Scientists find life in dead brain cells(forgetoday.com)
forgetoday.com
Scientists find life in dead brain cells
http://forgetoday.com/2020/05/03/scientists-find-life-in-dead-brain-cells/
70 comments
available on archive here: https://archive.is/pk9YR
Does not work for me, plus SSL error :|
You'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/
EDIT2: I should mention that I still use 1.1.1.1, and I agree with their stance on this. :)
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/
EDIT2: I should mention that I still use 1.1.1.1, and I agree with their stance on this. :)
Judging 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.
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.
Plenty 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.
This 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...
Not 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.
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.
Stories like this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rom_Houben - terrify me, imagine being assumed in a comatose state, but being conscious the entire time.
The claim that this was true was rejected years ago, but thinking about it is scary.
The claim that this was true was rejected years ago, but thinking about it is scary.
There was a Tales from the Crypt episode about this. It's been a long time, but they played a prank on a guy where they somehow knocked him out and temporarily paralyzed him. When he came around they pretended like they were about to do an autopsy on him, knowing that he could hear them. Then I think one of the pranksters had a heart attack and died and they really did an autopsy on him, except it turned out that consciousness did continue after death and the scene ended as he started screaming (in his mind - somehow they got across to the audience that you were hearing his thoughts) as the started cutting in.
Fringe was a fucking amazing show. I should go watch it again.
Yes, 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.
I loved that show.
I 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.
Fringe was a terrific show. Probably top 10 my favorite shows ever. Definitely #1 sci-fi show I watched.
It is actually what I have on in the background right now. That now Amazon owned IMDB streaming service has it with commercials for free.
There was a tales from the crypt where the main character dies and finds that his consciousness remains after death. But then it turns out he wasn't really dead, it was a prank. But then he has a heart attack and dies for real. And his consciousness remains as his body is dissected.
Ha! I just wrote a comment about the exact same episode! I though it was one of the pranksters who had the heart attack. Was it the prankee? It's been too many decades since I saw it.
I don't remember now. I have a lot of half-baked memories of TftC episodes. Maybe someday I'll rewatch the whole series.
I 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.
> 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.
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.
Sorry, I need more coffee before I write comments.
You are all correct and I'm totally wrong. I confused it with the research on neurons surrounding the dead areas. These neurons become dormant because of disuse.
What are educts?
"Educt, is a substance separated from a mixture in which it already existed, as opposed to a product, which is newly generated by a chemical reaction."
So, in this context, the substances consumed by the cell's chemical processes.
That'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.
Source? My understanding of biology is that _all_ cells can die from oxygen deprivation, which is what happens to asphyxiated brain cells.
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Minor electrical activity. That is amazing. One wonders whether some kind of rhythmic electrical impulse might restart neuron firing.
Could 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?
Or brains in jars. Build a new body when you get there.
The 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
Why not build the whole thing when you get there? And then fill it up with whatetever needed via some form of rapid education
I'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.
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.
Connectome scans—a lot easier to maintain over centuries for interstellar travel.
It 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.
We are quite a ways from fully understanding even a single neuron.
I 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?
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?
That'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.
Imagine 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.
If 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!
Hey that's a very interesting response, thanks for taking the time to write that! Sorry I'm late :)
I imagine such a brain upload process would be rather traumatic. Assuming it works reliably, what sort of physiological trauma would you now have? So many people associate themselves with their body, how they look, what physical things they do (sports, gym, etc)... and then suddenly they are just their thoughts and whatever external stimuli we can simulate. I guess we could simulate those things in VR, but even so, deep down you will know it's not "you".
I didn't read the actual publication but based on this article I think what they are essentially saying is that the cells were still functioning in the context of basic cell operation, but were no longer functioning as neurons. In which case the cells themselves weren't fully working either.
Funny enough, linking to this site from Hacker News killed it.
well the brain is still there working
I'm reminded of this study: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobe...
Link to article:
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1099-1
The 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.
I know people like that.
Site name is a little on the nose...
You 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...
Just saying...
I recently read Max Brooks's World War Z and (a) even before Covid-19, he was able to lay out a plausible scenario of stupidity and selfishness that led to a global collapse and (2) as he's said in interviews [1] he couldn't have predicted how much dumber and selfish we would be in real life.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/03/24/820601571/all-of-this-panic-c...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/03/24/820601571/all-of-this-panic-c...
The 'Zombie Apocalypse' to me is more about being stuck somewhere(life/work situation) fully surrounded by living people who don't use their mind. And then you go about gathering a merry band to fight the mindless herd.
Covid'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.
Could you explain where you got that "less than 1%" figure from?
The main thing to understand is that is infection fatality rate, not case fatality rate. IFR being the portion of the people who got the disease that died, and CFR being the portion of people who the medical systems finds out has the disease who die.
The 1% number if support by a pretty wide variety of sources and studies that have all been relatively consistent in the 1%-0.1% order of magnitude - more recently they seem to have been converging on the 0.5% to 0.25% range (though I haven't been thorough enough in reading the literature to want to state that range confidently).
A relatively recent and good example of such a study would be this one [1] from Germany. They sampled 600 people relatively randomly from the population, tested them all, and looked at the outcomes.
[1] https://www.land.nrw/sites/default/files/asset/document/zwis...
The 1% number if support by a pretty wide variety of sources and studies that have all been relatively consistent in the 1%-0.1% order of magnitude - more recently they seem to have been converging on the 0.5% to 0.25% range (though I haven't been thorough enough in reading the literature to want to state that range confidently).
A relatively recent and good example of such a study would be this one [1] from Germany. They sampled 600 people relatively randomly from the population, tested them all, and looked at the outcomes.
[1] https://www.land.nrw/sites/default/files/asset/document/zwis...
"Using data through April 20, 2020, we fit a statistical model to COVID-19 case fatality rates over time at the US county level to estimate the COVID-19 IFR among symptomatic cases (IFR-S) as time goes to infinity. The IFR-S in the US was estimated to be 1.3% (95% central credible interval: 0.6% to 2.1%). County-specific rates varied from 0.5% to 3.6%."
https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20200506.15905...
https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20200506.15905...
Have you read that study? It's over-extrapolating from shit data with a overly fancy mathematical model. I don't fault the authors for trying, it is an interesting attempt, but I weight their results substantially less heavily when forming my world view.
Not to mention which, some estimates of asymptomatic case rate go up to 50% (others substantially less so, it probably depends both on age range and what you define as asymptomatic)
By the way, direct link to the study is https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2020....
Not to mention which, some estimates of asymptomatic case rate go up to 50% (others substantially less so, it probably depends both on age range and what you define as asymptomatic)
By the way, direct link to the study is https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2020....
Remember 2 months ago when data from China indicated the CFR was 1-2%? And then it exploded in Italy and now we see CFRs in the 5-15% range worldwide? Yeah. I am really sick of flippant underestimates of the seriousness of this motherfucking disease. Deaths are still being underreported and no one has shown a statistically sound study of what the real infection rate is, even as it continues to climb, so both the numerator and denominator of this fickle IFR quantity have got massive errors on them.
yes, we’d all be zombies.
100% death rates don't make for good pandemics and rabies-style viruses are poor spreaders, since you have to bite a victim.
The 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.
Or at least they would like to if they weren't trees and weren't dead.
That one Aqua Teen episode is probably a preview of their reaction.
well, a zombie pandemic is a 100% undeath rate... 0% dead but 100% contagious forever after is a practically unbounded r_0.
If they are typical zombies who have to spread the contagion via bites and scratches, and are slow and stupid, then my guess is the remaining humans would find it relatively easy to reduce the infection rate below 1. Zombie movies and shows are for drama, not realism. You'd need 28 Days Later or Resident Evil style zombies to overwhelm well armed humans who employ strategy. But this is a fictional scenario we're arguing about.
yeah, we’re whiffing hard enough in real life..
Hugged.
Cue more black market organs until more can be grown.