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:
In the larger diameter blood vessels, it’s also due to relieving back pressure and finding a path of least resistance. This causes existing pathways to dilate and eventually join together to form a new channel / anastomosis (aortic coarctation is quite an extreme example - because of severe narrowing at the aorta existing blood vessels widen so much they cause notching of the ribs, which is visible on chest x-ray). Things like liver cirrhosis can cause back pressure and dilatation in a similar way.
Indeed. One family member with a rare desease discovered new blood vessels last week after an internal bleeding. These vessels had developed in the wrong places in the stomach and will be closed again and the normal vessels, which had been blocked by blood clothing, will be unblocked.
> another possible adaptive mechanism of coronary circulation to chronic intermittent ischemia of OSA patients is the development of coronary collaterals
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)
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
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.
if the super conductor thing fans out we might not even need to wait for fusion to go mainstream to electrify everything. That tech could take 10,000x the efficiency of batteries.
> the new revolutionary battery (that we will never hear about again
Which is a cute thing to say if you're totally ignorant of the substantial progress being made, in fundamental research and manufacturing methods, of batteries and energy storage systems every week.
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.
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.
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.
imagine if ai basically ended human labor we all had universal basic income and everyone was essentially advised to become an artist or scientist to essentially work on elevating our knowledge. imagine if every starving kid or adult in 3rd world countries were scientists.
I mean with AI we might not need all those brains on problems but it couldn't hurt to have that large of a scientifically educated body .
I don't think those are your only two possibilities. The much more mundane answer is just that this isn't really that different from most years. There's usually a couple of seemingly "big" breakthroughs every year. It's just that the past few years have had most of them overshadowed by negative clickbait news even moreso than normal.
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?
Cyclarity (formerly Underdog Pharmaceuticals) published an article on their technology to use Cyclodextrin molecules to encapsulate "toxic biomolecules" including 7-ketocholesterol which they believe is linked to atherosclerosis and macular degeneration. I think this might be the approach they are using with their candidate drug linked above.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037851732...
I get the impression that Cyclodextrins are far from perfect, but at least there is some hope for non-invasive treatments in future.
Edit: But look at what has been done with hearts and kidneys...
Hearts and kidneys are tinker toys! I am talking about the central nervous system!
I am a scientist, not a philosopher! You have more chance of reanimating this scalpel than you have of mending a broken nervous system!
...I am not interested in death! The only thing that concerns me is the preservation of life!
[jams the scalpel into his leg...
:)
* Heads in jars, but, of course the basis of the series is Fry coming out of "cryogenic stasis"
** Caveman lawyer ... the usual mix of stupid / corny but with some amusement value, I guess ... can't even quite remember how dumb vs. funny that one was ...
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
That isn't strictly true. New neurons do get created 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.
That very Wikipedia article says that adult neurogenesis essentially does not exist in humans, according to the latest studies.
This used to be a very controversial topic, and some people still hold on to the older view, but new research has found nothing in the last place where it could have been plausible.
That's a nice idea actually. We used culture media in the experiments. I'm interested to know how would the endothelial cells react to the "engineered" blood
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.
Hi, that's a good point, but given that the graft is made of biocompatible materials, the risk of toxicity is low. The idea is that while the engineered blood vessel degrades slowly, the body will replace it. So, the engineered vessel should be replaced by native blood vessel within a few years of implantation.
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.
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.
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...
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!
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!
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
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.
> 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.
Your denial of reality is the same. Because even evolution had to start from somewhere. We still haven't figured that out. Living organisms didn't just spring into existence out of nowhere.
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...