[HN Gopher] We're closer to 'engineering' blood vessels
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We're closer to 'engineering' blood vessels
Author : geox
Score : 81 points
Date : 2023-08-05 18:55 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pursuit.unimelb.edu.au)
(TXT) w3m dump (pursuit.unimelb.edu.au)
| formvoltron wrote:
| sounds great, but is it a good idea to use polymers inside the
| body? can't they degrade into sub-cellular sized particles which
| could then damage cells? And when those cells apoptose their
| insides come out, including the polymers and those polymers go on
| to damage another cell.
|
| I've got a sneaking feeling that nanoparticles of plastic are
| going to be a major health problem in the future. I hope I'm
| wrong.
| tomrod wrote:
| Depends whether they are inert. I suspect lack of internal UV
| light might help a bit. I'd reckon something breaking polymers
| down internally won't stop until the nanoparticles degrade.
| tmccrary55 wrote:
| Beta problems
| JimtheCoder wrote:
| Well, since I'm still quite young, I can look forward to getting
| all of my internal plumbing replaced for my 65th birthday...
| tmccrary55 wrote:
| I wonder how long a human brain could survive, if all of its
| support systems could be maintained indefinitely?
|
| Wayland-Yutani vibes
| tux3 wrote:
| New neurons cannot be created in an adult brain (only new
| synapses), so over the years it's a very slow process of brain
| atrophy where neurons that die for any reason cannot be
| replaced. That already makes indefinitely untenable in a messy
| living system, since many of the inportant bits can't
| regenerate.
|
| And then neurodegenerative diseases are really hard bugs to
| fix, those are the fast brain atrophies where you get motor
| problems, amnesia, impaired cognition, dementia, and so forth.
|
| Avoiding stroke and hypoxia is one thing, but keeping the cell
| and protein machinery running and self-healing forever without
| any deadly bugs is a tough ask. It's only optimized to
| reproduce, not to live forever
| falcor84 wrote:
| That isn't strictly true. New neurons do get heated in adult
| humans, in at least two regions of the brain, but probably
| more. There is even some evidence of cannabis potentially
| contributing to this process.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_neurogenesis
| nine_k wrote:
| Adult brain can grow new neurons, at least in hippocampus:
| https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/new-hippocampal-neurons-
| continu...
| HappySweeney wrote:
| There was a Quirks and Quarks episode about 35 years ago aabout
| that and concluded that the brain would only last 300 years due
| to bacterial erosion.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Pretty sure mine would die of boredom long before.
|
| What would you do without a body?
| falcor84 wrote:
| VR in the metaverse and/or controlling a robotic body in
| regular meatspace.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Wayland-Yutani? I can't seem to recall they did that? What
| film(s)?
|
| My thoughts on the other hand immediately went to the heads in
| jars in Futurama.
|
| https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Heads_in_Jars
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| It's kind of ludicrous how complex the blood vessels are.
|
| Considering their role, whoever or whatever created the
| "blueprints" for them must have been very inteligent.
| smallnix wrote:
| *intelligent
| tomrod wrote:
| Certainly if credit needs to be given for the design of blood
| vessels, I'll take all that credit, thank you!
|
| /s
|
| Let us not assume creation and intelligent design with
| biological evolution does fine. Too many malicious people claim
| moral superiority/right to rule when you mix in a claim to a
| creator of life with evolution. Parismony!
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| Oh, I wasn't thinking about _that_ creator.
|
| The creators I believe in are much closer to actual science
| than religion.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| falsifiable science relies on adjusting to new evidence, so if
| an invisible being that doesn't interact in our world in any
| way was able to be quantified in a reproducible experience or
| experiment, the science would change to accommodate its
| existence and all fundamental assumptions about reality
|
| Unfalsifiable things are distinctive, in that there is no
| evidence that would change the assumption. its working
| backwards to support the unfalsifiable view, as opposed to
| working forward and adjusting to any result even if it doesnt
| match the view
| prmph wrote:
| If the invisible being doesn't interact with our world in any
| way,then by definition it cannot be quantified or subjected
| to experiment?
|
| Also, if the being is super intelligent and running us in a
| simulation, can you really subject it to experiment?
|
| That would be like processes running in a container going
| rogue and demanding evidence of their host environment.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| and its existence cannot be relied upon to substantiate
| anything else
|
| the hypothesis wouldn't present itself at all without
| hearsay, or just be invalidated by all experiments and
| useless for building upon, compared to just using the
| substantiated resources at hand: in your analogy that would
| be all of the other RAM and computational resources to your
| benefit.
|
| whereas if you play hide and seek with a friend that says
| theyre going to hide in a magical land you cant access,
| then you cant play with that friend anymore and thats the
| totality of the observation, compared to the friend thats
| ultimately just another process hiding in RAM.
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| > so if an invisible being that doesn't interact in our world
| in any way was able to be quantified in a reproducible
| experience
|
| No invisible beigns here. Our creators are either extinct
| (killed by a world-altering catastrophe, perhaps) or are
| somewhere far away where they can observe their creation.
| pigeons wrote:
| So we can't see them?
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| Can ants "see" us?
|
| But no, not directly. You did give me a good chuckle.
| gcheong wrote:
| Or maybe if you get enough rolls of the dice over billions of
| years you don't need intelligence.
| ttymck wrote:
| Same thing?
| pessimizer wrote:
| Yup. Pretty sure trained LLMs are functions of the dice
| rolls provided by the input. What we are now is a function
| of the dice rolls provided by terrestrial physics.
| barbazoo wrote:
| How?
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| Because someone did the initial rolling of the dice?
| Someone bought the dice in their version of LA casino.
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| Who did the rolling of the dice?
|
| But I digress. Arguing with people who believe in world-
| building RNG Tetris is pointless.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| Oh, I imagine we'll keep trying. Each one of us, shaped by
| both the differing environments we were nurtured in, and
| our individual genetic nature, will try different ways and
| means of addressing it with you. Perhaps eventually one
| argument will succeed, news of its efficacy will spread,
| and it will come to dominate...
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| Just to be clear, I wasn't thinking about some biblical
| God...
| tomrod wrote:
| I'll take the blame. Dice, rolled.
|
| /s
|
| Let us not assume creation and intelligent design with
| biological evolution does fine. Too many malicious people
| claim moral superiority/right to rule when you mix in a
| claim to a creator of life with evolution. Parismony!
| agumonkey wrote:
| Great for surgery, what about restoring non invasively ?
| ccity88 wrote:
| So just of the top of my head, things that have made mainstream
| news in the past ~week;
|
| - A Small molecule oral cancer drug kills 100% of solid tumors
| across 70 evaluated cancer types - LK-99, potentially the first
| ever room temperature ambient pressure superconductor (unverified
| as of yet)
|
| Things are looking up
| rwc wrote:
| Don't forget growing teeth:
|
| https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/08/05/a-drug-that-makes-t...
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Growing teeth likely would improve peoples lives more than
| anything else mentioned.
| agumonkey wrote:
| odontogenesis is very fascinating...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_tooth_development
|
| even after reading a bunch of articles about many aspects,
| the cell organisation to produce mineral rods support as
| scaffold for mineral/enamel surface layers is .. really
| something
| darkclouds wrote:
| That story has been around for at least a decade now.
|
| 2011 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/1103301010
| 38.h...
|
| 2017 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/damaged-
| teeth-reg...
| ben_w wrote:
| Had teeth growing in petri dishes a while ago; I wonder what
| happened to those...
| formvoltron wrote:
| Are you talking about the City of Hope discovery: AOH1996
| inhibitor of PCNA?
| bobmaxup wrote:
| What about the record high ocean temperatures and antartic ice
| loss?
| formvoltron wrote:
| robots building robots installing solar panels.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| They forgot to add the "for humans" postfix.
| JimtheCoder wrote:
| Measurement errors of course...\s
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| you win some you lose some
| tomjen3 wrote:
| At this rate of change anything twenty years out is
| essentially impossible to estimate.
|
| There are commercial companies working on Fusion power. We
| may have electrified everything by then, we may have painted
| the dessert white or we may be totally doomed.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| Now we can replace the ice with blood vessels.
| lm28469 wrote:
| It's like that every week tbh, you forgot the alzheimer cure
| (in mice models) and the new revolutionary battery (that we
| will never hear about again)
| submeta wrote:
| More and more, I'm starting to believe that we are witnessing
| one of two phenomena. Either we're observing an emergence, in
| which humanity is making quantum leaps in scientific
| advancement, or indeed, some form of intelligence is subtly
| guiding us toward solutions for humanity's most pressing
| problems.
| bobmaxup wrote:
| Why would you believe that an intelligence is pushing
| humanity that way?
|
| For instance, LK-99 was discovered in 1999. Why would an
| intelligence who pushed someone to make this tell them to
| study it for decades and to patent it before they made a
| publication?
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Used to be a brilliant mind could learn all there was known
| about science. Now its too much, and our minds have a hard
| time grasping what millions of minds working on a million
| problems for untold hours can accomplish.
| gochi wrote:
| Or the alternative: after several years of media coverage
| almost exclusively being about either the pandemic effects,
| covid, layoffs, or wars; we've gone "back to normal" by
| relying on these _revolutionary_ studies /concepts that
| struggle to ever make it to full availability for clickbait.
| lukko wrote:
| Quite a while ago now, but I used to work at a tissue engineering
| lab in London. I was interested in how techniques from procedural
| design and architecture could be brought across, as actually the
| design of many of the TE scaffolds seemed very crude.
|
| Blood vessels grow according to growth factors that are released
| in response to hypoxia, I wanted to try and model them as a space
| colonisation. I never quite got around to producing the actual
| structures, but some more details here:
|
| https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/-/media/files/rcs/standards-and-res...
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| Oh neat- your scaffolding reminds me of Erwin Hauer
| trallnag wrote:
| I'd love to get replacements for my defective and missing
| lymphatic vessels...
| go_prodev wrote:
| I'm eagerly awaiting cyclodextrin based treatments, that can
| potentially remove the plaque and cholesterol buildup.
|
| There's so much to be positive about at the moment.
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(page generated 2023-08-05 23:00 UTC)