I think the "can communicate with poor vision" is the most important as its dark in about 50% of the day when sign language doesn't really work. Not to mention that you first need to call the other's attention to start communicating with signs, possibly by making some sort of sound so they look at you. The second most important benefit is (IMHO) that you can speak while you are focusing on something, e.g. waiting for the prey to come closer while everyone holds their weapons.

They never talk about very important factors: relationship and sex. No one can expect that these people will just stop doing it, but it could cause serious issues as there's nowhere to go after a break up. So they will take drugs to suppress these emotions? What alternatives are there?

Given the circumstances, I think most adults could suck it up and be pleasant to each other after a relationship ended. The modern day table flip "I never want to see you again" is a luxury that comes with living in cities.

I think the bigger problem would be accidentally getting pregnant. That could be fatal for the mother, and caring for a baby on Mars, not to mention bringing it home, could prove impossible.

You could simply sterilise people (storing their sperm/eggs just in case). Sure, it sounds inhumane, but then that kind of appropriate if you want to survive in such an inhumane environment as is Mars.

There are long-acting contraceptives like IUDs and implants which, as a bonus, come with a near-zero failure rate. Quietly include a few just-in-case pills to account for the 0.05% failure rate (https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/unintendedpregnancy/p...) and hope the religious right doesn't get wind.

Well, that's one way to solve the problem. However, I think your "religious right" could maybe be convinced to fund space missions to support the survival of the first whoopsie space baby. Some of the major churches pull in a billion/week. A guy can dream....

There is a thing such as an amicable break up. You'd hope that the psych evaluation would select for people who can handle sex and relationships in a mature way without jeopardizing the mission.

I recall reading an interview with one of the Russian cosmonauts that stayed for a long time at Mir, mentioning something about a couple of wet dreams and then not really thinking much about sex for the rest of his (long) stay.

Can't find the link now, but I did see Canadian Chris Hadley make a similar (less explicit) comment in his Reddit ama: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1s4l7v/i_am_col_chris...

And while I'm sure people would like to think that the military have sex with each other all the time -- I'm pretty sure people manage to avoid having sex aboard submarines and other environments that are similar to a space expedition: dangerous and with long days filled with taxing work in the form of various experiments, exercises and routine tasks.

> people would like to think that the military have sex with each other all the time...

This is, in fact, the case though. It's not unheard-of for personnel to have a casual boyfriend/girlfriend for the duration of a deployment, in a what-happens-in-vegas way.

I'm sorry if I was unclear, I meant that sex is not that common in deployments in constrained/mission environments without leave, like while on board a (small) submarine.

I'm actually not so sure about this, as people have sex all the time while aboard ship; a fan room usually ends up becoming the Love Shack. They're working 12-hour shifts and doing extra duty on top of that, and they're still banging. Careers get ruined when the woman shows up pregnant to sick call.

I don't know about submarines, mostly because they've been male-only until very recent, and attitudes on homosexuality have not been and still aren't very tolerant[1]. From the fact that Marines fuck in Porta-shitters in Afghanistan, I'm sure that life, er, finds a way.

[1] <insert ribald Navy joke here>

Ah, gotcha. I'd still wager it's more common than we think :)

Stress can really put the zap on even those at their reproductive peak. It is a very common experience for men going through USMC bootcamp to not have a single erection in the 3 months they're there. Same story during combat operations. I fought in Fallujah for 7 months and I can tell you that sex was near the bottom of my list of concerns. Sure the number of opportunities were low, but even pornography held no interest. The tales of sex on deployment occur in very low stress environments: Navy ships and mega-bases, between personnel who don't see combat and have ice cream socials...

I imagine a Martian outpost would initially be pretty stressful. Once it becomes safe enough, and the stress levels decrease, sex won't be a mission-success/safety concern any longer. That isn't to say that there shouldn't be a plan in place, but it isn't as big a deal as folks make it out to be.

Relationships flower with pheromones. As part of the space sickness pack - the sinus of every astronaut is swelling and they can not smell anything anymore. Thus love in space becomes unlikely, due to space?

Love on mars though - well gonna have to ask David Bowie for that.

The statistics about sexual assult of men by men in the military are very vague and shrouded in secrecy, but even the most 'optimistic' number paint pretty dismal picture.

> No one can expect that these people will just stop doing it

What about professional attitude? Astronauts sacrifice a lot more than simple lust. Of course, if they went in for a quick fling in the bunks, a break up wouldn't be far around the corner. I'm sure they are aware of that.

On the other hand, in sci-fi depections they send couples and they still break up, but that's more for the dramatic effect. I couldn't imagine myself to allow any distrust in the few people that my life literally depends on.

"No one can expect that these people will just stop doing it"

Why not? I'm pretty sure many people live ok without sex.

Who exactly?

1.5% of the population, according to Kinsey. A bit less, according to newer research, but still not an insignificant number.

The era of free love is rather recent, and quite localized. Until not that long ago, and still today in many countries, people who are single or widows - particularly women - often live without sex for many years.

I thought it was more. I suspect a lot of married couples don't have sexual relationships anymore. I also see a lot of single persons that have a hard time (or don't even try) to find someone and so on...

Oh, I think these were just people who were sexless by choice (so, OK with it); there's probably many more who want to have sex but don't.

Asexual people

Sure, but presuming the deployed personnel are not Asexual, the problem still stands.

What problem? Non-asexual people can simply decide not to have sex, just like people decide to not eat sugar or meat.

It's not that simple, since sex is an instinct. It's hard-wired in our brains, not lile sugar or meat that are luxuries. But definitely possible with a ton of self-control.

That might be true for the average person, but since they only need a few candidates, it'd be pretty easy to select people with little or no sex drive. They are not very rare.

I don't believe truly asexual people exist the same way gay people do

I think they have depression, body issues, anxiety, etc but they don't have a true lack of sexual orientation

Having only a bucket shower once a week is probably a strong deterrent tho.

Last time I was in a topic like this on HN, there was a discussion about whether a mission could have as its mission parameters a part where they just send people willing to entirely abstain from sexual relationships - whether this could possibly be a pragmatic thing for early exploration-oriented pioneering missions where people are likely to die on Mars anyway.

Or rather, it started pragmatic, but it turned into a bit of a culture-wars clash immediately (apparently some people feel quite strongly about humans abstaining from sex), and honestly, if any US or European space program did the same, they'd have to deal with the fallout, so... it may not be the best plan.

We can just send couples with a contract to have sex regularly. I am sure many people are willing to subscribe to that and professional attitude should guarantee to fulfill the contract even if negative sentiments start to set in at some point. Afterall such contracts were common throughout the history and people did just fine.

Can you provide some references for the things your suggesting here? I've never seen any mention of this sort of thing in any of the history material I've read.

Or I could just have missed the joke.

You've missed the joke; the contract referred to is marriage.

Will we ever be able to scan the wiring of this spider's neurons and "run it" on a computer? That would be amazing, I think. Then we could create virtual worlds for these virtual spiders and let them evolve, supposedly much faster than "normal" evolution.

Letting them evolve suggestions that we simulate at the dna / protein level. We are far from there.

Hopefully. There's a project attempting to do that with a simpler animal, a kind of worm on a couple of Amazon GPU clusters:

http://www.artificialbrains.com/openworm

I thought I have an intermediate level C knowledge, but I have no idea what is happening in the vulnerable line:

    *(v3 + 0x8)(*(VOID **)v3, &dword_AD002290, CommunicationBuffer + 0x18);

As I understand it is (was) an example code from Intel. Example codes should be easy to understand and well documented.

It's C generated by disassembling x86 assembler code. It is not an example code from Intel.

The function pointer at `v3 + 0x8` is invoked with arguments: (1) the pointer at `v3 + 0x0`, (2) some fixed pointer, and (3) a pointer into the CommunicationBuffer.

E.g. here's more idiomatic C code to represent the same idea:

    struct Thunk {
      void *argument;
      void (fp)(void *, DWORD *, void *);
    };
    struct CommunicationBuffer {
      uint64_t unknown[4];
      struct Thunk *thunk;
      ...;
    };

    EFI_STATUS __fastcall sub_AD3AFA54(
        EFI_HANDLE SmmImageHandle, VOID *CommunicationBuffer, UINTN *SourceSize)
    {
      struct CommunicationBuffer *cb = CommunicationBuffer;
      if (cb->thunk) {
        cb->thunk->fp(cb->thunk->argument, &dword, &cb->unknown[3]);
        cb->thunk = NULL;
      }
      return 0;
    }

What idiomatic C code uses thunks? Is this an interpreter/runtime for a functional language or something? Or do some optimizers introduce thunks?

`qsort_r(3)` in libc, for example. It's not uncommon in idiomatic C code.

This likely calls a UEFI protocol, which are typically called this way.

do I understand correctly that v3 stores sort-of closure in C?

It's like a `this` pointer in C++, with a method table, yes. See the first link in the update from 30.06.2016. `v3` would be `RtServices`.

Maybe. From the assembly we don't know what type the pointer is. The general C style for closures ("thunks") is to store two pointers—a function and `void `. Since `void ` can point to anything, it's fully general. But maybe the original has a less general type and we can't tell from the assembly.

Assuming DNA matching has 99% certainity. Are you saying if I get DNA samples from 57 different people and match each of the 57 samples in all possible combination of pairs (so 57*56 tests), then there is 99% chance that I'll find 2 samples which will match? Someone should do this experiment. I think it's very scary if this is true.

Maybe she just left out from the story, but why didn't she say "But I didn't take any meth! I didn't even drink any alcohol! After a miscarriage I'd never do anything like that! Is it possible that the test is wrong?"

Doctors are like cops in that they're used to being lied to, particularly by drug users. Telling a doctor "I didn't take meth" when he has a positive test result is likely to mean exactly nothing unless you have a long term existing doctor-patient relationship.

You, the filthy unwashed public: "Is it possible that the test is wrong?"

Them, apparently omnipotent gods: silent shaking of head and look of pity

Had they been certain the test was right, CPS would have been hovering over the birthing bed and the parents would have risked carting to a cell. That's not what happened.

This. Even simple things like "undo last commit" has hard to remember syntax that I always have to google for it. I wish darcs was more successful.

I don't drink coffee at all. I eat a vegetarian sandwich every morning when I go to work, it gives me a good start for the day, I feel sharp and focused all morning. Sometimes when the sandwich shop is closed I buy something like a chicken sandwich, and that makes me more sleepy and tired.

Lunch is usually a big pile of rice with some vegetables and meat. Wow, this makes it reeeally hard to stay awake at the afternoon, but there aren't many options for lunch near the workplace.

For dinner, my wife cooks something also usually rice with some meat and veggies. But about 1 hour before I plan to go to sleep I eat 1 or 2 bananas. I always had hard time sleeping, and I read that bananas are good for sleeping because it contains potassium. For me it works. Although this might be completely placebo, because bananas don't work for my wife.

> Plenty of hardware in my life has backdoors (I'm looking at you Intel[1])

That same libreboot article[1] says that AMD is not any better. Is there any alternative I'm not aware of? An ARM Chromebook is unfortunately not fast enough for me.

[1] https://libreboot.org/faq/#intel

I hope this will be good: https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php

Probably I'm biased because I had a dengue fever infection a few years ago, but I don't understand the commenters here. Humanity as a whole burns millions of tonnes of coal, manufacturing millions of tonnes of products which are just thrown away, releasing who knows what chemicals into the rivers and oceans, not to mention the radioactive waste. And seriously you are worried about killing mosquitos?