On another track, I wonder how this ties in with the army's computer game and things like Counterstrike, players of which could become the 10th Interactive Division. Respawning would be a problem, but there would finally be a use for campers.

Any chance next weeks story is about humans in the military breaking the "Thou shall not kill" commandment? Or perhaps something detailing how tariffs violate the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition?

Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 09:34 AM

August 30, 2005

The secret of NIMH is now available at the Wistar Institute

In the continuing vein of sceintists-playing-god stories (zombie dogs and monkey brains, we now take you to... Immortal mice?

SCIENTISTS have created "miracle mice" that can regenerate amputated limbs or damaged vital organs, making them able to recover from injuries that would kill or permanently disable normal animals.

Well, that's rather cool. Bypassing the better mousetrap, they're breeding better mice, because that's what we need. Expecially in New York. Mice its harder to get rid of...

at the Wistar Institute, a US biomedical research centre

Wait. I thought it was the National Institute of Mental Health that did this stuff. Where's Nicodemus and Brisby?

"We have experimented with amputating or damaging several different organs, such as the heart, toes, tail and ears, and just watched them regrow," she said. A similar phenomenon was observed when the optic nerve was severed and the liver partially destroyed.

"It is quite remarkable. The only organ that did not grow back was the brain."

"When we injected fetal liver cells taken from those animals into ordinary mice, they too gained the power of regeneration. We found this persisted even six months after the injection."

So the only way to kill them is to sever their heads and/or destroy their brains. Which is bringing both zombies to mind, and the following scrolling narration... "He cannot die, unless you take his head, and with it his power. In the end there can be only one."

Good god. Just utterly incredible. If it ever makes it to clinical human testing and works this well, the implications are astounding. Arthritis, organ failure, nerve damage, spinal injuries, amputations all gone in one fell swoop.

Incredible.

The researchers believe the same genes could confer greater longevity and are measuring their animals' survival rate. However, the mice are only 18 months old, and the normal lifespan is two years so it is too early to reach firm conclusions.

It really only leaves two things: The quest for world domination and working out how to create such small admantium claws for my army of Wolverine mice.

Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 01:43 PM

August 05, 2005

You want to do what?

Following on from an earlier post, Australians are going ahead with test tube baby sharks.

Yahoo had an interesting article which tells us that

The gray nurse is one of the fiercest-looking but most docile marine creatures

And in the very next paragraph that

In a process called intrauterine cannibalism, gray nurse embryo pups develop a jaw and razor-sharp teeth very early in their development and cannibalize siblings in the womb.

which would not appear particularily docile to me.

Melbourne Aquarium this month artificially inseminated Lonnie, an 8-1/2-foot-long seven-gill shark with the sperm from a male tank mate.

Docile though they may be, artificially inseminating something that looks like this little girl is not something that seems inherently wise.

Some short while after that, they're going to remove the embryos (before they grow teeth) and pop them in individual, artificial wombs (they'll probably end up using buckets) of artificial shark-amniotic fluid, so they don't have the chance to eat each other.

Neither of which have been developed yet. Back to the drawing boards. And next time, frickin' laser beams!

Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 02:13 PM

July 14, 2005

Ethics, ethics, ethics.

Cunning and simplicity may belong together in an ape. A monkey who could recognise both would be on the long road towards humanity.

Monkey, Episode 17, "Vampire Master", BBC Release.

More debate on the cutting edge of medical research. Whilst I was not perturbed by the zombie dogs, this one is a little... odd.

The insertion of human stem cells into monkey brains runs a "real risk" of altering the animals' abilities in ways that might make them more like us, scientists said today.

A panel of 22 experts -- including primatologists, stem cell researchers, lawyers and philosophers -- debated the possible consequences of the technique for more than a year.

They don't know, can't reach a consensus and will, of course, push on, in the name of stem cell research. Progress, progress, progress.

Stem cell research is, of course very important. But I'm not convinced you need to stick them in monkey heads.

Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 05:00 PM

June 29, 2005

Braaaaaaiiins! (Zombie alert)

Commercial Voiceover: The rich aroma that forcibly interrupts the story. The deep taste that makes even a zombie's eyes pop out. When you are tired of a confused story. For you, who know the difference, try Dog Blend.

Talking Head (1992)

Boffins create zombie dogs.

So sayeth the headlines.

After reading a little more, these are no more zombies than anyone who has been jump-started by an EMT. Karl Rove still has all the mind control chips, and he's not wasting them on puppies. He's saving them up for his army of mechanized hedgehogs.

The process may sound grotesque, but that all makes for better zombies. The subject (pre-zombie dog) is killed by draining it of blood whilst replacing it with a chilled saline solution (zombie fluids). This has the added bonus of sounding rather vampiric at the same time. The core body temperature drops rapidly from 40'c to about 7'c, staving off damage to brain tissue - in much the same way that allows people who have fallen through ice on a pond to be resuscitated 40 minutes later without the brain damage that typically occurs five minutes after the brain is cut off from oxygen. It also avoid the problems that plague the cryogenically frozen - namely that when you actually freeze the brain, the cell walls rupture. A thawed brain is not much more than goo. If you've ever frozen and thawed a strawberry, that's the ballpark.

Some hours later, the saline is pumped out, the blood goes back, body temperature is brought back up and the heart jump started.

And the dog wakes up, suffering, apparently, no detectable loss of mental ability (then again, if they tested on Boxers or Irish Spaniels, there would be no detecable loss of mental ability if they removed the brain).

USSR open heart surgeons have been using a chilling (to 26'c), killing, heating reviving technique for over 20 years (circulatory arrest does indeed mean stopping the heart and bloodflow). This was done with crushed ice and had incidence of 'neurological complications' (synonym: brain damage) (3.8%) and deaths (9.3%).

It's the sophistication of this technique, and the way it avoids the neurological complications by chilling to such a degree quickly that garners it the attention. Who will be interested and why?

The hospital emergency rooms, the military and quite likely the cryogenic nut jobs. If you can do this and reliably resuscitate (rather than "reanimate") them, it's actually going to be less risky to kill a patient to perform large, complex and invasive surgeries, then revive them than it would be to operate on on a live patient who has an excellent chance of bleeding to death. And you save on anaesthetic.

Is it grotesque and creepy? Many would say so. Playing god? It does rather sound like embalming. But no life is created where there was none before. Is it ethical? I feel sorry for the dogs. Also I think they should have done a little more research on this one first. Careful with that knife, Rachel.

The good Doctors Frankenstien will doubtless have a good deal of time to consider this with the AMA Institute of Ethics.

Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 09:14 PM