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Doctors Claim Suspended Animation Success
Philoneist.com writes to tell us the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that US doctors have developed a process to induce hypothermia in trauma patients, shutting down their bodily functions for up to three hours. The process has been proven about 90% effective in trials with pigs and now the doctors would like the go ahead to test it on humans who would "probably die" under normal care.
"Brain death occurs in 4-5 minutes Brain can survive for 90-120 minutes"
If they can get past this, they may be on to something here- shame research funding for this was cut.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I wonder how many times you can undergo this treatment and still be fine. Perhaps one could undergo it several times a night thus lenghtening the time you could potentially live by maybe 30 or 40%. I for one would welcome our new 160 year old overlords.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Too bad they couldn't figure out a way to do it safely yet, we could use for manned long-duration space travel or just to stick around and get defrosted, Futurama-style.
I wonder how the world will look like in, say, 100 years, but do have the patience (or the stamina) to wait. Maybe Bin Laden will finally have been caught? Maybe Brazil becomes the next world superpower? Who knows?
I wonder how this new technique might improve the own of saving the brain from destruction after an heart attack, as if now it could be safe to get the body much cooler for much more improvement.
You just got troll'd!
One of the shows creators revealed in some TV guide or other that had the show got an extra series or two, it would have been revealed that John was in fact the result of an experiment by a mysterious group to gain all the knowledge of the universe. They believed that such knowledge was revealed at the moment of death, hence John was killed and brought back again. But the series got axed before any of that could really be explored.
Surely if your heart is stopped and your brain dead then your soul leaves your body and you go to heaven (or hell) depending on how good you lived your life.
:), instead of being stuck in meat-producing-pig-hell-shitholes.
ehehehe! Or not.
Pigs are actually very clean. Sure, they like to roll in the mud to stay cool (and they tend to get sunburns quite easily, like me), and to keep bugs under control (I don't need that, not yet.)
If they'd be given a choice, I'm sure they'd rather hang out in green fields and pastures and run naked in the woods (I know I would!
And I'm sure they have a soul, try to scratch them, it makes them crazy! They know pleasure, and to enjoy pleasure is no reason to go to hell (I hope!)
Going now, the sweet and sour spare ribs are waiting!
-----
Born stupid? Try again.
i don't know what whacky definition of life you're going by but using "self-sustained mass of chemical reactions" i'd say life does begin at conception. and like he already pointed out, you don't usually know date of conception. and a lot a babies used to die before their first birthday, so as birthday celebrations are a tradition started in olden times, it makes sense that it would be a celebration of actual birth and the person still being alive since it started in those earlier times
Personally, I hope I'll go somewhere more interesting.
What if going into suspended animation for short and/or extended periods became common practice for everyone (or maybe only the elite)? Assuming that the process was safe, reliable and inexpensive? Imagine if you could skip winter every year, or sit out an unfavorable situation until enough time has passed that things would be different when you woke up?
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
I ask why he would allow there to be anything bad in the world. Free will doesn't cover it.
Yet I can see how "bad things happening" would be directly a reaction to choices made through free will. I can't think of any bad things happening in my life that weren't directly because of choices I made, even if it seems like a cop out. My belief that our veil of uncertainty will be lifted after death leads me to believe that in the afterlife, we'll know what decisions not to make (eve if they aren't sinful decisions).
Why not make everything wonderful for everyone all the time forever? Everyone would be worthy of heaven... or heck, put everyone on there to begin with!
Sure, until you understand that God is a jealous God. If we want to worship idols and other gods, we're free to. He never promised not to test us.
It makes no sense that people like murderers and adulterers and rapists make God sad and angry... if he didn't think up these concepts and incorporate them into his universe, they wouldn't even be there.
You're right, but it is not something that I could explain. People who know me know that I am the most logical person you'll ever meet. The non-believers can't believe that I believe in God. The believers can't believe that I'm a Christ follower, either, as I don't follow the same path they do.
My life changed when I accepted Jesus in one big way -- I felt I knew why I was here and it didn't conflict one bit with my login and liberty beliefs.
I guess that's the big problem with "pushing" religion, though. No one pushed it on me, and to say that God led me towards salvation in everything I was reading and researching makes sense after the fact, but would I have seen it that way before the fact?
As for rape and murder and robbery, I don't know if I'd feel so certain that I couldn't commit these acts before I believe in God and the Word. I know that I'm utterly disgusted by the thought of any of the above now, but I can't recall how I felt before hand.
I can vouch for this experience 100%. After a long, cold and very wet route march across the South Downs (a particular Brit Army training exercise), I plonked myself down in a window seat on the bus to take us back to barracks and passed out from exhaustion. Some moron opened that window while I was sleeping with the result that I experienced 50mph windchill for the next two hours in wet clothing while completely immobile - no need for snow or 30 below zero weather.
When we go to the other end, I vaguely remember feeling warm and comfortable but strangely unable to move. I also remember being surrounded by clearly panicking instructors who were bellowing at me not to go to sleep while they manhandled me to the hospital. It was very surreal - like you're watching yourself from outside with a mixture of detachment and fascination. Mountaineering tales I've read describe the same thing: a sort of pleasant warmth even while you're looking at your frostbitten fingers and a very strong desire to take a "short nap."
Death by freezing would have felt pleasant I'm sure. On the other hand, being warmed up slowly was the worst experience I've ever had bar none because then you start feeling how cold you really are - and the feeling continues for days. I can't remember what my core temperature had dropped to but it was dangerously low.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Yep, that's almost exactly how it was for me. The main difference was that I knew I would die if I fell asleep. That was a surreal experience, going to sleep and not expecting to wake up.
I only had frost nip in one of my toes, but the sensitivity-to-cold thing was definitely a hassle. I think it was at least a week before my sense of temperature was back to normal.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
This concept is not relatively new. Randomized clinical trials, involving trying to protect the brain, in surgeries like CABG (Coronary artery bypass graft) are taking place for more than 10 years now. 5 years ago, a review of many such trials found that though stroke related deaths decreased by inducing hypothermia, they faced other non-stroke related mortality in operations and overall there was no difference between hypothermia and normothermia.
However, there is some evidence of benefit in non traumatic head injuries (eg post cardiac arrest) where cooling does provide improved neurological outcomes.
Hypothermic circulatory arrest is used routinely for certain types of aortic arch surgey where it would be difficult to maintain cerebral circulation (eg for aortic arch dissection) using conventional techniques.
If you cool someone down to something in the range of 15-24 degrees you can get 20-40 minutes of cardiac arrest without major consequence.
The articles seem to present this as something new - its really more an extension of a known technology into trauma surgery.
I suspect that the biggest problem with this level of extreme hypothermia is that blood coagulation essentially fails at these temperatures - so in the case of trauma, they are going to have to sow everything up and even then nothing will seal over - which leads to the need for massive transfusion requirements as everthing bruises up extremely badly. Massive transfusions (> 10 units of blood) are likely in themselves to cause multi organ failure, and a downward spiral of death.
This is just a technical hurdle to be overcome, but at the moment the odds of surviving this will be very low - so low that I don't think you would do it for anyone who has even a slight chance of surviving the injuries by conventional measures.
My 2c worth
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.