Slashdot Mirror
Natural Gas to Offer Breakthrough in Suspended Animation?
Kingcanute writes "The BBC is reporting that American scientists are claiming that sewer gas may be successful at inducing suspended animation. The results were achieved using mice but further studies are needed" From the article: "The problem with hypothermia is it's not that easy to cool down the human body so if we can find another method to inhibit metabolism that would be very useful"
So, finally a decent theory may be developed as to why farts increase lifespan. (Quick check - ok, farts do contains hydrogen sulfide)
So, this is pretty interesting, but this smells like (LOL, H2S.... get it?) incomplete science in that they appear to have gone to the press without first, doing the real experiments that would tell them more about what is going on here. Simply looking at core body temperature, heart rate and blood pressure will not tell you the status of organ function, nor will it tell you anything about potential organ system damage. Dr. Chris Pomfrett's letter is right on where he questions: "My big question about this work is: is it reducing brain metabolism or simply having a toxic effect on the brain stem?", but he only gets part of it right in his suggestion to perform an electroencephalogram (EEG) as well.
Additional tests can not simply be EEG combined with standard histology as you need to know something about how the tissues are responding in metabolic space, especially as how they are introducing a new small molecular species to the mix. EEG is only going to tell you the global overall status of the tissues, but it too will be altered in ways that may or may not be informative. I would suggest looking at early immediate gene expression profiles for apoptotic pathways and performing experiments designed to actually look at and document the metabolic profiles of these cells/tissues.
I am thinking specifically of some of the techniques we have developed (pictures of some tissues using these techniques can be seen here), but there are many, many other traditional biochemical and metabolic assays that could have been performed for these studies like HPLC, MassSPEC etc...etc....etc....
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SG2: Natural gas.
SG4: It gives you some ideas.
HAll my brother does is fart and the room goes dead.
I wouldn't mind a less smelly solution.
I disagree that this is incomplete science. This is the way science works. Scientists do a study, publish their results, and get overexcited about what the implications could be. Other scientists do peer-review, make sure the study is on the level, and suggest what could improve data quality, and further experiments to test/revise current hypotheses. Also, I think you are too quick to blame the scientists behind a study for what is usually oversimplified reporting.
somewhere in a small lab...
Scientist1: Well, we've tried freezing, that didn't work..
Scientist2: Yah, this is a pretty tuff one ya know, suspended animation?
Scientist3: GUYS I GOT AN IDEA!
Scientist1&2: ?!?
Scientist3: Will bathe the subject in farts
Scientist1: worth a shot.
Scientist2: Gentlemen, we may have cracked this one.
Sure, manybe a few people need to be placed in suspended animation to be sent into deep space or such, but for such small numbers freezing is probably OK.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"Natural Gas" is usually interpreted to mean something other that just any gas that occurs in nature, like hydrogen sulfide.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
well, I always knew it was good at inducing something, just not this...
I pulled a Dutch oven on my SO and she didn't regain consciousness until half way to Alpha Centuri.
"The problem with hypothermia is it's not that easy to cool down the human body so if we can find another method to inhibit metabolism that would be very useful"
This is incredibly stupid. First, the proper terminology is cryogenics. Hypothermia is a condition, not a method of suspended animation.
Second, sucking out the heat from a limited space is not that hard, we do it today in many applications today. The hard part is preventing damage to the cells within your body as the water within your cells freezes, crystalizes, and basically pops every cell in your body. As biologists, chemists, and physicists know, as water freezes, it expands.
If this were not true, then it would simply be a matter of money to keep the body cool enough to wake up at some later date and the space program would have been to jupiter and back by now using that technology.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
This looks like a dupe from an earlier post located here: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/2 2/0228226
I mean, what it takes to figure that any amount of sewer gas would be amount to take you to suspended animation ?
Even one single piece of fart does that.
Read radical news here
The reason they are not funny is because you all are overdoing it, tripping over each other to tell us how funny it is that swamp gas might be related to a fart.
Apparently the belief is that immense mental power is required to produce a fart joke, hence we should be roflmaoing and lolling choking with our own spit at you.
Flashnews: fart jokes, just like farts themselves, are only funny in moderation. And since they're only funny in moderation, I urge all moderators to mod them down versus mod them funny, and see where the discussion takes us on this, otherwise intesting, article.
...try running Doom3 on a 386sx with 1MB of RAM
...then we should see some statistical bumps in the health or lifespan of the average sewer worker. Or of the average sewer-going animal, for that matter.
Have we?
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Ha! I got a chuckle when I read this:
You guys may not remember this, but the original Buck Rogers story from the comic strips was that Buck was exploring a cave when he was exposed to gases that put him to sleep. When he woke up and emerged from the cave he was in the 25th century.
Breakfast served all day!
However, there are real medical problems that could benefit greatly from drugs that reduce metabolism. For example, people who go into sudden cardiac arrest and are revived can often have irreversible brain damage due to lack of bloodflow to their brains. Essentially, without blood flow, nutrients in the brain are consumed more than they are delivered, and this results in brain damage. Some studies have suggested that packing the head in ice can greatly reduce the risk of brain damage by decreasing the brain's demand for nutrients. However, most ambulances aren't equipped with ice packs specifically for your head, so this isn't used much in the US.
This technique is probably more useful in open surgeries. Sometimes surgeons accidentally or purposefully cut off the blood flow to an organ. If you could reduce that organ's blood needs, perhaps you could avoid life-threatening complications such as acute renal failure after surgery.
This results *are* incomplete science, in that they were presented at a conference American Physiology Society. The scientists themselves might not have any responsibility for the press coverage - i.e., other scientists acknowledge that data presented at conferences is interesting but not peeer reviewed. The news media, on the other hand makes no such distinction...
An EEG will be marginally useful - you don't care what's going on during the metabolic manipulation - what will be useful is markers of toxicity (i.e., cell death, stress), and long term effects on the animals.
...try running Doom3 on a 386sx with 1MB of RAM
...just try running DooM II on a 386... that was bad enough way back then.
This shit scares me stiff.
... and of course everyone is thinking about sending frozen bodies of austronauts to some remote star, but in reality it should be useful when a soldier is hit in, say, some remote desert and it takes 15 hours to airlift him to more advanced places where an operation can be performed. Source of HS4 can be portable and if his metabolism is three times slower it would feel like an 5 hour flight.
Paul B.
Natural Gas is a biproduct of the petrolium industry and the two are not related even though they both smell bad.
Why try the sewer gas, try just air, I made a post about this http://gavilan1010.wordpress.com/2006/10/07/car-th at-runs-on-air/
I smell poo gas!
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Wasn't this in Scientific American, like, two years ago? What has changed? http://www.sciamdigital.com/index.cfm?fa=Products. ViewIssuePreview&ARTICLEID_CHAR=B3AA39F1-2B35-221B -63CD1B9A1E124351/
All the way down here - I really expected more funny replies to this post.
_Vishal www.squad9.com
"The BBC is reporting that American scientists are claiming that sewer gas may be successful at inducing suspended animation." Must be why the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles never became Middle Aged Mutant Ninja Turtles
:(
Here's the transcript:
Begin evacuation
*faarrrrrrrrrt*
Evacuati- *fart*
Evacuati- *fart*
Evac- *fart*
Evacuation *fart*
E- *fart*
Evacuation complete.
> so if we can find another method to inhibit metabolism..
Yeah asphyxation/suffocation.. that does it every time.
I am surprised about stinking, poisonous H2S gas that could have medical uses.
How about trying tiny amounts of carbon monoxide or hydrogen cyanide? Maybe an interesting discovery will be made.............
1. no medical institution would actually try this as hydrogen sulfide is highly toxic 2. obviously fake names such as dr. IchiNose
Uh, guys, "natural gas" is methane. Not hydrogen sulfide.
I think that this story is a dupe. http://science.slashdot.org/science/05/04/22/02282 26.shtml
2. obviously fake names such as dr. IchiNoses howperson&id=172271374177274371178272&a=hms&r=1&kw =/
Mr Fumito (Fume Ito) Ichi Nose. Sounds fake, but here it is:
http://hms.harvard.edu/WhitePagesPublic.asp?task=
So, what about all those already frozen folks? :)
"Sorry, we will never find on how to unfreeze you, suspended animation is done using completely new method."
I guess anybody who wants to be suspended and reanimated in the future will have to visit the gas chamber.
there is no issue with my network
Dr. Fumito Ichinose? Nobody caught this?
-C.
Anyone noticed? Prices for beans just went up :)
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Apparently people are running out of steam already.
More fart jokes please!
A Dutch Oven, perhaps?
Friends don't let friends line-dance.
From my blog post of... http://suddendisruption.blogspot.com/ Saturday, April 22, 2006 What Ever Happened with H2S Induced Hibernation? One year ago today... Mark Roth at Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center in Seattle announced the astounding ability to induced hibernation in mice by having them breathe 80 parts per million (ppm) hydrogen sulfide gas (H2S). Yes, that's the gas that smells like rotten eggs. Not only did these critters fall asleep for six hours, their heart rate and respiration dropped by 92% - apparently replicating the effects of true hibernation. And their temperature dropped to 2 degrees C above ambient temperature. They in effect became cold-blooded. It should also be noted, when the gas was removed, the mice awoke with no apparent ill effects. The critters could still run their maze in a normal fashion. There are hints that H2S Induced Hibernation might be a natural defense mechanism or at least a normal biological process. It appears this H2S gas is produced by the body under certain conditions and may be the key to normal hibernation. This may also be the cause of "Cold Water Shock Reflex" in which those who have "drowned" in cold water come back to life. At 80 ppm, H2S can not simply be replacing O2 in the blood which exist at 210,000 PPM in typical air. It seems that H2S acts more like a hormone causing ALL cells in the body to slow down at the same time. Is H2S the body's way of adjusting the thermostat? Hold on! I'm way out of my element here. I'm not qualified to do biology. I'm not even qualified to write about it. But I DO considered this ASTOUNDING news! And indeed the world reported it. Well at least in a tepid way. From the BBC to the Washington Post they did at least rehash Mark's original work. Even Wikipedia added three paragraphs to the Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S) page. I was impressed with that. But THAT was it... I'm serious. Nothing more. No follow-up questions. No follow-up answers. No in-depth reporting. No detailed analysis. No flying out to Seattle. No camping on the lawn. No helicopter shots. No checking tax returns. Hell, Tom Cruise jumps up and down on a couch and the media follows him around for weeks! Where is the coverage for the stuff that REALLY counts? Oh well. I would wait. There was sure to be more news on the topic in a short time. So I set my Google news reader and waited... And waited... And waited... And I'm still waiting. It's been one year. Other than some comments from an aging blog and one think tank, there has been nothing at all. Nothing! Am I way off base or is this NOT a Nobel class discovery? Where's the follow-up from Mark Roth? Where's the H2S Induced Hibernation blog? Where are the frat boy posts about their flatulent experiments? Where's the Flatliner crew? Where's Kiefer Sutherland when we need him? Where are all the science fiction plots? When I read the news release last year, I thought follow-up would be like the coverage for Cold Fusion a few years ago - lots of people trying to reproduce the results. Maybe we would even get some quick test with humans. But no... Nothing. Nada. Zilch. What's a geek to do? There's only one thing. Ask the questions that SHOULD have been asked a year ago. So here goes. Does this Roth effect work longer than six hours? Does it work for days? Does it work for weeks? Does it work for months? Does it work on other larger mammals? Does it work on humans? Any obvious side effects? Any long term side effects? How long can someone stay under without ill effects? Does this low-level metabolism consume fat like it does in bears? Does muscle tone also atrophy? Does this low-level metabolism extend life? Is 80 PPM a threshold or is there a proportional effect at 40 PPM? 20 PPM? What happens at 160 ppm? Is the sleep deeper? (yes, I know H2S is deadly at higher concentration, but so is table salt). Is this truly a natural feature of mammals? If H2S is produced internally, can the effect be induced by meditation? If so, how does
Funny, I remember from my childhood chemistry delinquency days that the stink of hydrogen sulfide would wake me right up.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
The lifespan, and quality of life, of the gas releaser may indeed be increased, when compared to gas non-releasers. I believe Dave Barry is an expert in this field of research. His theory is that women tend to be more uptight than men because they tend to "bottle up" their emissions for later release, rather than allowing them to escape in a natural, relaxing manner.
Everyone gets on, you put them is suspended animation wake them on arrival.
See "Fifth Element"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You try it first, ok?
FRA: STFU GTFO