[HN Gopher] We're closer to 'engineering' blood vessels ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-08-05 23:00 UTC)