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Domain: swmed.edu

Stories and comments across the archive that link to swmed.edu.

Comments · 7

  1. NLP would be nice by tgibson · · Score: 2, Insightful · on P2P Bibliographies with Bibster

    eTBlast is a bibliographic search engine to which you submit an entire abstract. A little natural language processing and the results returned are to articles which have similiar abstracts. Though the tool operates on the Medline database, there is no reason the algorithm couldn't be used with Bibster.

  2. Re:Yes, but does the law equate intelligence with. by MacJedi · · Score: 1 · on AI Sues for Its Life in Mock Trial
    but most importantly, even if i am proven wrong and we do make something like that, it should never be given the rights of a human as it is neither human nor animal nor living. that's my main point. we cannot equate an inanimate object with a living thing.
    Now that's a really interesting statement. I'm going to ignore the more contentious point-- that a created being should never have the rights of a human, and address your broader argument-- that we cannot equate an inanimate object with a living thing.

    Consider this thought problem: There is a small creature, the tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans . Now C. elegans has been studied extensively by science-- its genome has been completely sequenced, all of its neurons have been catalogued (all 305 of them), and even the precise connectivity between its neurons has been recorded.

    In the not too distant future it should be possible to completely model the nervous system of C. elegans in silico with a very high level of detail. It is conceivable, but this is certainly an open question, that the simple behavior of the creature would emerge from the simulation.

    Now assuming that the simulated worm does exhibit the same simple responses as the actual one, how shall we classify this artificial creature? Is the simulation alive and if not, why not?

  3. You're making this stuff up ... by cookie_cutter · · Score: 2, Insightful · on The Oldest Mouse Contest
    ... or at least remembering it incorrectly.

    I know of no mouse which has been engineered with "re-activated" telomerase, tripling it's life span, nor did a google search find mention of one. I challenge you to provide a link or reference to such a mouse if it exists.

    Also, the limit of 50 cell replications you speak of is only for cells in culture, and it is still unknown whether there is such a limit exists for cells still in the body.

    Here is a telomerase faq

  4. CNN math wizzes by bigfatlamer · · Score: 4, Interesting · on Live Worms Found in Columbia Wreckage

    As they state in the article, C. elegans have a life cycle of 7-10 days. As they also state in the article, the shuttle, at the end of its mission, crashed on Feb. 1. That was 89 days ago. But somehow they've only managed to go through 4-5 generations? It's a pretty simple calculation.

    More interesting (like CNN hasn't ever had a problem with pretty obvious facts) however is the survival. If we were talking about fungi or bacteria, organisms which are able to enter a dormant/stationary phase of the life cycle, it wouldn't be too surprising that they could survive. But C. elegans just have a pretty basic (egg-->larva-->adult) life cycle so they don't have a mechanism for surviving extreme situations (like a flaming fireball smashing into earth).

    One of the great things about C. elegans is that they're easy to mutagenize and determine which genes give rise to characteristics such as resistance to UV/ionizing radiation, long life, ability to consume large volumes of alcohol, etc. I hope that some of these super space worms get into the hands of folks like Leon Avery or Tim Schedl so they can figure out what helped these guys survive.

  5. Re:ageless cells? by Rothfuss · · Score: 2 · on Ultimate Stem Cell Discovered

    The guy you are responding to was not a biologist either.

    He also may have been smoking crack.

    Look here for a bit on cell aging theory.

  6. John Sulston is probably best known for... by myc · · Score: 3, Informative · on Royal Institute Christmas Lectures
    his work on the anatomy of the soil nematode Caenorhabditis elegans . C. elegans is a simple roundworm that has only ~1000 somatic cells, of which ~300 are neurons. It was originally chosen as a modern model organism to study behavior, beacause of the simplicity of its nervous system. In the worm research community, Sir John is most reknowed for his serial electron micrograph reconstruction of all of the synaptic connections of all 302 neurons of the worm. Thus it is mostly due to his work that C. elegans is the ONLY organism in which scientists know the entire anatomy (that is, the wiring diagram) of the nervous system.

    On a related note, at a recent C. elegans seminar I attended, the speaker made mention of Sir John, saying (to paraphrase) "Only Sulston is interested in these long boring projects, like serial EM reconstructions and the human genome project". Said in jest, of course :)

  7. Observations of motion sickness... by gPocket · · Score: 1 · on Motion Sickness In 3D Games?

    I have had similar problems with 3D games, but in my experience, I haven't noticed a specific problem with DirectX. Asheron's Call, admittedly a Windows-only game, is based on DirectX, and I can handle it for embarassingly long hours. On the other hand, I can look at a Quake screen for about 20 seconds before I'm dizzy and nauseous. Does anyone know, is there maybe a different refresh rate these use? This article Preventing Motion Sickness says that motion sickness is caused by your brain getting signals that don't coincide - your body says you're not moving, your eyes are sending signals of a static car, and your inner ear is saying, whoa we're doing 60mph... So, is our brain actually taking the visual input of certain games and translating them as us moving while our inner ear is reporting that we're at rest?