7 ms·
We're not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon
- jamesy0ung 2y agoLink seems to be broken, Firefox is displaying raw JSON when I visit it.
- roca 2y agoThe incredible complexity of anatomy is even more amazing considering * all the structures grow from a single cell * somehow it's all encoded in DNA (only 6 billion bits in humans, which has to also build cells and their ultracomplex machinery) * this all had to evolve using only a very noisy objective function
- dotancohen 2y ago> only 6 billion bits in humans That's under 1 GB - it might all fit on a standard compact disc.
- lostlogin 2y ago> compact disc It’s probably not far off being easier to read DNA than a CD. And it’s surely less frustrating.
- semitones 2y agoI wonder if saying that "it's all encoded in DNA (which is only 6 billion bits)" is accurate. Every time life (considering only humans for now, to simplify) arises, in addition to the DNA (the "code"), you also have the rest of the first cell (the zygote), which already has an "expression" of that code (which may contain additional information beyond what is already in the code), + the entire environment of the mother (which obviously provides additional information). This makes me think that we need far more than just 6 billion bits to actually encode the entire process of new life formation (each instance always piggy-backs off the previous, and always provides processes/information).
- rolisz 2y agoMichael Levin has some awesome experiments where he screws around with the bioelectric fields of planetaria and he gets them to grow two heads and no tail, while being genetically identical to a normal one.
- elric 2y agoOne of my old classmates' area of research is applying electric stimuli to various types of cells. Apparently the right amount at the right time can briefly allow foreign material to pass through the cell wall unimpeded. The complexity of a single cell is insane, that of a complex organism is way beyond insane.
- dennis_jeeves2 2y agoI think you meant cell membrane rather than cell wall? (There is a contrarian theory that says that the cell membrane does not exist at all, look up Gilbert Ling. So it's no surprise that things can move in and out of the cell under certain conditions.)
- inglor_cz 2y agoPlanaria. (Yeah, I am a pedant sometimes.) Also, frogs, tadpoles, axolotls. Truly a wonderful mind. I admire him, not least for his ability to do really weird and important science outside the usual "don't do anything extraordinary" boundaries set by ossified grant committees.
- 9dev 2y agoI wonder if it's actually more similar to procedural generation, based on a seed value, that reliably recreates the same complex output that isn't entirely described by the seed alone. In this case, the DNA would just serve as input to a myriad of algorithms that yield a fully working cell. A single base pair change may lead to a mind-bogglingly long chain of side effects that result in a third arm, or really just nothing at all.
- tialaramex 2y ago> only 6 billion bits in humans A 27-state two value Busy Beaver can implement "Give a counter-example to Goldbach's Conjecture" - if there are none the program never halts. We can recognise that, and say "Oh dear" but it gets us no closer to an answer. Six billion isn't even in the right ballpark, our ability to understand the meaning of every self-acting machine extends maybe to six or seven bits if we're very smart.
- refurb 2y ago> somehow it's all encoded in DNA (only 6 billion bits in humans, which has to also build cells and their ultracomplex machinery) One has to be cautious to not assume that the only data DNA holds is in base pairs. We know that secondary factors like inter- and intra-strand interactions or DNA-histone interaction encodes information as well. A good analogy is a book. While it is made up of individual letters, the combinations build to words, which build to sentences, which build to ideas, which can interact with other ideas (sometimes in other chapters!) to create a complexity beyond just the combination of letters would suggest. That's not even getting into the temporal aspects of DNA expression.
- candiddevmike 2y agoI believe DNA is a compression algorithm beyond our current understanding, and the 6 billion bits is a post-compression size.
- thih9 2y ago> 6 billion bits in humans ~750 megabytes (unit conversion via google)
- BurningFrog 2y ago> all the structures grow from a single cell Two cells: Egg and sperm
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago...which merge into a single zygote cell.
- Metacelsus 2y agoA fertilized egg (zygote) is one cell.
- lubujackson 2y agoA crappy, self-improving function with a decent feedback loop (survival) can get pretty far given 100s of millions of years with hundreds of million (or trillions) of concurrent experiments running at the same time. The time scale of life is the hardest element to comprehend.
- wonnage 2y agoI don’t think it’s true that DNA actually encodes an entire organism. Leaving all discussion of epigenetics aside, the proteins produced from DNA can basically do anything, including modifying DNA. Maybe we could think of large portions of DNA as simply bindings to shared libraries (i.e, the proteins). Or like a package manifest and build script for life rather than the code itself
- s5300 2y ago[dead]
- MattGaiser 2y agoIf I understand his three groups correctly, he’s basically saying that one of the big bottlenecks is that nobody is looking full time. Basically, nobody has the job of discovering human anatomy except as a side hustle or byproduct. I’m quite surprised at that. That’s a remarkable area to not have full time researchers in.
- Validark 2y agoIt's sad to think about how little of our resources are dedicated to work like this. Although I enjoyed the Marvel movies growing up, it would be nice if similar funding could be found for a project like the author describes (and, of course, you could have a sort of documentary showing people what they discovered).
- amelius 2y agoI think he missed at least one group: pathologists.
- twic 2y agoIs it? How would anyone make money or fame out of it? The way our scientific establishment works now is that you are rewarded for discovering things which fit into and shed new light on our existing web of understanding, not for things which are completely new and unconnected. I don't think this is entirely bad - science is useful because it's a densely connected web rather than a bag of unrelated facts. But it does mean that very little value is attached to observations of weird new things that don't fit in anywhere. Back when I was a scientist, I was studying a known structure in the cytoskeleton. By chance, some of the cells I prepared went funny, and produced a radically different structure that I hadn't seen before, and couldn't find any mention of in the literature. I showed my supervisor, who basically said "so what?". On their own, this new structure was useless to a career scientist, because you can't say anything about what it is, what it does, why it's important, or how it connects to what anyone else is publishing about. (It turned out this structure had been seen before, and published a few times, but still, nobody really knows what it's all about)
- MattGaiser 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- elric 2y agoThat was a super interesting read. Another factor that's probably missing is a weird form of prudeness/sexism. I remember reading articles years ago about new discoveries about the clitoris, and thinkig "how the fuck was this missed", or the debate around the existance of the G-spot, or the existence (or not) of female ejaculate. I suspect there's more female anatomy left to be discovered/described than male.
- FrustratedMonky 2y agoI also think it is great to call out that not all 'missing' things like this are a conspiracy, it is just inefficiencies, or competing goals of different groups. "No shadowy Illuminati group deliberately made this decision, but as a civilization we have collectively ‘decided’ that three groups of people would get to peer inside the human body, and they’d all be hobbled."
- elric 2y agoOh indeed, I don't think there's a shadowy cabal suppressing the knowledge of the existence of our third eye or anything like that. But in the past, the long arm of the catholic church certainly had a chilling effect on some research. Like the guy who built some of the first microscopes and discovered the sperm in semen, he wrote to the scientific community to discuss the discovery, but made sure to include that the semen he used was "what was left" after he copulated with his wife. Wouldn't want to give anyone the idea that he had masturbated, heaven forfend!
- valval 2y agoYou’re looking at this from a point of view with inherent bias, that has no guarantee of being lesser in degree than the ones that produced the literature.
- chowells 2y agoYou're looking at this from the point of view that bias is inherently bad. It's not. Biases do not need to be "lesser in degree" to allow adding something new to a conversation. They only need to be different from existing ones. You know, diversity improves results.
- keepamovin 2y agoThe author says that no one‘s gonna fund such work, but I really think the stated multibillionaires should fund it. biological anatomy makes it pretty clear that biological bodies are complex layering of biopolymer sheets that perform incredible mechanical, biochemical and other subtle energetic processes. We could learn a lot about the robots we hope to build by intricate studies of how Animal anatomy has really perfected the art of efficient and compact mechanical motion and advanced functions. In a sense, the sophistication of the dense layering is akin to how modern processor architectures, motherboard and fully integrated circuits SOCs inside compact devices are kind of composite materials of fused layers of nevertheless separate components. I believe this kind of work really should be funded.
- verisimi 2y agoThis is a great case study in how all science is hobbled. Define categories, silo information - who will ever recognise something unusual under their very nose?
- 11235813213455 2y agoI think human species real advantage is human hands, they are so precise, for me that's what made the difference
- atombender 2y agoI'm not sure what you mean by this comment. Was there a time when you didn't have hands?
- 11235813213455 2y agoyes, when we were still bacterias or a bit later, even monkeys hands are not always super precise
- inglor_cz 2y agoI sometimes wonder if crows would be able to build a civilization if they had human hands. They may be about as smart as australopithecus, so there could be an evolutionary feedback loop: tools-brain-better tools-better brain. But you can only do so much with a beak.
- hinkley 2y agoIn the Uplift books dolphins are given prosthetic arms. That’s already half future tech and you’d have to miniaturize them for crows. No way to control them yet, in either case.
- out_of_protocol 2y agoCrow's brains are very good at what they do because their version of human's neocortex is in the center of the brain. And this is the reason why crow's brains can't scale up, there no enough space to grow "thinking" part of brain
- fooker 2y agoHuman hands are marvelously complicated, we don’t appreciate that much as we see our hands everyday. Interestingly, a stark reminder for this came when image generating models could generate everything except realistic hands.
- dwighttk 2y agoAnt that’s just the structures, next is the purpose
- dannyxertify 2y agoThere is still too many things to be discovered and hope AI will give us a full understanding of it
- aaron695 2y ago> If I was a multi-billionaire, I’d hire 1000 of the world’s best surgeons <> supply them with 10,000 ethically donated willed bodies No, this would be like like giving the best programmers super computers in the 80's. What's needed is a better way of doing anatomy. The tools and access are the problem. One cadaver x-rayed and MRI'ed and ultra sounded in great detail then the raw data shared for free for instance. Or do what really really matters and is also the end goal, a cheap way to see inside the living. Cheap ultrasound chips with open data APIs so people can try and find ways to increase accuracy for instance. Every farmer should have an ultrasound but they are too $$$
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- btrettel 2y agoI just skimmed the article, but it reminds me of something from my own PhD in fluid dynamics. I worked in liquid jets/sprays, basically, when a stream of liquid flows from a nozzle and breaks into droplets. Nearly everyone has seen this in some form. I published a "regime diagram" improving the existing categorization of types of liquid jet breakup. There were a lot of changes from the status quo, but one that strikes me as particularly sad was the addition of a new regime that I called "turbulent Rayleigh". Every time men pee, they create a turbulent Rayleigh liquid jet. Yet this was a mostly foreign concept to spray researchers! You can find a few papers that identify what they view as an anomaly, but the papers seem to be mostly ignored and they don't go beyond saying something like "Something here is weird, future researchers should look into this". I did my share, making a theoretical model of the regime, showing how it's fundamentally different from the conventional laminar Rayleigh regime. Most spray researchers would consider a "Rayleigh" jet to be inherently laminar, but that's a misconception. The reason why this happened is that liquid jet/sprays research is heavily biased towards fuel sprays, which rarely ever have this regime. You basically need a long tube (or something similar) to reduce the Reynolds number for turbulence to appear, which usually doesn't happen in fuel spray nozzles. Fuel sprays tend to have lower surface tension and higher viscosity than water/pee too, which makes seeing a turbulent Rayleigh jet even harder.
- CoastalCoder 2y agoOk, honest question: Is this why guys have so much trouble peeing only into the toilet bowl when standing?
- btrettel 2y agoThat's a problem of aim, not spray formation, and thus beyond my expertise. The Rayleigh regimes produce large droplets (mainly diameters similar to the orifice) and not a finer spray that could go everywhere. Also: Peeing into only the bowl won't necessarily minimize the mess. Air gets "entrained" into the water and that creates splatter. Best practice is to target the porcelain inside the bowl (just above the water line) and adjust the distance so that the stream has broken up less as droplets will create more splatter than a solid stream.
- tgbugs 2y agoAs part of an NIH consortium I work with two teams that are collecting multi-scale anatomical data on the human vagus nerve with one of the objectives being to start to get a handle on the variability between individuals. The variability that the experimental teams are seeing is beyond anything I expected, though admittedly my assumptions were naive. The branching structure and routing of the nerves is basically unique per human and we are in the processes of determining whether there are invariant rules (e.g. for branch ordering) that apply across all individuals. And that is at the level of gross anatomy. So we aren't even done with gross anatomy, despite many biologists thinking that the foundations are complete and have been since the 16th century. Turns out that if you want to be able to apply our knowledge of gross anatomy for more complex clinical use cases we need significantly more data about basic variability in structure so that we know what additional data we need to collect for each individual.
- ASalazarMX 2y agoInteresting that such an important nerve could possibly have genetic instructions like "just grow around this direction and do branches".
- aconz2 2y agoBit late and I posted essentially this same comment on their site in hopes they'll see it, but this article jumped out at me because a while ago I was thinking about what it would take to get a whole organism single cell atlas so that you could explore it on the computer. The only thing I can really think of is to take a CNC machine, put it in a big freezer, then scan one layer of the specimen with a microscope and whatever multispectral lighting/imaging you need, then mill away a layer and repeat. Pathology slides are prepared with stains to enhance the contrast of membranes and other features which is probably not an option in the frozen state, so that's a big hurdle, but maybe you can do it with some fancy multispectral imaging. And if you can't, maybe you can at least start with lower resolution structures like anatomy (though I think there's still contrast challenges for that). I know there are some single cell atlas efforts for parts of or whole brains for mice and maybe other organs, but like the author's dream idea of getting order thousands of specimens to study variation, it would be great dataset if you could capture everything in one go.
- kaikai 2y agoThis exists! They’re called knife-edged scanning microscopes.
- aconz2 2y agoWow thanks for the info! This was a good overview of one system https://academic.oup.com/mt/article/25/4/14/6815410 https://academic.oup.com/mt/article/25/4/14/6815410 - 5um slice thickness at 0.7um per pixel and ~1 TB/cm^3, max sample size 50x50x20mm. Humans are about 75k cm^3 so a 75 PB scan isn't impossible. Probably start with a coarser scan and work on the compression algorithms. "Just" need a (much) bigger scanner. And figure out if the knife edge is okay with bones!