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Cells May Communicate Through Light
SilverLobe writes "The hypothesis that living cells may use photons for communications has been on the fringes of cell biology for a while. No proof positive exists, but there is some strong circumstantial evidence. Byte Size Biology reports on a simple experiment that shows how the unicellular protozoan Paramecium may use so called 'biophotons' to signal for growth and feeding. The original academic paper in PLoS ONE concludes: '... not all cellular processes are necessarily based on a molecule-receptor recognition. The non-molecular signals are most probably photons. If so, cells use more than one frequency for information transfer and mutual influence.'"
well my gray cells responded at lightspeed.
To be fair, there is never any _proof_ in biology. Only observations of occurances and patterns. You can only disprove things in biology. Mathematics reserves the right for universal truths.
FTFA: "Depending on the cuvette material and the number of cells involved, these effects were positive or negative."
Occam's razor: These are stochastic effects.
Seriously, he replicated these studies 4 times TOTAL. "Depending on the cuvette material and the number of cells involved, these effects were positive or negative" basically fits the definition of a null hypothesis, which I certainly won't reject on the basis of 4 trials. Call me when an outside lab replicates this in a large number of trials.
...they were just listening to techno music during the experiments?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
"Mathematics reserves the right for universal truths."
^
Godel might have something to say about that.
In the most universal sense.
This can't be emphasized enough. Life finds incredibly clever ways of doing things. And we are only just really beginning to understand just how amazingly sophisticated life is.
That said, this really shouldn't be that surprising. We know that many larger life forms use light to communicate. It is quick and efficient. It doesn't take time to disperse like chemical signals. And many life forms have the ability to sense light anyways so it shouldn't be that hard to evolve the use of light as a signaling mechanism.
Godel might have something to say about that.
No, he really wouldn't. Godel's primary results are that a) we can't be sure that certain systems are self-consistent and b) there are some statements that we can't prove. That in no way alters the level of access mathematics has to universal truth. When a statement is proven from a set of axioms it does follow from those axioms and anything which satisfies those axioms will satisfy the statement. Godel's theorems have nothing to say about that. There are good arguments against the notion that mathematicians have access to universal truth. For example, we all make arithmetic mistakes comes to mind. Also, there are published papers that have incorrect results that need to be retracted. Arguments can be made in this regard, but Godel has little to do with this matter.
Slashdot is bringing it to the people. The unfortunate part of Slasdot's "nerd" image is that it's just preaching to the choir! "Pure" science is altruistic. The value of science is not found in how correct it is but to what effect it has on society. The value of truth has no meaning to the universe. If our lies match observations does that make them truth? Yes. PS. This particular study may be flawed but the study of light and biological communication is a fascinating story. One of many interesting examples is the work of Albrecht-Buehler from Northwestern. His group published observations of 800nm (NIR) light communication in motile fibroblasts many years ago. That's a cell with no obvious light interaction structures! Mitorchondria produce 800nm light as part of their function so there is a reason why an endothelial cell might have such a function.
e.g.
But he was never quite mainstream, and followers of his theorie(s) are rated to be in the vicinity of morons.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Creating light (thus swamping the communication) and detecting single photons are trivial. Since they didn't do these experiments I'll have to call BS and "correlation is not causation."
Instead I'll claim that the protozoa communicate telepathically through hyperspace, and the hyperphysical properties of the different vessels they used influenced the effectiveness of the communication.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
If this is the case the photons should be detectable. We can design experiments sensitive to the level of a single photon so this is not too much to ask.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
Not having RTFA, I was wondering why organisms would develop such a trait. I mean, chemical messaging on the molecular level is pretty darn fast as it is. Just think of all the neurotransmitter molecules traversing the synaptic cleft to reach their receptors as I am writing or you are reading this.
So what could be the evolutionary advantage of intercellular electromagnetic messaging?
I've read through the methods and I can't understand why either the journal editors or the referees didn't insist on replicating each experimental setup with a simple sheet of lead (or other dense material) interposed between each cuvette and sufficient to block the direct path of any putative photonic communication. Without the demonstration of an expected null result for each experiment given this setup and a photonic communication hypothesis, I can't take this paper seriously.
Da Blog
It is common knowledge that plants (can) communicate through UV radiation.
Interesting idea. ... everyone can look in a paper and assess results themselves. Instead of this I want to mention that in my opinion paper is a little biased in direction of "bio-photons idea", and ask about two things (in paper there was not mentioned about this problems):
I want to omit experimental part of this work
+ Communication needs for working simple mechanism: place where the signal is encode, reveal and point where revealed signal should be deliver, catch and interpret. Because radiation mentioned in paper is very weak, so I suppose, that one cell is able to emit only few photons. Of course photons cannot hit anywhere into neighbor cell, because this system of communication is very inefficient. Photons should hit in specific molecules into neigh. cells.
Q. Thus, what is the mechanism of finding the direction in which photon should be send ?
+ As we know authors choose waves in UV range (I omit the reasons why they did it). And we know also that the cells are mixture of proteins, nucleic acids and so on, ... in short: mixture of many, many dipoles (not all are dipoles but many of them). As we know from basic physics any dipoles which is in non-uniform motion - radiate. To take into consideration thermal motions into cytoplasm, there is no hard to state, that molecules immersed into cytoplasm radiate in very wide spectrum of radiation.
Q. Have any tried to compare power of bio-photons radiation with integral from (0+epsilon) to 340 nm for thermal radiation ? Maybe bio-photons radiation is neglected small or inversely ?
Maybe answers on this two questions are essential.
brr... just like "blood music", that book from Greg Bear...
This can't be emphasized enough. Evolution isn't smart. Clever solutions are the result of time and probability: millions of permutations of similar creatures until one with a slightly better permutation survives long enough to have slightly more offspring than its peers.
If you're going to anthropomorphize evolution, call it brute-force. It's the biological equivalent of "hacking" a password by trying every permutation of letters and numbers.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
Can some one please confirm for me the geometrically impossible conditions described in the methods section. the section on Cuvette's begins:
Populations of Paramecia were separated from each other with cuvettes with a wall thickness of 1.5 mm. Two sizes of cuvettes were used: 2.3 mm x 2.3 mm x 40 mm, and 1.5 mm x 1.5 mm x
45 mm.
these are I beleive the inner and outer cuvettes. He does not state if those numbers given are the outer widths of the inner width of the cuvettes. But under either assumption they are incompatible with the wall thickness:
to be specific: if the all thickness is 1.5mm then the inner cuvette would have to have a width at minimum of two wall thicknesses which would be 3mm. therefore the inner cell specificaiton of 1.5x 1.5 cannot be the outer width and must be the inner width. But then this is incompatible with the 2.3 mm of the outer cuvette. you can't put a 3mm wide inner cuvette into a cuvetter with an inner width of 1mm.
The next problem is the volume in use. if you put 1mm of liquid into the cuvette that was 1.5x1.5 then it's 400 microns deep. after 48 hours this should have evaporated!
can someone else respond to these seeming show stoppers?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Without negating my original post questioning the cuvette geometry, I note that my statement about the volume of liquid and the numbers of individuals is highly mistaken. I mistook cubic mm of millileters which is wrong by 1000 fold. However I still think there is a svere issue with the cuvette dimensions that I'd like explained.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.