people over 65 (which I'm not saying is the case), that's still not a valid reason to conclude that seasonal/H1N1 flu vaccination doesn't reduce the mortality rate or have other benefits for other groups--which is the invalid deductive leap the article makes. (The article doesn't rely SOLELY on this single study; they do try to selectively pull in some other evidence from other studies. But primarily, this article is driven by the study of mortality rates among people over 65.)

It's also worth pointing out that mortality rate is only one of many metrics that can be used to evaluate the efficacy of vaccination. For example, productivity gains from preventing or minimizing the duration/severity of seasonal/H1N1 flu infection are another benefit. Flu can lead to complications like pneumonia, which even if not fatal can lead to additional complications like liver, kidney, or heart damage, etc.

gr8_phk: Considering your personal experience with the individuals you happen to have known is not a scientifically valid way of determining the severity of the threat that seasonal flu or H1N1 pose to different demographic groups. Only scientific studies of large groups and retrospective studies of particular groups (e.g. reviewing the demographics of those who die of flu/H1N1 vs. demographics of the population as a whole) can accurately determine risk levels. See http://www.flu.gov/individualfamily/parents/pregnant5tips.html, which notes "Pregnant women, even ones who are healthy, can have medical complications from the seasonal and H1N1 (Swine) flu."

You are correct that infants do get a partial immune boost from antibodies they receive from the mother. However, you are not correct in concluding that infants therefore have "very good immunity" to seasonal flu, H1N1, or pathogens in general. In fact, infants younger than 6 are both more generally vulnerable to disease (because they have not yet been exposed to germs and developed the diverse immunity of an adult) and also particularly vulnerable to seasonal flu and H1N1. That is why cdc.gov notes that "people who live with or care for children younger than 6 months of age" are one of the priority groups for H1N1 vaccination: not to protect them, but to reduce the risk of transmission to their infants under 6 months who are especially vulnerable. See http://www.cdc.gov/media/pressrel/2009/r090729b.htm

It's true that you could volunteer to participate in a study, and I'm glad you're willing to help advance science in that way. However, consent from the subjects is not (alone) sufficient to guarantee that conducting a study is ethical. Scientific ethics guidelines require that the study be deemed inherently ethical by a Human Subjects Research review board. Regardless of what level of risk the subjects are willing to accept, it's only ethical to conduct a study that exposes them to a level of risk that is commensurate with the scientific benefit to be achieved, and not in excess of some absolute limits as well. For example, even if there were human subjects willing with full informed consent to allow their syphilis to go untreated, it would not be ethical to conduct a study that studied the long-term effects of untreated syphilis by deliberately denying available treatment to participants with syphilis (a la the infamous Tuskegee study, which of course compounded the injustice further by using prison inmates as subjects, not getting their informed consent to boot, and selectively using subjects from a particular ethnic group rather than others, among other issues).