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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, 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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"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").
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.
I am well aware of how science works as I am a scientist who has spent some time working in the metabolic space. What I am objecting to is the fact that this was brought to the press before they really understood what was going on, bringing back memories of cold fusion and all that. Furthermore, it sounds like other scientists who have reviewed the paper are asking similar questions, so...... no, I don't think I am being too quick to criticize the study. Before making claims such as these, there simply needs to be more work done, and one should not do this kind of science in the popular press. That is what I was objecting to.
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...try running Doom3 on a 386sx with 1MB of RAM
Peer review should be done before the research reaches the public, not after. The point of peer review is to prevent indefensible or incomplete research from publication.
No sir, you're "incredibly stupid" by not reading the full article.
Had you bothered to read it instead of simply going by the short quote, you'd understand that the article has nothing to do with 'cryogenics'.
The quote is from a larger statement where they're referring to inducing hypothermia in patients undergoing cardiac surgery or with severe trauma, where it helped stabilize the metabolism of the victims, which resulted in better outcome on the treatment.
The article itself is aimed at medical uses such as the ones described above. This research has *nothing* to do with space travel, but is geared at preserving organ function in critically ill patients, where hypothermia is regularly induced to slow down organ deterioration.
Now go back to your cave.
"We'll need 2000 crickets, 4 cans of Easy Cheese, and the fluid from 18 glowsticks for this plan to work...." - ph0n1c
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!
"and one should not do this kind of science in the popular press."
Especially when one is competing for the same funding as you? Whether they excite the press or not has no impact on the validity or lack thereof of the study or the results. Your other points do, although they are all additional research and tests to be performed, nothing you said actually detracts from the work that has already been done.
Stoking the press is entirely about funding, and all is fair in love and funding. After all, if your results are exciting enough to make headlines, they are exciting enough to pay for.
Actually, they are not remotely in the same funding structure as we are and we are not competing for the same research funds. It just so happens that the technologies we've developed are able to inform metabolic questions to a degree other technologies cannot even hope to touch. However, we are applying them to entirely different questions.
Stoking the press is entirely about funding, and all is fair in love and funding.
Actually, that is not the way I prefer to work. Only after the work has been done and you are confident of your results do you go to the scientific press, then the popular press.
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Actually, it's not that the lifespan of the gas releaser increases. It's that the lifetimes of those in close proximity to the gas releaser tend to be shortened, thus making the releaser's own life seem longer by comparison. This is known to biologists as the Fluglemann Effect. Biologists also note a related phenomenon: the Gas Density Relative Dispersal Effect (known by its acronym, GDRDE), wherein a population of animals or people will tend to disperse into the environment over time in vectors orienting away from the position of the gas releaser. Biologists are still debating the cause of the effect, although the phenomenon itself is easily observable and quantifiable.
Some easy experiments you can perform yourself to investigate these phenomena:
* * * * *
I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.
--Mae West
This explains the incredible lifespans of bean-eating gurus in the Himalayas. Swami Mongo Bin Putrid claims to be over 120 years old, though no one can get close enough to him to check.