3 ms·
From a shrewd entrepreneurial point of view, these critters must have all kinds of interesting enzymes and hardware that allow them to operate at such low metab
by rickyconnolly 14y ago
From a shrewd entrepreneurial point of view, these critters must have all kinds of interesting enzymes and hardware that allow them to operate at such low metabolic rates.
Dissecting their repair mechanisms might give us insights into regenerative medicine in the near future, and technical knowledge for suspended animation for long distance transport or generation jumping in the not-so-near future.
- anusinha 14y agoStudying organisms like these would certainly teach us a lot about cellular maintenance and extremely slow patterns of gene regulation. Relatedly, note that storing information in DNA is the longest lived form of information storage. Harddrives tend to deteriorate in ~10 years or so. Flash Memory has a similar life time. Books can last hundreds to thousands of years, but no more, and stones and rocks and fossils, perhaps a few hundreds of millions of years. But genetic information can be maintained for billions of years--it is a discrete information encoding, is easily copyable, and has noise tolerance and error correction. Not very useful (yet!) to store information and data, but very interesting to think about conceptually: humans have been reconstructing in metal and silicon what nature developed billions of years ago. Sort of cool to think about.