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New Bone Cell Type Identified
- conductr 6y agoThis blows my mind that we have something like CRISPR while undiscovered cells are still a thing. Kudos to all involved in the find.
- enchiridion 6y agoI was just thinking about this. They just found a new salivary gland a few months ago. And that was in a relatively accessible location... would not be surprised if there are similar things waiting to be discovered in the brain.
- sexy_seedbox 6y ago> would not be surprised if there are similar things waiting to be discovered in the brain That's why I'm excited for Elon's Neuralink, there are going to be so many new discoveries.
- FriendlyNormie 6y agoYou’re a certified dicksucker.
- tsimionescu 6y agoThat's definitely the wrong place for excitement: it's a vanity project for someone who imagines that money can burn past necessary research. Look at real biological research programs if you want to be excited. Even in computery tech, the recent advance in AI protein folding solvers is much more exciting than anything likely to come out of Neuralink.
- odyssey7 6y agoA lot of people accept the practice of medicine in just the way that they experience it, rather than as it could be. It's just accepted that there are limits to what medicine can do, and often times those limitations are devastating. This outlook makes sense for most people, because what else would they do? However, for every high-profile disease process that doesn't have a known and rigorously understood cause, medicine as a field of study has a major gap in it. These aren't just gaps. These are major gaps. They're high-profile. They cause endless suffering for families across the world, they kill people, they make beloved grandparents forget everything about themselves and their families as they slowly die. If we haven't been able to pinpoint the root causes of these things that are getting huge amounts of attention, imagine what else we're missing.
- calvinmorrison 6y agoAnd at the same time doctors have accepted a code of ethics and have used thier better knowledge to help the people they serve At some point science and the doctoral profession separates, you're unlikely to find a newton again. Our society exists on specialization and doctors serve patients and learn from scientists It's the same reasons random doctors don't inject unheard of drugs into patients, there's a process and with any process there are side effects.
- xvector 6y agoAnd the fundamental truth that we are too scared to accept: death is just another disease. Death is just another way to say we did not have the technology or ability to save a life. That the limits of modern medicine were, unfortunately, reached. We accept death as a “reality” today, because we have no choice. But tomorrow, humans will look back on our age with horror - that self-aware beings were doomed to an eternal abyss, barely having a chance to live to begin with! In the far future, I imagine that the unintentional loss of even a single self-aware sentience would be both newsworthy and devastating. I envy the children of tomorrow that will have a choice in the matter of their mortality, much as I would envy the luxuries of people of today were I to be born centuries ago. I envy their consciousnesses, distributed amongst computers scattered throughout space, operating on timescales that make our own lives look like a blink of an eye, able to live out whatever reality they desire for however long they wish to live, barring the heat death itself.
- segmondy 6y agoIt's hard to know what you don't know.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kens 6y agoThe thing about biology is that even the "known unknowns" form a huge list. There are over 200 different known types of cells, but there are probably lots more waiting to be discovered. Lots of genes in the body have unknown or hand-waving functions. If you look at a cell biology book, there are lots of questions marks in the diagrams. It seems to me that scientists should be putting a lot more effort into answering these questions. I consider these questions much more important than the questions that particle physics is expensively investigating for instance. It's as if an advanced alien nanotechnology machine appeared and people didn't put all their effort into understanding it.
- parineum 6y agoPhysics has given us the tools to understand our bodies.
- witherk 6y agoHmmm I wonder how many more types of cells like this there are. Is there any reason to think that body wouldn't use a very small amount each of an enormous amount of specialist cells.
- T-A 6y agoThe human genome encodes about 1.5 GB of information. How many specialist cells can you fit in that space? https://bitesizebio.com/8378/how-much-information-is-stored-in-the-human-genome/ https://bitesizebio.com/8378/how-much-information-is-stored-...
- coldtea 6y agoWhat blows my mind is that we have something like CRISPR and people using it with certainty and cavelier "throw caution to the wind" attitude, while undiscovered cells are still a thing.
- srswtf123 6y agoI feel similarly about SSRI/MAOI drugs. Doctors prescribe these as if humans understood brain chemistry. I’m sure we understand some things, but we have such an incomplete picture. It wasn’t too long ago doctors thought the shape of your head could predict a propensity for criminality!
- matheusmoreira 6y agoDoctors prescribe these drugs because their benefits are proven by research. Depression in particular has a massive impact on society and it is understood that the benefits of the treatments outweigh the risks. Don't think I've ever seen anyone prescribing MAOIs. There are better options with less side effects.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoThis, one hundred times. Anyone who's maintained even a five-year-old deliberately and well-designed software system knows how unpredictable it can be to mess with random components. Here, we're talking about a system with 3.5 billion years of stochastic randomness.
- rubicon33 6y agoWe are still in the stone age with regards medicine, biology, and microbiology. The tools we have might seem incredible to some, but they're extremely crude by future standards. Sure you could say this about any industry but it's especially true about medicine.
- astrange 6y ago> This, together with the evidence of the new re-fusion processes observed by intravital imaging, convinced us that we had discovered a new cell type, which we called osteomorphs, after the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. This goes with the gene named after Sonic the Hedgehog I guess. Supposedly this kind of name makes it difficult for doctors when they have to tell people they have cancer caused by a sonic hedgehog mutation.
- FriendlyNormie 6y agoSmelly nerd scientists really shouldn’t try to be funny ever.
- rrmm 6y agoYeah, I suspect doctors would usually just call it by the abbreviation, SHH or what not and leave it at that. Osteomorphs doesn't sound that bad as long as the doctor doesn't add the origin. Sounds like a standard Greek medical neologism. Patients I guess get to find out when they start researching whatever condition on the web. Latin/Greek derived names do sound more important though.
- taneq 6y agoA sonic hedgehog mutation doesn't cause cancer, it causes central midline defects (which in fruit flies turns the fruit fly larvae into spiky balls, hence the name.)
- agumonkey 6y agoNow i'm just waiting for the dragon ball oriented scientist to finish their discovery about grant-wishing-cell-resuscitation ..
- matheusmoreira 6y agoWait, that gene was literally named after Sonic the Hedgehog? Always thought it was some kind of happy coincidence. Not very scientific but extremely cool.
- timeimp 6y agoAh man, they're gonna need to introduce new characters on Cells At Work! every one-to-two years at this rate. Nice.
- farseer 6y agoAn entire new organ was discovered last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tubarial_salivary_gland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tubarial_salivary_gland
- gsich 6y agoThere is discussion if this should be called an organ.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 6y agoIt's such a tease seeing headlines like these as someone with a bone disease. I've started following grants for research on my illness 15 years ago, and every few years they reapply having discovered a tiny part of the process necessary to understand the disease and develop a therapy. As a scientist I know things take time and hard, dedicated, work but as a patient it's soul-draining to see your life pass you by while waiting for these discoveries to materialize into cures or drugs.
- loceng 6y agoI would recommend keeping an eye on Emcell - they have been doing research using donated fetal tissue (there are an estimated 50mm+ abortions per year) for 30 years, and they've recently been able to ramp up their research efforts due to demand and exposure increasing for their existing treatments. Free documentary on the clinic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYRcmDySFyE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYRcmDySFyE
- 14 6y agoThe only thing I got from this article is now the cookies banner with slide from the right side of the screen and completely block the text on one side making it impossible to read through while ignoring cookie banner. So I just left the site
- peter303 6y agoBiologists are using the genome expression in each kind of tissue to refine the number of tissues. These were counted observationally in the past. Some suspect the count could as much as triple this way.