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Time-lapse of a single cell transforming into a salamander (2019)
- bch 6y agoHere’s a direct link to the video so you don’t have to endure the hostility of their website: https://youtu.be/SEejivHRIbE https://youtu.be/SEejivHRIbE
- doctor_eval 6y agoI thought it was just me. Thanks!
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoI literally couldn't find the video link at all on the article in mobile. Thank you.
- raws 6y agoIt's the picture at the top that is the video, took a while for me to load.
- joshspankit 6y agoYou’re very likely getting an upvote from everyone who visited the link and came back here. Thank you.
- SV_BubbleTime 6y agoGuilty. I dealt with the page for as long as I could, scrolled, saw no video and came back here for someone to surely give the direct link. I think someone has trained me, but for what purpose I am not sure.
- a_t48 6y agoThe image at the top is actually a video. It fooled me, too.
- lxe 6y agoWhat's wrong with the website?
- edgyquant 6y agoIt took almost 10 seconds to load on my gigabit connection, then a banner came up over the play button before finally a pop up forcing me to give my email to continue. At that point I X’d out and came here.
- beefsack 6y agoI got none of that and it loaded very quickly, presumably thanks to uBlock.
- guram11 6y ago+1 and with noscript
- usefulcat 6y agoI got none of that without uBlock or noscript, thanks to pointing my router to ad-blocking DNS servers.
- gcblkjaidfj 6y agoI spent couple days after joining an Ad tech project, because I could not get a working local build. I had already disabled adblocker at the time, and was even using other browsers. Turned out i also had DNS[0] ad blockers I forgot about. This story always make me think the kinda of experience we are building for our own families and children online. sigh. [0] https://someonewhocares.org/ https://someonewhocares.org/
- lxe 6y agoWow. I guess uBlock does it's magic for me.
- djrconcepts 6y ago
- mixmastamyk 6y agoAnd youtube-dl to avoid the hostility of the Youtube website: youtube-dl https://youtu.be/SEejivHRIbE
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dragonsh 6y agoTry direct link instead of YouTube. Its also there in comment below. https://pmdvod.nationalgeographic.com/NG_Video/772/995/1442844739770_1550184269599_1442865731523_mp4_video_1024x576_1632000_primary_audio_eng_3.mp4 https://pmdvod.nationalgeographic.com/NG_Video/772/995/14428...
- ChuckMcM 6y agoThat sort of thing just amazes me. I get that it is "programmed" by DNA, and I understand programming quite well, but the series of chemical reactions that allow the cells to go from gamete to full thing still fills me with wonder.
- TaupeRanger 6y agoIncreasingly it's becoming clear that DNA is only a small part of the picture. Cellular electrical dynamics are the forefront of morphogenesis research atm. Look at any recent high profile work out of Michael Levin's lab for an example.
- bigtones 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioelectricity
- fktnktofk 6y agoAren't those electrical field patterns still somehow encoded in the DNA?
- ethbr0 6y agoEverything is deterministic if you're omniscient. In our more limited experience, certain levels of complexity mean unpredictable outcomes. As for why-not-DNA, I think about it in terms of "If there were some way that was faster able to adapt organisms than DNA changes, wouldn't most organisms accumulate substantial functionality via that pathway over time?"
- sssilver 6y ago> Everything is deterministic if you're omniscient Is this true, given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle ?
- pvaldes 6y agoAnd then it grows and turns into this steel blue newt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_newt#/media/File:Uhandre_goimenditarra.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_newt#/media/File:Uhandr...
- amelius 6y agoI'd like to see a video of the hands and feet forming.
- fktnktofk 6y agoAt around 2:30 you can see some cells moving inside the embryo. What are they doing?
- amelius 6y agoCould be blood cells (?)
- basicplus2 6y agoCell migration occurs at many stages in development and can be interferred and even stopped by ionizing and electromagnetic radiation. Could not find Reference for the electromagnetic radiation in time to do this reply sorry. https://embryology.med.unsw.edu.au/embryology/index.php/Developmental_Mechanism_-_Cell_Migration https://embryology.med.unsw.edu.au/embryology/index.php/Deve... https://www.statpearls.com/ArticleLibrary/viewarticle/20922 https://www.statpearls.com/ArticleLibrary/viewarticle/20922 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14690282/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14690282/ This man did a study showing how electromagnetc fields interfere with embryonic cell migration. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/W.+Ross+Adey%2c+M.D.-a0163395965 https://www.thefreelibrary.com/W.+Ross+Adey%2c+M.D.-a0163395...
- vinhboy 6y agoThat yellow goo we see from the beginning. Is it just a mix of the same thing, or is it a bunch of different things that we can't see with the naked eye? And if it's a bunch of different things, why is it yellow? Like, why does it look so simple, like a ball of playdough, when it works more like a very complex machine...
- koverda 6y agoI believe that is a fertilized egg cell, so kinda both. It's the yolk (all one thing), plus a bunch of associated organelles (bunch of different things).
- f430 6y agowhat's striking to me is how similar in early stages it looks like the Flower of Life pattern. Perhaps its possible that our life in the 3D world is essentially geometry on the hyperdimension that somehow trickles down into life. ex) DNA to proteins.
- timr 6y agoYou're not the first to notice this. The phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" was coined to capture this very observation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory (unfortunately, the theory wasn't very useful, and is mainly a historical curiosity today.)
- WClayFerguson 6y agoI agree. I think our entire 3D universe is really more like a 'projection' (onto lower dimensions) of some vastly larger hyperspace in many more dimensions, so we're always seeing basically only a sliver of true reality, and if we could see it all (all of reality) it would be vastly more complex, but also a lot of things (like this video) would seem more mechanical than magical.
- saltyfamiliar 6y agoCompletely agree. I think this could also explain the fundamental randomness we perceive at the quantum level. We're simply not seeing/unable to see the full picture.
- WClayFerguson 6y agoYep, most every serious Physicist today agrees, it's more likely we're not "seeing" everything. Slit experiment, Entanglement, etc. prove we're missing lots of the picture. All the particles popping in and out of existence...seems like really they're just 'passing thru' and we only see them a fraction of the time, because most of the time they're in some 'realm' we've only thus far managed to label as "Wave Probability"
- amirkdv 6y agoThe most mind-boggling thing about development IMO is the fact that it works at all, let alone so reliably. It's a really complex system navigating all these different regimes of stability and instability, with variations caused by internal/external forces, yet coming out almost exactly the same every time.
- sumedh 6y ago> let alone so reliably. To be fair it sometimes does not work and we end up with deformed babies.
- gbh444g 6y agoThe process looks similar to a CNC machine replicating a predefined shape. Except that here the material is able to grow itself. In this case it's not surprising that a CNC machine always creates about the same shape from a rather amorphous material.
- f6v 6y ago> The most mind-boggling thing about development IMO is the fact that it works at all, let alone so reliably. That's why so many people don't accept the evolutionary theory. It's just hard to think on evolutionary timescales, there's no difference for most of us between 1 million, 10 million or 1 billion years. Nevertheless, it took billions of years for life to evolve.
- rnestler 6y ago> The most mind-boggling thing about development IMO is the fact that it works at all, let alone so reliably. This sounds to me like engineers talking about a code base :)
- hughes 6y agoSome of the sound effects they chose were a bit much. Pretty sure a cell doesn't sound like anything at all, never mind the sound of lightly splashing water. I loved watching for the moment the topology of the creature changed from a sphere to a torus. Not exactly sure when it happened, but there was a point where it wrapped itself in half and seemed to fuse.
- NoInkling 6y agoYou're either talking about formation of the gut tube (gastrulation) or the formation of the neural tube after that (neurulation).
- prawn 6y agoFor anyone familiar with these things, is their significance that they create tubes which are isolated systems?
- Balgair 6y agoI'm confused as to your question. What is the 'their' in the second part of your sentence? Generally, in development, it's the lineage of the cells that matters the most. Skin and neuronal cells have a closer lineage than the gut cells do.
- prawn 6y agoThe initial result of the gastrulation and neurulation. e.g., what would've made that process 'useful' so that it persisted in an evolutionary sense. Would intestinal processes work as well if they weren't contained (from mouth to anus), or if brain/spine/nerve channels weren't separated from other parts of the body.
- Balgair 6y agoI think I get the question. Neural tube-like structures are pretty ancient. Hallucigenia, I believe, is the oldest fossil (-0.5 BYA) that shows the differentiation of a single neural tube-like structure [0], right back to the mid-Cambrian Explosion. We are the ancestors, likely, of that animal. It seems that bi-lateral symmetry is a highly advantageous body plan, as it's evolved a few times in separate clades that weren't that before. As to the reason why bilateral symmetry is good, it's a good question! As for the difference in why neural tubes are better, it seems that the ability to centralize the information exchange between the body and (what may pass for a) brain is a better fit with a single trunk. Other animals do have other arrangements, but the one we have has the most diversity of subsequent animals forms. It seems to be a more flexible arrangement and evolution seems to have preferred it. Granted, the neural tube idea has been through a few mass extinction events, so there is a considerable amount of luck involved too. [0] For reference, the reason that arachnids are different than other 'insects' is because they have dual ganglia structures that run down the rostral(head)-ventral(tail) axis instead of a single neural tube. That divergence took place before Hallucigenia, I believe.
- hanoz 6y agoIt's just all so... completely implausible. And yet there it is, and what's more the finished product comes fully loaded with all sorts of instinct about the physical world, plus an ability to learn as it goes that our AI can't hold a candle to. And that's just the Salamander version. Feed in a different strip of ticker tape and now you're looking at your very self emerge. It's utterly unnerving to behold.
- bmitc 6y agoI agree, this is just insane and a reminder that we’re just banging with sticks. I’ve seen more believable stuff in sci-fi movies.
- wombatmobile 6y ago> And that's just the Salamander version. Feed in a different strip of ticker tape and now you're looking at your very self emerge. You may think humans are more amazing than salamanders, but no other species agrees with you.
- steve_adams_86 6y agoI hear you, but it seems neat that our ticker tape yields a meat bag that likes to send rockets to other hunks of rock in a giant cold vacuum (for example). Salamanders on a cosmic scale are probably difficult to distinguish from humans – just more bundles of cellular automata that share more in common than they don't, but the differences are fascinating from an earthly/human perspective. I really wonder, too - does a dog care as much about a salamander as a human? How about a crow? Do crows think we're interesting at all? It's impossible to say. Ultimately you're right though, we're just creatures trying to survive in various ways. Humans have very sophisticated ways of doing it, but they aren't inherently more amazing outside of the human lens.
- nor-and-or-not 6y ago> Humans have very sophisticated ways of doing it Which yet has to be proven they are really working in the long way, because we are still on trial. Also let's see if we can retain our humanity whilst surviving as a species.
- smiley1437 6y agoHas anyone calculated how much energy\entropy is expended to evolve a functioning genome? My math is far too weak to even know where to start. It may give a better sense of how much is lost when a species goes extinct.
- lisper 6y agoEnergy and entropy are not really the right metric here. The thing that is lost when a species goes extinct is information, and specifically, information that has been acquired by a process of parallel search that has been going on for literally a few billion years, so the odds of reproducing that information once it is lost is effectively zero. Imagine working on a term paper for a few billion years and then having your computer crash and not having a backup. That's what happens when a species goes extinct.
- edmundsauto 6y agoWould there be a way to use "information entropy" as the measurement? Late in the day so I'm struggling to finish my thoughts, but putting this here in case you can connect the dots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
- lisper 6y agoYes, but it's tricky for two reasons. First, we don't really know how to quantify the relative value of two different species. It's kind of like trying to quantify the value of a book. Losing a volume of Aristotle's Poetics is probably worse than losing a Harlequin romance. And second, the information is not just resident in the genome. We can quantify how many bits of information is contained in DNA, but just knowing the complete gene sequence of a salamander is not enough to be able to make a salamander. You need to embed those genes in the right environment, and we have no idea how to quantify the information needed to describe that. So actually putting a number on it is hopeless. The best you can do is look at the effort it would take to reproduce that information once it's lost, which is essentially infinite.
- op03 6y agoI am going to guess all those sudden jerks are the build breaking on the latest commit.
- xuhu 6y agoIt also looks like reboots between bootstrap stages.
- sebringj 6y agoHere's the direct video: https://pmdvod.nationalgeographic.com/NG_Video/772/995/1442844739770_1550184269599_1442865731523_mp4_video_1024x576_1632000_primary_audio_eng_3.mp4 https://pmdvod.nationalgeographic.com/NG_Video/772/995/14428...
- udev 6y agoThe amount of information required to orchestrate such a process seems incredibly high compared to the amount of data stored in the DNA. My understanding of Information Theory completely breaks down looking at this. It seems impossible that it works. I have this feeling that we have not yet developed the theories that would make it possible for us to grasp how this truly works.
- gbh444g 6y agoWatching the initial stage where this amorphous blob of cells just kept multiplying, made me think that the blob of cells is just that - the bioprinter material. The shape is probably set by the printer, i.e. the parent body, and that blob of cells would never form anything meaningful without the parent. This theory would fall apart, though, if such an organism can be replicated in a lab.
- shmageggy 6y agoThe process is riding on a foundation of chemistry and physics that has a whole lot of intrinsic dynamics. The DNA only has to take a causal role in modulating those existing dynamics. It doesn’t have to orchestrate every minuscule interaction, only coordinate things to the extent that the intrinsic dynamics come together to form something with an emergent complexity. It’s like calling into a complex library with a line or two of python. Yes, the top level is compact, but only because it’s built on top of a base of complexity.
- mclightning 6y agoThat explained it beautifully.
- Balgair 6y agoTo add to this: It's like the floating water level valve in a tank. It accurately controls the level of the water in the tank with a very simple mechanism. It does not control where every water molecule goes.
- udev 6y agoI think I get what you're trying to say. But it does not really explain certain phases of this process, in the beginning, where cells are dividing exponentially and suddenly a fold appears, and simultaneously many cells, many being far apart, start behaving differently from other cells just next to them. So whatever chemistry or physics foundation helps achieve that, it has this capacity to be very selective (these cells far apart do it, but these ones next to them don't), i.e. it is not temperature, acidity/base concentration, pressure, or other basic physics, because these phenomena don't have this kind of selectivity.
- dimastopel 6y agoHow does each cell know it exact location to decide which specific cell to become (i.e. which part of the dna to read)? Especially at the very early stage?
- divbzero 6y agoThis is an excellent question with no easy answer. Drosophila is one model organism for which we know something about how expression of specific genes leads to developmental structure [1] but there is a lot still unknown, not just for Drosophila but also for cellular differentiation [2] more generally. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drosophila_embryogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drosophila_embryogenesis [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_differentiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_differentiation
- shellfishgene 6y agoBasically, the mother determines which side of the egg is "up" by adding chemicals to one side. From there on many different gradients of proteins and chemicals form, which pattern embryos into subsections of more and more detail. The graphics in the Drosophila article linked in the sibling will give you a good idea.
- beyondcompute 6y agoThis somehow almost feels me with awe even thought I am somewhat a cynical person. It’s another level of demonstrating how intricate life is, how powerful evolution can be and how incredibly well-tuned our (Earth) environment for these sorts of things (which seems to be in stark contrast with what we see elsewhere).
- soheil 6y agoI look forward to a future where we will be looking back with nostalgia on these days thinking how bizarre it must have all felt to be living in these times. Perhaps not too dissimilar to how now we look back on the ancients way of thinking about the cosmos before there was any theory of gravity or any understanding of the strong force in nuclear physics.
- shpx 6y agoI was thinking the opposite, that I'm glad to be living in the good old days where no one is able to have direct control over that.
- kleton 6y agohttps://pmdvod.nationalgeographic.com/NG_Video/772/995/1442844739770_1550184269599_1442865731523_mp4_video_1024x576_1632000_primary_audio_eng_3.mp4 https://pmdvod.nationalgeographic.com/NG_Video/772/995/14428...
- clcuc 6y agoThanks. How did you find this?
- luisramalho 6y agoIt's the src attribute of the video element: <video class="vjs-tech" id="aem-lead-video_html5_api" tabindex="-1" preload="auto" muted="muted" poster="https://pmdvod.nationalgeographic.com/NG_Video/772/995/becoming_filmstill05.jpg https://pmdvod.nationalgeographic.com/NG_Video/772/995/becom..." src="http://pmdvod.nationalgeographic.com/NG_Video/772/995/BECOMING_CARDS.mp4"><meta http://pmdvod.nationalgeographic.com/NG_Video/772/995/BECOMI... itemprop="thumbnailUrl" content="https://pmdvod.nationalgeographic.com/NG_Video/772/995/becoming_filmstill05.jpg"><meta https://pmdvod.nationalgeographic.com/NG_Video/772/995/becom... itemprop="name" content="See a salamander grow from a single cell in this incredible time-lapse"><meta itemprop="uploadDate" content="2019-02-14T22:25:17.000Z"></video>
- clcuc 6y agoYour link ends in "995-BECOMING_CARDS.mp4", but the parent comment's link ends in "audio_eng_3.mp4". Where can you find the link that ends in "audio_eng_3.mp4"?
- bilekas 6y agoI don't know why but I have a flashback of the X-Files episode where someone had a salamander arm.. It was something about reversing ageing. :Nostalgia
- jokethrowaway 6y agoThis is fantastic. I can't wait until morality and governments will let us do the same with a human.
- bilekas 6y agohttps://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751265/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751265/
- lai-yin 6y agoWorth the six minutes. Life begins at the first cell.
- jhatemyjob 6y agoI agree. I think you should be able to kill it when it's still a sphere
- Thorrez 6y agoI'm not sure what you're saying. That sphere is the first cell I believe.
- jhatemyjob 6y agoAt the 1 minute mark it still is a sphere and is a multi-cellular organism.
- dublinben 6y agoWas it not alive before?
- anthk 6y agoWhat are we? Matter, or the information exchange between matter?
- richardkiss 6y agoThis entertaining video does a good job of, if not explaining, hinting at the mechanisms that make this possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydqReeTV_vk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydqReeTV_vk
- ctdonath 6y agoWhere is the bright line between “not a salamander” and “salamander”?
- Thorrez 6y agoMaybe there is no bright line, maybe it's a salamander the whole time.
- capnorange 6y agothere is no difference between "life" and "no life" :)
- shellfishgene 6y agoFurther complicated by the fact that the egg develops into a larvae with gills, which then undergoes metamorphosis to become an adult salamander...
- rhn_mk1 6y agoAn annotated version of this video would be amazing. What's happening at each moment? Where do the movements come from? What is happening when it "closes"?
- shellfishgene 6y agoThere is of course lot's of descriptions in biology books, this is a nice summary of the basics: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/developmental-biology/signaling-and-transcription-factors-in-development/a/frog-development-examples https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/developmental-bi...
- bertdb 6y agoThe AI equivalent of this: Growing Neural Cellular Automata - Differentiable Model of Morphogenesis https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/ https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/
- abyrvalgg 6y agoDespite the fact that the video is scientific you realy start to think about God. Who else could invent this? Amazing.
- jl6 6y agoThe magic ingredient is time. This is the result of billions of years of iteration, trying quadrillions of quadrillions of different approaches, parallelised across a whole planet, with every generation being built only from a successful previous generation. The result is amazing, but the scale of all this compounding is also amazing.
- pbrw 6y ago"If we went to Mars and found there a computer, we wouldn't ever say that it popped up by accident. There had to be some creator of it. On the other hand, we have brains, which are much more complex than computers and we deny the existence of some creator." I heard this anecdote during homily in church and honestly it perfectly describes how I think about God.
- anthk 6y agoAgain, that's not the valid answer. Who created God then? Stop using God as a placeholder and be more humble. The correct answer is "we don't know", but for sure today God is not a valid theory. No more than Spiderman, Batman or cosmic magical people from Andromeda.
- pbrw 6y agoThe correct answer is "we don't know" That's right. And that is the moment when science has to give place to beliefs. Everyone can have different. Some poeple none at all. For a person who wants to find a bridge between science and religion, this model may be good.
- anthk 6y ago>has to give place to beliefs. Yeah, if everyone did that, we could be trying to fly the Ocean by praying. Or trying to cure plagues in the Middle Ages too, with the same bullshitery. Hint: in didn't work. Once we threw that crap away, and began to properly was the hands, or develop the steam machine in the 1800s, with no "magic" in between, the progress and science development skyrocketed.
- reubens 6y agoFrom 'View From a Height', by Isaac Asimov: "And just as an organism in the embryonic stages seems to race through the aeons of evolutionary development, from single cell to ultimate complexity, in mere weeks or months; so the individual scientist in the course of their life repeats the history of science and loses themselves, by progressive stages, in the orchard [of science]."
- notjes 6y agoHumbling.
- ExcavateGrandMa 6y agothoughts multiply this way, with a map. :Ð
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- seddin 6y agoIts like a self extracting zip file
- SeanFerree 6y agoAmazing!
- foxyv 6y agoIt blows my mind that we all start off as a sphere and then fold inside ourselves to make a meat tube. Life is so amazing!
- Balgair 6y agoIt depends on the species. For instance, most mice will start out as a tube, and then they turn inside out at embryonic day 8 (I think, It may be earlier though). Whereas rats, dogs, and humans do not do this. And that's just the mammalian development that has been under a lot of study. What other vertebrates do, well, that takes a bit more funding!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rthomas6 6y agoThis video brings up a crackpot theory I've been toying with. I know it's crazy, but I keep thinking about it. The Fermi paradox asks, why haven't we found any alien probes? Why have we received no contact or evidence of aliens visiting Earth in the past? Why aren't there galactic-wide civilizations, or super advanced beings that have spread over the entire galaxy? If there were such a being/civilization, perhaps their planning time horizon would be billions of years, instead of (optimistically) hundreds of years like for humans. With that magnitude of time horizon in mind, what might that civilization's colonization efforts or exploratory probes look like? What would their machines look like, if time was not a concern? If 4 billion years is nothing to you, and assuming there really isn't a way around the speed of light, maybe sending self-assimilating, self-adapting machine "seeds" to all Earth-like planets is the most efficient way to expand or explore. Seeds that perfectly adapt to the environment they're exposed to, self-replicate, take over the planet, and then the solar system. Sort of like the Protomolecule from The Expanse, instead of hijacking life, it hijacks raw materials, and was designed on a timescale of beings that think in terms of eons.