Wonders of Biology

Well, you leave scientists alone to play & anything is possible...….

{{ Two completely unrelated studies, but weirdly related and not a little disturbing, have ben released.

First a US bunch of scientists reviving dead pig brains!

'US scientists have partially revived pig brains four hours after the animals were slaughtered....The study showed the death of brain cells could be halted and that some connections in the brain were restored....Four hours later the organs were connected to a system made by the team at Yale University.
It rhythmically pumped (to mimic the pulse) a specially designed liquid round the brain, which contained a synthetic blood to carry oxygen and drugs to slow or reverse the death of brain cells.
The pig brains were given the restorative cocktail for six hours...The researchers found working synapses...The brains also showed a normal response to medication and used up the same amount of oxygen as a normal brain.
This was all 10 hours after the pigs were decapitated..."What we are showing is the process of cell death is a gradual, stepwise process.
"And that some of those processes can be either postponed, preserved or even reversed."...the Yale scientists were so concerned the pigs might become conscious that they gave drugs to the disembodied brains to reduce any brain activity.
And the team were constantly monitoring the brains to see if there was any sign of higher brain functions.
In that case they would have used anaesthetic and ended the experiment..."If, in the future, it were possible to restore the function of the brain after death, to bring back someone's mind and personality, that would, of course, have important implications for our definitions of death."


So um yeah, there's that. And one wonders had they not given the pigs heads drugs to reduce the chances of consciousness returning would the pigs have been aware?  And 4 hours is a long time, what would the results have been had they done it immediately after 'death'?

And the second study is this one-

'We know we are dead when we die because our brains keep working to make us aware of what's happening around us...a new study suggests your consciousness carries on functioning after your heart stops beating and your body movements fail...This means you are essentially 'trapped' inside your dead body with your brain still working, if only for a short time...Dr. Sam Parnia is studying consciousness after death and examining cardiac arrest cases in Europe and the US...He says people in the first phase of death may still experience some form of consciousness...there is evidence to suggest the deceased may even hear themselves being pronounced dead by doctors.'

So yeah, when you die you might know your dead for a bit before switching off, and even then theres a chance some mad scientists is going to lop your head off stick it in a jar and reanimate you!!   }}

It all makes sense. On the hopeful side, this means it may be possible to keep the brain alive while the body is worked on and resuscitated. Nearly everything can be restored except the brain, given enough time.

That makes sense to me. About 15 years ago I spent a bit of time in the Critical Care Unit with machines keeping me alive. I remember I had some crazy dreams of drowning, with voices periodically that I took to be the Coast Guard trying to save me. A couple days later when I was awake I told the CCI nurse about this and she said, "That was me. I was talking to you." She's one of my heroes!

Since then I've always assumed that an unconscious person is still listening....

You keep telling the ends of stories without the rest of it, Dave!

so, when the executioner holds up a fresh head from the Guillotine does the Head think.." Fuck ! look at all those people, turned out to see ME !"

you keep telling the ends of stories without the rest- Halfy

{{Yeah come on Dave, spill the beans! And frankly given all your exciting escapades its just as well there someone here being sensible to keep your crops fertilised in your absences }}

Oh believe me, that wasn't the end! That story was from the 2nd book of the trilogy.

I've shared bits of this before, but basically a couple years of my life in the early 2000's were devoted to surviving a particularly virulent form of leukemia, the chemo that followed, the compromised immune system that it left me with, and some of the amazing secondary infections that tried to make their homes within my body while the gates were open. It's thrilling stuff if you're into that sort of thing , but I usually only share the full story over beer with other cancer survivors who can properly go "OOOOOH!!! AHHHHH!!!" over the massive doses of drugs I was able to survive.
{{{a bit like Keith Richards, now that I think about it... }}}

Admittedly we were expecting some kind of bear entanglement...

Ah, chemo stories. My twin brother went bald during his treatments. Then once his hair grew back went skeletal during an infection; scared the crap out of us. But that's what it took to finally wake up his immune system and he came back strong as ever. I was urged to do chemo after a melanoma, but when I found it would only make a 6% difference to recurrence in this case, took a pass.

Wonderfully strong people here. So many stories of endurance. yet you speak of it without pity or sympathy. "just get on with it" seems to be the mantra. I had cancer many moons ago & just recently had to chew my finger nails to the elbow wondering if I had bowel cancer. I don't, thank gawd but, do you ever see things abstractly. And yes, you do just get on with it.

yep, it's worse when you're younger and still have delusions of life being fair. That's part of being protective of kids: you don't want them to find out the truth.

halfwise wrote:Admittedly we were expecting some kind of bear entanglement...

Yeah, I can tell you from experience that not only are bears and wolves a lot less scary, they make a lot better stories at parties. Trotting out a bear story will get you invited back again and again. Dropping a cancer story in the middle of a lively evening will usually get you permanently struck from the invitation list....

This guy who used to live on our property with his little boy died of Leukemia several years ago now. He was a musician and a farrier. He named his son Sativa.

Anyway, just trying to get struck from the party lists lol.


Hey btw, speaking of biology, I was trying to find the definition of "wick" as relates to the green part under the bark of vines and the branches of bushes and the like. Is this not one of the meanings of "wick"? I couldn't seem to find it.

I don't know about that definition of "wick" Forest, but I DO know how effective leukemia stories are for killing conversations.

{{ I duno about lukemia but I do know a definition of wick.

From West Germanic came into Old English as wēoce (whch itself was related to the Dutch wiek and the Germanic wieche (which translates as 'wick-yarn').

There also another Old English form of the word that comes in through latin and meant a dwelling place or small hamlet., and eventually by 13th century, exclusively dairy farm, but I'm guessing its the plant related word you were after. }}

The only wick I know is -- "you get on my bloody wick !", & of course Candle Wick.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:{{ I duno about lukemia but I do know a definition of wick.

From West Germanic came into Old English as wēoce (whch itself was related to the Dutch wiek and the Germanic wieche (which translates as 'wick-yarn').

There also another Old English form of the word that comes in through latin and meant a dwelling place or small hamlet., and eventually by 13th century, exclusively dairy farm, but I'm guessing its the plant related word you were after. }}

Yes, I see, is any of this related to the meaning I'm talking about though? Have you heard "wick" used in that way before?

I can't say I've heard "wick" specifically used for that inner layer in woody plants, but it's a pretty good description of how water is transported upwards through that tissue, and it's less pretentious than saying "Xylem" or Cambium layer". I think I'll try it next time the subject comes up in casual conversation!

{{ The reason I thought it might be related word Forest is that early wicks for candles were made by twisting fiberous plant material together. We used to peel bark of fallen branches as kids and pull the green stuff off form underneath as it came away in long thin thread like stuff, which was excellent for twisting into strings- perhaps it was used for primitive candle wicks and the name stuck. }}

DIATOMACEOUS EARTH. Mark it down.

You may remember I've had a bedbug problem. The professionals couldn't get them because it was only after they had been by 3 times I realized my heavy pine loft bed needed to be unscrewed so the treatment could get in the crevices. So I started treating myself using conventional bedbug insecticides, and got it down so I was only killing one bug every couple of days (I would lay out as bait, flick the lights on, and nail the little bastard) but for weeks I seemed to have reached a plateau.

I had been reading about diatomaceous earth for a while, but it seemed some mystical stuff I would never find in my local hardware store, but lo and behold, it's there!

This is what it is: little diatoms ground up. They don't bother us, but are as sharp as broken glass to the bugs. It abrades the exoskeleton, and especially when helped along with a little salt and citric acid causes the bugs to dehydrate over the course of couple days. A slow, satisfyingly gruesome death.

And it works better than pesticides! I spread it all around my bed and bedroom, went on the weekend trip where I lost my car ( ) and came back to find them gone. Except in furniture like the couch where I hadn't treated. Took care of that right quick.

The stuff's a miracle, and no bug has developed resistance to it. It doesn't evaporate like pesticides. Though I'd seen it mentioned I can't understand why this hasn't been spread around as THE treatment for bedbugs and other things. Perhaps because it's slow. But I sure enjoy the thought of them abrading and dehydrating to a slow death. I like that thought a lot.

hmmm it can be harmful for the lungs Halfy, so after you have killed your bugs Hoover it all up and get rid of it. Don't leave it lying about as dust.

You don't want to leave it where it can stirred up on a regular basis. Unfortunately it looks like I'll need to do that for about a week because last night I discovered that though I'm not getting bugs early in the night, I am getting them very late at night, implying they are travelling from away from the bed. So I have to leave the stuff around all the possible access points.

But then I will definitely clean those up.

{{ This is intriguing-

'the idea that living organisms are floating in the clouds of Planet Venus.
But this is what astronomers are now considering after detecting a gas in the atmosphere they can't explain.
That gas is phosphine - a molecule made up of one phosphorus atom and three hydrogen atoms.
On Earth, phosphine is associated with life, with microbes living in the guts of animals like penguins, or in oxygen-poor environments such as swamps.
For sure, you can make it industrially, but there are no factories on Venus... Prof Jane Greaves, from Cardiff University, UK published a paper in the journal Nature Astronomy detailing their observations of phosphine at Venus, as well as the investigations they've made to try to show this molecule could have a natural, non-biological origin.
But for the moment, they're stumped.
Prof Greaves' team first identified phosphine at Venus using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, and then confirmed its presence using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile.
Phosphine has a distinctive "absorption line" that these radio telescopes discern at a wavelength of about 1mm. The gas is observed at mid-latitudes on the planet at roughly 50-60km in altitude. The concentration is small - making up only 10-20 parts in every billion atmospheric molecules - but in this context, that's a lot.
Dr William Bains, who's affiliated to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, is a biochemist on the team. He's studied various combinations of different compounds expected to be on Venus; he's examined whether volcanoes, lightning and even meteorites could play a role in making PH3 - and all of the chemical reactions he's investigated, he says, are 10,000 times too weak to produce the amount of phosphine that's been observed.
Through my whole career I have been interested in the search for life elsewhere in the Universe, so I'm just blown away that this is even possible," Prof Greaves said. "But, yes, we are genuinely encouraging other people to tell us what we might have missed. Our paper and data are open access; this is how science works." BBC Science }}

Interesting stuff Petty, thanks.

I know the previous conversation is old but I just wanted to say that I've used diatomaceous earth in my parent's house for fleas in the past. Seemed to help as I recall. And yeah, the thought of the little buggers cutting themselves open and slowly dehydrating is quite satisfying!