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Scientists find life in dead brain cells
- Ericson2314 7y agoCue more black market organs until more can be grown.
- astrea 7y agoHugged.
- asdff 7y agoLink to article: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1099-1 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1099-1
- wait_a_minute 7y agoCould this become a strategy for hibernating during deep space travel? Say, we could chill ourselves until it seems we're almost dead and use this type of process for preserving ourselves until we get to the next habitable planet?
- logfromblammo 7y agoOr brains in jars. Build a new body when you get there.
- zipwitch 7y agoThe Whisperer in Darkness By H. P. Lovecraft http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/wid.aspx http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/wid.aspx
- onemoresoop 7y agoWhy not build the whole thing when you get there? And then fill it up with whatetever needed via some form of rapid education
- slfnflctd 7y agoI'm sure that would be considered a viable option if we had the tech, but brain-in-a-jar feels more achievable in the nearer term to me. It also allows for continuity of self/culture, which is important to a lot of people. The idea of infants being raised to adulthood by machinery in unknown conditions to start a new civilization seems more like branching into a different species when you really think it through. I have greatly enjoyed this story line in fiction, but I honestly don't see it as remotely realistic for many, many decades if not centuries. Unless we stumble across the Singularity or something, haha.
- adinb 7y agoConnectome scans—a lot easier to maintain over centuries for interstellar travel.
- andbberger 7y agoIt is incredibly presumptuous to think a connectome scan is even a fraction of the full-state of the brain. We are quite a ways from fully understanding even a single neuron.
- scottlocklin 7y agoavailable on archive here: https://archive.is/pk9YR https://archive.is/pk9YR
- brainless 7y agoDoes not work for me, plus SSL error :|
- Operyl 7y agoYou're using 1.1.1.1 for your DNS resolver. Archive.is has this hatred with them, and purposely serves a bad record to Cloudflare's resolver as a "retaliation." The SSL error you're seeing is because they (that is, archive.is authoritative server) returns the IP 1.1.1.1 when 1.1.1.1 is used to resolve the A record. I should reiterate: this is archive.is' doing this, not Cloudflare. EDIT: Some more details, including quotes from Cloudflare's CEO from another internet citizen: https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/ https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/ EDIT2: I should mention that I still use 1.1.1.1, and I agree with their stance on this. :)
- adamhearn 7y agoThis is really bad. I don’t love cloudflare, but I do use their dns. This makes me want to support them with my business and makes me wish I could take back my archive donations...
- imjustsaying 7y agoJudging by the tweet, the archive.is admin says the lack of the EDNS data causes many problems. Maybe it increases his operating costs too? Archive.is a free service and goes offline frequently so I'm inclined to believe he's really trying to triage the problem queue, unless I'm missing something.
- Operyl 7y agoPlenty of other providers/projects are able to geo/load-balance based on many other factors, like request IP. I dunno, I just feel like it's a dumb hill to die on.
- spiritplumber 7y agoYou know, I always thought that a zombie apocalypse was impossible because it'd be nipped in the bud by armed forces, but after seeing the COVID19 reaction all over the world, I'm not so sure anymore. Just saying...
- gpm 7y agoCovid's death rate is less than 1%, if we saw a "zombie apocalypse" disease (death rate 100%... plus zombies) we'd see a very different reaction for a very good reason.
- hprotagonist 7y agoyes, we’d all be zombies.
- goatlover 7y ago100% death rates don't make for good pandemics and rabies-style viruses are poor spreaders, since you have to bite a victim.
- gpm 7y agoThe 4 billion American chestnut trees would like to disagree with your first assertion. Or at least they would like to if they weren't trees and weren't dead.
- selimthegrim 7y agoThat one Aqua Teen episode is probably a preview of their reaction.
- hprotagonist 7y agowell, a zombie pandemic is a 100% undeath rate... 0% dead but 100% contagious forever after is a practically unbounded r_0.
- frellus 7y agoFunny enough, linking to this site from Hacker News killed it.
- reality101 7y agowell the brain is still there working
- SubiculumCode 7y agoMinor electrical activity. That is amazing. One wonders whether some kind of rhythmic electrical impulse might restart neuron firing.
- frellus 7y agoEasy there, Dr. Frankenstein ..
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 7y agoIt's Frankensteeen
- shakil 7y agoCached at http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8EDr1uZEasAJ:forgetoday.com/2020/05/03/scientists-find-life-in-dead-brain-cells/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8EDr1uZ...
- frellus 7y agoNot jumping the science, but on the outside this is a terrifying idea. If cells still have life maybe consciousness could as well. It reminds me of a scene in the TV series "Fringe" where they wheel a body into the evil corporation "Massive Dynamics" high-tech lab, where the CEO orders that he be interrogated since he's only been dead for five hours.
- DiabloD3 7y agoFringe was a fucking amazing show. I should go watch it again.
- m-watson 7y agoIt is actually what I have on in the background right now. That now Amazon owned IMDB streaming service has it with commercials for free.
- heimatau 7y agoI was disappointed in the last few seasons but they were still very good. I've thought about multiple storylines from time to time. Lovely sci-fi TV.
- the_af 7y agoYes, yes it was. For me it was a better successor to X-Files. I even forgive Fringe's last season because, as weak as it was, it had some powerful moments. Tell me you didn't get misty eyed with Broyle's laconic "Dunham!" when they meet again in season 5. I loved that show.
- myth_drannon 7y agoI always read that asphyxiated brain cells actually never die and there is some base level electrical activity. Many teams work on trying to re-activate those neurons. It's really an exciting research that can help millions that have suffered brain damage during birth(cerebral palsy), stroke or in coma and have large areas of the brain with dead cells.
- kunai 7y agoThat's so odd given everything we know about cell biology -- aerobic respiration is required for cell activity and anaerobic processes generate lots of toxins and are an inferior alternative. This is really exciting research.
- oarabbus_ 7y agoSource? My understanding of biology is that _all_ cells can die from oxygen deprivation, which is what happens to asphyxiated brain cells.
- Udo 7y ago> asphyxiated brain cells actually never die and there is some base level electrical activity What you're describing is physically impossible and has in fact never been observed by science. Electrical activity implies chemical activity and an active metabolism. Dead brain cells lose their electrical potential, eventually the cell walls break down and spill their dead biochemical machinery, effectively liquefying the organ. Our cemeteries are not full of intact, electrically active brains somehow. When a neuron is deprived of oxygen, it shuts down. Some intracellular processes run until their educts are exhausted, and then come to a stop. When an anoxic brain cell is then re-supplied with oxygen after this shut down has progressed too far, the sudden resumation of processes means that these previously accumulated cytotoxic reaction products are now suddenly disrupting normal biochemical processes - this disruption leads to the death of the cell after it has been re-supplied. We call this category of damage reperfusion injuries. Reperfusion damage is perverse in the sense that, while the neuron was damaged during anoxia, its actual death only plays out once its chemical programs start running again. But in a way this is also promising, since in the future we should be able to prevent this kind of cell death, effectively prolonging the time a patient can survive anoxia without brain damage. There are drugs that we give stroke patients today with this mechanism in mind, but so far the results have been mixed. > stroke or in coma and have large areas of the brain with dead cells In a live body, dead brain cells quickly break down and are resorbed. There is nothing left to fix there. The correct time to take action is while cells are still intact, in the delicate stage before and shortly after oxygen supply is restored.
- emsy 7y agoI know people like that.
- tomcam 7y agoSite name is a little on the nose...
- somestag 7y agoI just finished reading Ubik, so this is eerily timed for me. I have trouble interpreting discoveries like these because my understanding of (neuro)biology is limited. For example, this: > At the cellular level, these brains are very close to being alive, but if we consider the life of the brain as the expression of the functionality of the brain, then they’re very far from being alive. I understand this is basically saying, "Just because the cells are working doesn't mean the brain is." But then my question is, what's the gap? I know the brain is complex at all, but it's always been a little strange to me that we aren't better at bringing back the dead. Do we know what it theoretically takes to "start" a brain?
- NotSammyHagar 7y agoThat's the key question (I'm just a poor programmer so I don't really know), but my thinking is we don't understand the software that powers the brain. your cpu my be running, the hardware may be say refreshing the ram right on schedule to keep the contents viable, but that's separate from having the running program you want. We don't really know the software running in the brain. I'm sad, really I don't expect brain upload (whatever it would mean metaphysically, I want to upload my consciousness, instead of just pass into nothing) in the next 30 or 40 years. Even for billionaires.
- bt1a 7y agoImagine the minimum number of neurons (say, n) needed to 'light up' consciousness. Why doesn't n - 1 work? How can you go from having the lights on to nothing based on a marginal decrease? There must be a spectrum with our minds on one end to a complete absence of running software on the other end. Thanks for reading.
- Figs 7y agoIf the brain is anything like computer hardware, the actual physical connectivity likely matters quite a bit. Consider what would happen if you randomly removed a single transistor on a CPU. Even though the transistors are very simple, virtually identical constructs the effect of taking any individual one out varies a great deal depending on what the transistor represents to the workings of the CPU. If it's involved in thermal regulation, it might result in spurious thermal shut-offs, performance throttling at incorrect times, bad fan control, or other problems. It could be involved in advancing the instruction pointer, which means that software on the affected core most likely wouldn't run correctly whatsoever. If it's part of a cache, you may get memory corruption problems that could be extremely difficult to diagnose. If it's involved in a rarely used calculation, you might never even notice that there's damage!
- Smoosh 7y agoI'm reminded of this study: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobel-prize-in-neuroscience-the-dead-salmon-study/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobe...
- waste_monk 7y agoThe linked website seems to have recieved the hug of death, but simply observing my morning commute leaves me with no doubt that the braindead walk among us.