Are they, by any chance, telepaths?
...Just in case the ISS goes FTL, you know.
NASA on Friday announced a set of ten experiments designed to study the effects of spaceflight on the human body by comparing identical twins – one being up in space and the other down on Earth. Back in November 2012, astronaut Scott Kelly – a veteran of three previous space voyages – was chosen to join Russian cosmonaut …
...now keenly awaiting the news that the orbiting twin has succumbed to SPACE MADNESS PLAGUE and OVERSIZED DARK CONTACT LENSES and seizes control of Putin's well-known Secret Laser, so (in a Shocking Twist of Fate) the grounded twin Goes Over His Commander's Head to fly to the ISS (he'll break into the "USS Intrepid" and steal the "Enterprise" to do this) because He Is The Only Man Who Can Stop His Twin. And (in a SToF) he must decide to whether to Chance Everything to Give Nadia More Time to Find a Cure. Nadia? Oh, she's the Chinese part of the Love Triangle (a Russian in the first draft but the test audience surveys from Shanghai were really bad)
[*] so crappy lazily-plotted thrillers using the wonders of science for meretricious decoration don't count as art? You patronising elitist snob!
It looks looks like a classical thought experiment about one twin flying on a relativistic spaceship and the other staying home.
In fact in this case the effect would be inverse to what most people expect. The free falling astronaut in the Earth orbit will age slightly more than the one staying on the earth. Remember that gravity and acceleration is the same in General Relativity. Of course precise clocks are better than identical twins if you really want to measure time. And yes, the effect has been measured. The software used in the GPS system takes a correction for this.
This does not yet rule out their very interesting observation, and the Higgs mass measurement certainly lends weight to the asymptotic safety program (although somewhat diminished considering my above comments). Is the prediction taken seriously? Probably not that much, but only because the asymptotic safety program (maybe unfairly) does not get that much attention. It is however a growing field and the authors of the paper are certainly very well respected physicists
"It looks looks like a classical thought experiment about one twin flying on a relativistic spaceship and the other staying home."
True enough, but the effect is miniscule in comparison to the human lifespan.
More telling would be radiation and microgravity effects upon physiology. Those effects, while understood, are still active fields of study in order to fully understand the implications of long term space missions.