Slashdot Mirror
Morse Code Used by Human Cells?
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers from several universities and drug companies in the U.K. have discovered that our cells are using Morse-like signals to switch genes on and off. The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) write that this discovery may have major implications for the pharmaceutical industry. Better and more efficient drugs would only deliver the signals to our cells that will activate a desired behavior. Sounds like science fiction? Read more for other details, references and pictures."
Morse code is considered binary right? Wouldn't that have been a better comparison?
Awesome though
Sigs are for Terrorists.
The Force
It's known that nature uses reaction-diffusion techniques to generate camouflage patterns for animals. This was noted by Alan Turing. It wouldn't be too surprising to see if this occurred inside cells as well. There's an interesting 3D demo to see what reaction-diffusion equations can do in real-time. Perhaps the pharamceutical companies will have to figure out ways of generating such signalling patterns.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Absolutely.
I once studied genetic algorithms and I thought to myself 'hmm there are so many ways that I could implement a genetic algorithm, endless ways. I wonder how nature does it' and went on to study cell biology and genetics.
Coming from computer science, I can tell you it was a humbling experience. We think we are so clever with our electronics and silicon chips and technology, but any living cell is far more amazingly... actually its hard to quantify in exactly what department they excel in, energy efficiency, massive parallelism, sophisticated encoding systems you name it.
And living cells are so much more than genes and proteins.
If some Mr Smartypants Biologist wants to say that we understand biology and we arn't like naive kids they are welcome to try but there are major problems in our understanding of some very basic mechanics of biology. It looks for all the world like a little machine down there... they talk about 'cargo vesicles'
Like oh I don't know how about a theory on how the right transfer RNA actually finds its way -- how it actually moves through the cytoplasm -- to the right ribosome at the right time to plug the amino acid in (which presumably it picked up and carried here from somewhere else), and *don't* try to tell me its 'brownian motion' because thats no better than a conspiracy theory.
If its supposed to be like a little machine, its got to be explainable in a deterministic way. Otherwise its magic.
I have no problem with magic (see my sig), but its nice if you admit to it rather than pretending its science.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
But as they suggest in the article, the same signaling molecule could conceivably be used for several coded signals, so caution would be needed with a drug that targets a signaling pathway which overlaps with others. However, there are plenty of more mundane signaling pathways where signaling molecules are used for many functions- molecules like cAMP and cGMP (one of the side effects of Viagra is transient blue-green color blindness, the result of cyclic GMP being the messenger molecule in two very different systems), calcium ions (mentioned in the article). Also, cell signals often trigger cascades of intracellular signals (like the protein phosphorylations parent mentions) that multiply the effect and spread it to a variety of cellular functions. That sort of thing has been known for awhile though. It's hard to say what's really meant by this terrible article- I read the press release, I read the "article"- which is not a journal article but rather a short blurb in a biotech industry council magazine- no useful details there, either.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Yeah, but where's the fun in doing only the bare minimum? I remember when 13 wpm was a reasonable expectation. But hey, you're losing out if you don't learn it. You can transmit and receive further and on less power with CW.
Doesn't anyone like a challenge anymore? It is all about buying multi-thousand-dollar Japanese rigs, prefab antennas and high-power amps? Where's the fun in that? You might as well just get a mobile phone.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
The short answer is: No.
The long answer is: People can obviously correctly grasp broad outlines. The problem is that, in mathematics anyway, the broad outline is the mathematics. This is woefully imprecise. Let's see if I can successfully clarify.
Consider Fermat's Last theorem and the introductory exposition here. Notice that to understand, in broad strokes, the content (not even the method!) of the proof, you have to understand elliptic curves, elliptic functions, zeta functions, L-functions, galois groups and their matrix representations over p-adic rings. The properties of objects in each of these topics are essential to the proof, and seeing as the proof is in some sense a description of "how these objects interact," any description that fails to include one of these fields is going to be inadequate even for framing a broad outline. Even if the idea that lead to Wile's final proof was simple, one needs all of this machinery to even comprehend what it means.
The issue in physics is similar, but distinct. Equations are one thing, and anyone can write a story about a physicist staring at a peice of paper and yelling "Eureka!" But giving these equations physical meaning is another. It is becoming more and more common for physical meanings to be given in terms of complex mathematical constructs, and for the expositor, we're back at the trouble above.
That said, magazines like Scientific American and shows like Nova do make people interested in mathematics, if only because they're so incomplete. And they can serve as an introductory guide to the literature. But their value as informative sources is nil.
After all, I am strangely colored.
I agree. This is utter drivel. The articles are completely lacking in details. Assumedly, the pictures show p65/RelA shuttling in and out of the nucleus, although it's not completely clear that these are even the same field. The conditions are completely unknown - what amount of TNF-alpha are they using? Is it supposed to be continuous application? It doesn't seem likely that a single hose of TNF-alpha would last 7 hours, though I suppose it's possible. Most importantly, however, what is the biological outcome they are measuring that suggests "morse code" is occurring? Essentially the results (taken at face value) show that p65 is going in and out of the nucleus following some form of TNF-alpha stimulation. So what evidence do they have that suggests the oscillation itself is encoding a biological message? In these articles, none that I can find. Additionally, you'll notice both links are to BBSRC articles. The BBSRC seems to be a biotech industry consortium hype-machine. I'm guessing the original Science article has some better information, but what is provided here is essentially useless.
"fist in the air in the land of hypocrisy"