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Scientists Discover New Clues To Regeneration: How Flatworms Regrow Heads
An anonymous reader writes "Regeneration is one of the most useful skills that an organism can possess. Lizards can regrow their tails and starfish can regrow and entire part of themselves if they're cut to pieces. Yet scientists have long wondered why some creatures possess this ability while others don't. That's why they decided to examine the process of regeneration, looking at the masters of this particular adaptation: flatworms."
Matt Smith is pleased.
really? Cool, certainly, but it seems there hasn't been a need to evolve the skill in many species.
Article is paywalled. I can get it on "readcube" for either $5 or $10. Or I can get it in a sane format (PDF) for $32. ORRR I can pay a lowly $200 to "subscribe to Nature" for some amount of time. And companies wonder why people pirate their material
Suppose you could cut a starfish into 5 segments, and they could each regenerate the missing 4. Which is the real one? How much of a body can one replace before it's a different body?
Please. Flatworms are great but plants.... plants are the champions here. Cut them off at the base, and they regrow from their roots. Cut off a branch and keep it from drying out, and it will regrow roots. Cut off leaves, it grows more, cut branches, it grows more.
Cut a flatworm up, you get more of the same. Cut a plant, and it will not just regrow....it will actually grow more limbs than you cut off. Wake me up when you cut a lizards tail off and he grows 6 more tails in response.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Maybe John Wayne Bobbitt could benefit?
That's grammar; not spelling.
they don't Regeneration hand or other parts no heads as well.
6 more tails wouldn't be functional, so it regrows only one, often just partially and only if the lizard species possesses the capability at all. Most species that do, often have a limited capability to regrow the tail more than once. A lizard needs it's tail to balance itself during running and climbing and more than one would hinder it.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
if they just fed on something.
Actually, it's more like the skill was lost in favor of one that was considered far more useful for survival -- inflammation and scarring.
Scarring stops bleeding and infection far faster than regeneration can and is a vital advantage in quick and dirty wound recovery. Scarring comes about because of a mutation that allows collagen to cross-link and build quicker scaffolding to seal the wound, but it comes at the cost of not being able to regrow tissues in the now "paved over" area. In the wild, this gave our distant mammalian ancestors the valuable ability to just kind of "write-off" the area and get up and going as fast as possible and avoid being preyed upon in a moment of weakness.
We may dismiss scarring today as ugly and wasteful of an opportunity to be made whole again, but without it, we probably wouldn't exist today.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Regrowing body parts or even growing new ones is certainly useful for kaiju.
Not if the intention was to write "..regrow an entire...". A typo that comes out as a real word that makes the grammar wrong is still a typo ( a spelling error).
If you're going to be a Grammar Nazi on a Spelling Nazi's post, you should at least make sure that you're right.
And the worms ate into his brain.
Some city was suffering from reduced tourism because their beaches had been invaded by starfish. So they paid some kids to go to the beach and kill every starfish they found by cutting it in half...
That's grammar; not spelling.
Grammar is spelling at the sentence level.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Cut off your head & grow a new one. Cool!
Also, from TFA:
No, I really don't think you get 40,000 worms.
Not if the intention was to write "..regrow an entire...". A typo that comes out as a real word that makes the grammar wrong is still a typo ( a spelling error).
Heh. Since everyone is being pedantic today... not all typos are spelling errors. :p
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
This could be useful, I know quite a few politicians that need to grow new heada...
I'd say that it's more like "grammar is morphology on the sentence level".
Ezekiel 23:20
Exactly what defines the "self" vs. the "piece"?
You do.
If you have a way to keep the piece alive, can it become a new self?
In the same sense that any bit of everything can itself be considered its self, sure.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
"If you were granted an uninterrupted spree of ten thousand days of posts correcting English usage on slashdot, do you imagine that on day ten thousand and one there would be even one less mistake then when you began?"
It's 'than', not 'then'.
I want new feet. I want a new right arm. I want a new penis. I want new teeth.
Not necessarily in that order.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
So this gets around the 12 regeneration limit for Time Lords?
John Hurt is not going to be the last Doctor