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Ancient Turing Pattern Builds Feathers, Hair and Now Shark Skin
- AllegedAlec 7y agoCool. It's fun to see how Turing patterns are everywhere in biology. However, as Turing himself said (allegedly): 'Well the stripes are easy, but what about the horse part?'
- jbay808 7y agoYou can watch acapellascience answer this question to the tune of 'Despacito'! https://youtu.be/ydqReeTV_vk https://youtu.be/ydqReeTV_vk
- AllegedAlec 7y agoThat explains what the central dogma is, but not how specific patterns of gene expression lead to a horse. That's something that's still quite a mystery. Hell, even after a lot of work, we don't still entirely know how even something as simple as Drosophila does its segmentation.
- anigbrowl 7y agoHaving developed an amateur interest in cell biology over the last few years, the single most interesting thing I've learned is that Interglobulin-M cells cells just happen to have same basic morphology as the kind of animals that they come from.
- ColanR 7y agoI have no idea what that means, but I'm curious to know. Can you point to anything I could read?
- anigbrowl 7y agoI'm so sorry, I should have written immunoglobulin-M and didn't notice my mistake. I don't feel qualified to recommend a text, I just follow references from here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunoglobulin_M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunoglobulin_M
- ColanR 7y agoThanks. :) That's what I found when I searched, but the spelling difference threw me off.
- ptah 7y agocan this be used in generating textures for 3d models
- lalos 7y agoIt's one way of doing it, yes. See this project that does it https://github.com/gollygang/ready https://github.com/gollygang/ready
- Angostura 7y agoIn the late 90s I chatted with Brian Goodwin who was about to write this book How the Leopard Changed Its Spots https://press.princeton.edu/titles/7043.html https://press.princeton.edu/titles/7043.html Really interesting guy and the book covers a whole host of areas where self-organising systems shape organisms without necessarily much genetic intervention
- parentheses 7y agoThis pattern of inhibitor/activator is one that can be used in social sciences as well. This also fits well with how codebases are managed: linting, style, patterns, etc.
- swamp40 7y agoThe picture of the model vs real shark denticles isn't very compelling to me. Maybe they just chose a poor example?
- 70jS8h5L 7y agoTuring's papers on the subject formed part of the research for my dissertation project, which culminated in a Matlab simulation of the skin patterns he described with inhibitors/activators. I recently converted it to JS and also Ruby, as an excuse for a few coding exercises. It's still a work in progress, but can be found here: https://github.com/rai-hi/rails-skin-patterning https://github.com/rai-hi/rails-skin-patterning Demo here: https://skin-simulator.herokuapp.com/ https://skin-simulator.herokuapp.com/
- imglorp 7y agoSince you're in the field, maybe I could ask about your impression of Wolfram's NKS? As a layperson, I understand it's a generalization of many classes of such patterns. https://www.wolframscience.com https://www.wolframscience.com
- 70jS8h5L 7y agoActually, the dissertation project was my only experience with the field. Although I read some of NKS at the time, it's a distant memory and so I wouldn't be able to say!
- kmnt 7y agoheres a webgl turing sim http://ktfh.github.io/gray-scott/ http://ktfh.github.io/gray-scott/
- 70jS8h5L 7y agoVery nice, thanks for the link. Certainly a more exciting demo!
- dr_dshiv 7y agoAnd, maybe, explaining the geometrical hallucinations from psychedelics and 10hz flicker: https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-theory-for-why-people-hallucinate-20180730/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-theory-for-why-people-...
- crawfordcomeaux 7y agoThis story makes me wonder when we're going to change the culture of science so as to minimize the time it takes for something to be taken seriously.
- anigbrowl 7y agoI feel like this pattern is a great example of how mathematicians, scientists, and technologists should focus their attentions on things that are economical and 'good enough' rather than fetishizishing ever-increasing levels of precision. While, say, calculating fundamental constants to the nth degree of precision is fun and intellectually satisfying in many respect, the marginal utility of each additional digit of precision asymptotically approaches zero so it's really a self-indulgent luxury. But this fetishizing of precision also has drawbacks; it misdirects resources and effort into improvements whose benefits fall far short of the costs. You wouldn't use a laser pointer to explore a room. Of course you could; but mapping a topological space using LIDAR is only possible because we have computers to do the vast amount of number crunching required, and it's only very recently that we've gone from very sparse representations to ones of sufficiently high resolution to give us representations that are immediately recognizable as familiar spaces. I will take fast proximity over slow exactitude any day of the week; I want models that get me close enough with very few parameters rather than more perfect ones that require a thick book's worth of specifications to articulate.