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Mountaineers climbing Everest, the world’s highest mountain, are being
recruited to save lives in space. Researchers at Brown University in Rhode
Island and the University of Vermont have been monitoring the radio
communications of climbers on the mountain, looking for subtle changes in their
speech patterns. The team believes that cosmic rays have the same effect on the
brains of astronauts as the low oxygen levels and high stress have on Everest’s
mountaineers. They hope that looking for similarly altered speech in astronauts
will be an early warning of overexposure to cosmic radiation.