Including all growth and electrical/chemical effects is not yet possible, because they are not yet all known. Furthermore, knowing all of them would probably tell us that there's no such thing as a generic neuron model; each cell has a very specialized gene expression profile that near-optimizes it for its role in the network. It may be that this can be reduced to expressing a neuron as a function of some hundred-odd parameters (as a guess), but it is not yet clear what the controlling parameters are.
The MURG question of computational modeling of the human brain is a very open problem with no solution in sight. I was not familiar with them, but they do at least seem to be composed of people with useful technological skills. It'll be interesting to see if they come up with anything cool.
Re:Hocum or over protective of company IP?
on
Brains on a Chip
·
· Score: 5, Informative
That's because it's not a breakthrough, it's commercialization of stuff that's been done in the academic labs for a couple years. Amazingly, it *does* take time to go from neat idea to marketable product. Electrode arrays can be a real bitch to fabricate.
See:
Biosensors & Bioelectronics 16:527-33 Brain Research Protocols 2(4):229-42 Journal of Neuroscience Methods 101(1):31-42 Journal of Neuroscience Methods 114(2):135-48
Plus, as the other poster mentioned, Jerry Pine's work. However, AFAIK, Pine's no longer working on that project, having found other interests. Pity, because the neurowells (as noted by Peter Fromherz in the New Scientist article) give the kind of single-unit interface that might be very desirable. I know that my group is planning to use similar approaches.
Piffle. Complaining about things on Slashdot is marvelously effective. Look how well it's eliminated the DMCA problems.
Perhaps I should file a report, at that. I always figured I wasn't the only person who'd noticed this, but then again, more bug reports means a higher priority score.
...is its lovely behavior of permanently saving every email as a file in your directory, even if you're using something like an IMAP server where the whole point is *not* to save messages locally. This leads to two problems:
1. My quota gets eaten twice. I lose the mail quota for having mail stored on the server, plus I lose disk quota for the local copies.
2. The directory is created with your default permissions, which for most shared systems include readability by others in the organization. I have been able to wander through other Evolution users' home directories and read their email. Joe User is not going to have a *clue* that this could be happening.
OK, sure, local caching is good, but use some compression or encryption or *something*. (And yes, I still use it, because it's the nicest client out there. But security is not *that* hard.)
Ah, but when you are old, you will have bad vision and will not notice.:-)
I'll agree with you that they're not the prettiest creatures in the world. Yet. They're still busy hacking on the actual functionality side of the bots. Once the tech transitions to the private sector, I'm sure they'll do all sorts of focus groups to optimize the appearance.
Of course, eventually I guess one would want it to be "skinnable" so that you could customize your personal companion to your tastes.
...check out the Nursebot Project here at CMU. Not only will these robots provide companionship, but they are intended to provide basic health monitoring and assistance with activities of daily living. The prototype robots have already gone into nursing homes and interacted with residents, and in general the response has been very positive.
There's a primer on gene patents (PDF file) that I wrote about a year ago. It explains the generally-accepted patent criteria and how genetic material has been interpreted to meet those criteria. The arguments for and against patentability of genes are presented, although the bias is against strict patentability; my personal viewpoint is that applications of genetic information are fair game, but the raw sequence itself should be off-limits.
What you describe is the exception, not the rule. Most patents *are* on the expressed sequence of the gene itself (or the amino acid sequence of the protein, which is informationally equivalent in most cases), not on some test kit or therapeutic regimen. The described utility is generally one that has been found through computational homology studies: you screen the gene against a database of knowns, and then declare it to have functionality equivalent to that of the closest match.
As you pointed out, there's supposed to be some novelty here. The trick is that the expressed sequence isn't how the gene exists in your body: in your body, there are unexpressed intervening sequences (comments, sort of), proteins attached to the strand at various points, and other modifications. Courts have held that since the pure expressed sequence isn't the form found in nature, it's a new compound and is patentable.
I agree that the specific applications of genetic discoveries should be patentable and patented, but that ain't what we're arguing here.
Shameless self-promotion: I wrote a primer on gene patents (PDF format) for the American Medical Student Association about a year ago that goes into a lot more detail on the issue.
Untrue. (Disclaimer: I sit one desk over from one of the grad students who works on this, and I think Stetten is a cool guy.) There are a couple key areas where this is useful:
1. While a well-trained US professional can do as you say, there are a lot of hospitals that can't afford/find a well-trained professional (think rural and innner-city medical centers). If this boosts the diagnostic ability of other caregivers, it will help patients. (Now, getting it made cheap enough for those hospitals to buy... could be trickier.)
2. It's an excellent teaching tool. Well-trained professionals got that way after struggling through many years of not being able to see jack shit. Speaking as someone who's a med student on the side, I would love to be able to use the SF to compare to a normal static US scan.
3. This isn't really aimed at diagnostic US anyway. One of the big goals of the MRCAS and MERIT centers at CMU is "augmented reality" for surgery. The idea is that as the surgeon prepares to go digging around in an area whose contents are not precisely localized, he/she can take a look with the SF and know exactly where to cut.
4. Even for diagnostic uses, like US-guided biopsy, this brings improvement. Instead of having to look away from the patient to some monitor, you keep your eyes on your hands and on the patient at all times. Speaking as someone who's had to handle a laparoscope while simultaneously staring at a TV screen, it would be a lot nicer if I had that little bit of extra visual feedback about precisely what my hands and the tissue under them were doing.
Yep. Brain can rewire, and it does it better the younger you are. Almost never gets it perfect, though. I'd bet money you never quite got back the same dexterity and sensitivity you had in your hand before your accident.
My bigger point, though, is that you're not quite right about the median nerve. It does both sensation and motor. What happens is that as the nerve passes through the anterior compartment of the forearm (that'd be the side you see when your arm is facing up), it innervates those forearm muscles. The nerve then dives into the carpal tunnel (yep, this is the CTS nerve) and re-emerges in the palm. It has some motor branches here as well; the muscles at the base of your thumb get innervation from the median nerve. You're correct in that after it enters the carpal tunnel, it's mostly sensory.
That concludes our semi-educational semi-tirade for the day.
Where's the ACLU? We're on the sidelines cheerleading, that's where.
There are lots of organizations that fight for civil liberties in one way or another. EFF is good at handling technological cases, so they tend to get those. The ACLU tends to get cases on free speech in schools and other "right to speak your mind" issues. (Remember the CDA? The official title of the Supreme Court case is "ACLU v. Reno".) In the meantime, we file amicus briefs in EFF cases, they file amicus briefs in ours, and we coordinate as appropriate. The same thing goes for Second Amendment cases. Regardless of where the ACLU stands on what it means (and I disagree with their current stance), those cases can be better handled by the NRA, whose budget is orders of magnitude higher.
It's called division of labor and specialization. It's the foundation of almost every economy. Get used to it.
And FWIW, here in Pittsburgh, the ACLU is putting together a fact sheet on online liberties, and it explains the Sklyarov case. I myself got chewed out by Dave Touretzky for getting the facts wrong. So nyah.
Out of curiousity, any of the readers have a reference to the actual journal article? (I'm assuming they published this *somewhere* and didn't just send out a press release.) I'm aware of previous results with neurons and polylysine, so I'd like to take a look and see precisely what the innovation is here. (My guess is that it's the microprinting.)
OK, right, you got me on one of my profs' classic sayings: "any drug can hurt the liver". Touche'. I maintain, however, that NSAIDS in general are not nearly as hepatotoxic as acetaminophen. (There's a *reason* it's a board question.)
There actually *is* a condition called "conversion disorder", wherein psychological conflict unacceptable to a person is manifested by neurological symptoms. It usually manifests as paralysis, and it's generally not following any pattern that can be explained by real nerves. Therefore, most RSI cases probably aren't conversion. However, you have a good point --- some of them *might* be. Probably a good thing in this case, since it lets the person do what they want.
That's not Advil, that's Tylenol. The massive liver damage is very specific to acetaminophen. The other drugs bother your liver *far* less; the real problem is that they decrease the secretion of protective mucus in your stomach and can lead to bleeding gastric ulcers (hint: bad).
And as several other people pointed out, acetaminophen has no anti-inflammatory effect, only anti-pain, so you don't want to take it for RSI anyway.
How do you expect every geek to have his own Britney-clone love slave? It's just not possible without mass-production. (Besides, I'm pretty sure she's a Beta anyway. Maybe even a Gamma.)
You're missing my point. The fungus is *already* in the ICU. It's already being blown around by the ventilation system. Sure, you can reduce risk a little by not having your computer fans kicking dust right into the patient's face. However, blaming the machines for the presence of the fungus is just plain wrong.
Are there things on the computer keyboard? Yes. And also on the sheets. And on the equipment. And on the countertops. And being tracked in from the outside with each new patient. You can't sterilize the ICU, at least not yet. No matter what you do, any surface that isn't either fresh from the autoclave or inside a sterile wrapper is automatically contaminated. Now, maybe those antibacterial surfaces we've read about will cut this down eventually, but for now, the only solution is careful monitoring of patients.
(And for the record, yes. I'm a med student. I've never been in the ICU as a patient, but I've been there several times as staff/observer.)
Well, you know, I've been *trying* to get them to put "Windows-induced psychosis" into the DSM-V, but for some reason all their eyes glaze over and they chant "Bill-is-good-all-hail-Bill".
Aspergillus is a favorite fungus for my profs to test, because the second your immune system goes away, it just waltzes in and starts invading everything it can find. However, one of the things I recall being taught is that part of the reason we have troubles with it is that it's literally *everywhere*. I'd be willing to bet money that it was in the ICU dust beforehand, just due to all the incredibly sick patients (some of whom had invasive aspergillosis) that had come through. It's the same reason the antibiotic-resistant bugs live in hospitals --- we can't get rid of them.
Oh, and for everyone else worried about Aspergillus from their computers: quit it. Unless you've lost a seriously large chunk of your immune system to chemotherapy, AIDS, leukemia, or something similar, the worst Aspergillus can do to you is trigger your mold allergies. When something is everywhere, the body learns to deal with it.
Nonsense. Most of the Sim games allow you to do something along the lines of sending Godzilla into downtown Detroit and then killing him by crashing an airliner into him. When I played SimCity, I'd always save and then trash the entire place before I quit the game. That's good clean American fun, that is.
The other problem, of course, being that the real process of governing is just not fun. Sure, if you get up high enough, you get some power and maybe some bribes/kickbacks/perqs. However, realize that you are no longer permitted to express your own thoughts on anything, because the media will lynch you. Your entire day consists of sorting through arcane bits of legal code and mile-high stacks of budget figures, trying to figure out what it all says and what changes might actually work. Meanwhile, your door is being beaten down by thousands of special-interest groups, all of whom say that you must do as they say or the country will go to Hell *and* they'll run ads showing you kicking a small child in the face. Oh, and did we mention that even though you're not allowed to express your true opinion on anything, you've got to have a position on everything? Or the party whip, whose sole job is to keep you in line with The Platform and The Agenda by whatever means necessary? And all your college buds who own companies and law firms make about ten times as much as you?
You want a game that'll drive people to murder, that'd be it.
1. Yeah, the hygeine theory does suggest that killing off too many bugs is a bad idea, and yes, you do need normal flora. That's not what this is for. This is for, as one poster has suggested, surgical equipment and cutting boards and other things likely to be vectors of infection. (Hint: doctors' office doorknobs.)
2. No, 94% isn't entirely sterile. However, look at it this way: when I take a sterile metal scalpel and start operating on you, with the first cut, that scalpel comes away loaded with skin germs, which are then spreadable to the deep tissue layer. (We'll ignore the cause of cauterizing scalpels for now.) Right now, part of the way we fight this is constantly irrigating the incision with a diluted antibiotic solution. Having the knife itself contribute would be nice.
3. Yes, bacteria develop resistance. However, they develop resistance to antibiotics that try to get into their metabolism and screw it up (essentially selective poisons). To the best of my knowledge, no bug is resistant to having its membranes chemically lysed. We can't use that kind of reaction for an internal antibiotic, because it'll also destroy normal tissue. However, when you're already cutting the tissue, you really don't care if a few more cells get popped.
But don't you see? This is all part of his plan! He's deliberately killed himself to set up the notorious Slashdot DDoS! I say they expand his supension to *twenty* days to make it clear that the school doesn't tolerate this.
Slashdot Mirror
Including all growth and electrical/chemical effects is not yet possible, because they are not yet all known. Furthermore, knowing all of them would probably tell us that there's no such thing as a generic neuron model; each cell has a very specialized gene expression profile that near-optimizes it for its role in the network. It may be that this can be reduced to expressing a neuron as a function of some hundred-odd parameters (as a guess), but it is not yet clear what the controlling parameters are.
The MURG question of computational modeling of the human brain is a very open problem with no solution in sight. I was not familiar with them, but they do at least seem to be composed of people with useful technological skills. It'll be interesting to see if they come up with anything cool.
That's because it's not a breakthrough, it's commercialization of stuff that's been done in the academic labs for a couple years. Amazingly, it *does* take time to go from neat idea to marketable product. Electrode arrays can be a real bitch to fabricate.
See:
Biosensors & Bioelectronics 16:527-33
Brain Research Protocols 2(4):229-42
Journal of Neuroscience Methods 101(1):31-42
Journal of Neuroscience Methods 114(2):135-48
Plus, as the other poster mentioned, Jerry Pine's work. However, AFAIK, Pine's no longer working on that project, having found other interests. Pity, because the neurowells (as noted by Peter Fromherz in the New Scientist article) give the kind of single-unit interface that might be very desirable. I know that my group is planning to use similar approaches.
Go here.
Piffle. Complaining about things on Slashdot is marvelously effective. Look how well it's eliminated the DMCA problems.
Perhaps I should file a report, at that. I always figured I wasn't the only person who'd noticed this, but then again, more bug reports means a higher priority score.
...is its lovely behavior of permanently saving every email as a file in your directory, even if you're using something like an IMAP server where the whole point is *not* to save messages locally. This leads to two problems:
1. My quota gets eaten twice. I lose the mail quota for having mail stored on the server, plus I lose disk quota for the local copies.
2. The directory is created with your default permissions, which for most shared systems include readability by others in the organization. I have been able to wander through other Evolution users' home directories and read their email. Joe User is not going to have a *clue* that this could be happening.
OK, sure, local caching is good, but use some compression or encryption or *something*. (And yes, I still use it, because it's the nicest client out there. But security is not *that* hard.)
Ah, but when you are old, you will have bad vision and will not notice. :-)
I'll agree with you that they're not the prettiest creatures in the world. Yet. They're still busy hacking on the actual functionality side of the bots. Once the tech transitions to the private sector, I'm sure they'll do all sorts of focus groups to optimize the appearance.
Of course, eventually I guess one would want it to be "skinnable" so that you could customize your personal companion to your tastes.
...check out the Nursebot Project here at CMU. Not only will these robots provide companionship, but they are intended to provide basic health monitoring and assistance with activities of daily living. The prototype robots have already gone into nursing homes and interacted with residents, and in general the response has been very positive.
There's a primer on gene patents (PDF file) that I wrote about a year ago. It explains the generally-accepted patent criteria and how genetic material has been interpreted to meet those criteria. The arguments for and against patentability of genes are presented, although the bias is against strict patentability; my personal viewpoint is that applications of genetic information are fair game, but the raw sequence itself should be off-limits.
What you describe is the exception, not the rule. Most patents *are* on the expressed sequence of the gene itself (or the amino acid sequence of the protein, which is informationally equivalent in most cases), not on some test kit or therapeutic regimen. The described utility is generally one that has been found through computational homology studies: you screen the gene against a database of knowns, and then declare it to have functionality equivalent to that of the closest match.
As you pointed out, there's supposed to be some novelty here. The trick is that the expressed sequence isn't how the gene exists in your body: in your body, there are unexpressed intervening sequences (comments, sort of), proteins attached to the strand at various points, and other modifications. Courts have held that since the pure expressed sequence isn't the form found in nature, it's a new compound and is patentable.
I agree that the specific applications of genetic discoveries should be patentable and patented, but that ain't what we're arguing here.
Shameless self-promotion: I wrote a primer on gene patents (PDF format) for the American Medical Student Association about a year ago that goes into a lot more detail on the issue.
Untrue. (Disclaimer: I sit one desk over from one of the grad students who works on this, and I think Stetten is a cool guy.) There are a couple key areas where this is useful:
1. While a well-trained US professional can do as you say, there are a lot of hospitals that can't afford/find a well-trained professional (think rural and innner-city medical centers). If this boosts the diagnostic ability of other caregivers, it will help patients. (Now, getting it made cheap enough for those hospitals to buy... could be trickier.)
2. It's an excellent teaching tool. Well-trained professionals got that way after struggling through many years of not being able to see jack shit. Speaking as someone who's a med student on the side, I would love to be able to use the SF to compare to a normal static US scan.
3. This isn't really aimed at diagnostic US anyway. One of the big goals of the MRCAS and MERIT centers at CMU is "augmented reality" for surgery. The idea is that as the surgeon prepares to go digging around in an area whose contents are not precisely localized, he/she can take a look with the SF and know exactly where to cut.
4. Even for diagnostic uses, like US-guided biopsy, this brings improvement. Instead of having to look away from the patient to some monitor, you keep your eyes on your hands and on the patient at all times. Speaking as someone who's had to handle a laparoscope while simultaneously staring at a TV screen, it would be a lot nicer if I had that little bit of extra visual feedback about precisely what my hands and the tissue under them were doing.
Yep. Brain can rewire, and it does it better the younger you are. Almost never gets it perfect, though. I'd bet money you never quite got back the same dexterity and sensitivity you had in your hand before your accident.
My bigger point, though, is that you're not quite right about the median nerve. It does both sensation and motor. What happens is that as the nerve passes through the anterior compartment of the forearm (that'd be the side you see when your arm is facing up), it innervates those forearm muscles. The nerve then dives into the carpal tunnel (yep, this is the CTS nerve) and re-emerges in the palm. It has some motor branches here as well; the muscles at the base of your thumb get innervation from the median nerve. You're correct in that after it enters the carpal tunnel, it's mostly sensory.
That concludes our semi-educational semi-tirade for the day.
That's a reason to give more money to NASA if I ever heard one. Lunar Revolt of 2075, here we come.
Where's the ACLU? We're on the sidelines cheerleading, that's where.
There are lots of organizations that fight for civil liberties in one way or another. EFF is good at handling technological cases, so they tend to get those. The ACLU tends to get cases on free speech in schools and other "right to speak your mind" issues. (Remember the CDA? The official title of the Supreme Court case is "ACLU v. Reno".) In the meantime, we file amicus briefs in EFF cases, they file amicus briefs in ours, and we coordinate as appropriate. The same thing goes for Second Amendment cases. Regardless of where the ACLU stands on what it means (and I disagree with their current stance), those cases can be better handled by the NRA, whose budget is orders of magnitude higher.
It's called division of labor and specialization. It's the foundation of almost every economy. Get used to it.
And FWIW, here in Pittsburgh, the ACLU is putting together a fact sheet on online liberties, and it explains the Sklyarov case. I myself got chewed out by Dave Touretzky for getting the facts wrong. So nyah.
Out of curiousity, any of the readers have a reference to the actual journal article? (I'm assuming they published this *somewhere* and didn't just send out a press release.) I'm aware of previous results with neurons and polylysine, so I'd like to take a look and see precisely what the innovation is here. (My guess is that it's the microprinting.)
OK, right, you got me on one of my profs' classic sayings: "any drug can hurt the liver". Touche'. I maintain, however, that NSAIDS in general are not nearly as hepatotoxic as acetaminophen. (There's a *reason* it's a board question.)
There actually *is* a condition called "conversion disorder", wherein psychological conflict unacceptable to a person is manifested by neurological symptoms. It usually manifests as paralysis, and it's generally not following any pattern that can be explained by real nerves. Therefore, most RSI cases probably aren't conversion. However, you have a good point --- some of them *might* be. Probably a good thing in this case, since it lets the person do what they want.
That's not Advil, that's Tylenol. The massive liver damage is very specific to acetaminophen. The other drugs bother your liver *far* less; the real problem is that they decrease the secretion of protective mucus in your stomach and can lead to bleeding gastric ulcers (hint: bad).
And as several other people pointed out, acetaminophen has no anti-inflammatory effect, only anti-pain, so you don't want to take it for RSI anyway.
How do you expect every geek to have his own Britney-clone love slave? It's just not possible without mass-production. (Besides, I'm pretty sure she's a Beta anyway. Maybe even a Gamma.)
You're missing my point. The fungus is *already* in the ICU. It's already being blown around by the ventilation system. Sure, you can reduce risk a little by not having your computer fans kicking dust right into the patient's face. However, blaming the machines for the presence of the fungus is just plain wrong.
Are there things on the computer keyboard? Yes. And also on the sheets. And on the equipment. And on the countertops. And being tracked in from the outside with each new patient. You can't sterilize the ICU, at least not yet. No matter what you do, any surface that isn't either fresh from the autoclave or inside a sterile wrapper is automatically contaminated. Now, maybe those antibacterial surfaces we've read about will cut this down eventually, but for now, the only solution is careful monitoring of patients.
(And for the record, yes. I'm a med student. I've never been in the ICU as a patient, but I've been there several times as staff/observer.)
Well, you know, I've been *trying* to get them to put "Windows-induced psychosis" into the DSM-V, but for some reason all their eyes glaze over and they chant "Bill-is-good-all-hail-Bill".
Aspergillus is a favorite fungus for my profs to test, because the second your immune system goes away, it just waltzes in and starts invading everything it can find. However, one of the things I recall being taught is that part of the reason we have troubles with it is that it's literally *everywhere*. I'd be willing to bet money that it was in the ICU dust beforehand, just due to all the incredibly sick patients (some of whom had invasive aspergillosis) that had come through. It's the same reason the antibiotic-resistant bugs live in hospitals --- we can't get rid of them.
Oh, and for everyone else worried about Aspergillus from their computers: quit it. Unless you've lost a seriously large chunk of your immune system to chemotherapy, AIDS, leukemia, or something similar, the worst Aspergillus can do to you is trigger your mold allergies. When something is everywhere, the body learns to deal with it.
Nonsense. Most of the Sim games allow you to do something along the lines of sending Godzilla into downtown Detroit and then killing him by crashing an airliner into him. When I played SimCity, I'd always save and then trash the entire place before I quit the game. That's good clean American fun, that is.
The other problem, of course, being that the real process of governing is just not fun. Sure, if you get up high enough, you get some power and maybe some bribes/kickbacks/perqs. However, realize that you are no longer permitted to express your own thoughts on anything, because the media will lynch you. Your entire day consists of sorting through arcane bits of legal code and mile-high stacks of budget figures, trying to figure out what it all says and what changes might actually work. Meanwhile, your door is being beaten down by thousands of special-interest groups, all of whom say that you must do as they say or the country will go to Hell *and* they'll run ads showing you kicking a small child in the face. Oh, and did we mention that even though you're not allowed to express your true opinion on anything, you've got to have a position on everything? Or the party whip, whose sole job is to keep you in line with The Platform and The Agenda by whatever means necessary? And all your college buds who own companies and law firms make about ten times as much as you?
You want a game that'll drive people to murder, that'd be it.
1. Yeah, the hygeine theory does suggest that killing off too many bugs is a bad idea, and yes, you do need normal flora. That's not what this is for. This is for, as one poster has suggested, surgical equipment and cutting boards and other things likely to be vectors of infection. (Hint: doctors' office doorknobs.)
2. No, 94% isn't entirely sterile. However, look at it this way: when I take a sterile metal scalpel and start operating on you, with the first cut, that scalpel comes away loaded with skin germs, which are then spreadable to the deep tissue layer. (We'll ignore the cause of cauterizing scalpels for now.) Right now, part of the way we fight this is constantly irrigating the incision with a diluted antibiotic solution. Having the knife itself contribute would be nice.
3. Yes, bacteria develop resistance. However, they develop resistance to antibiotics that try to get into their metabolism and screw it up (essentially selective poisons). To the best of my knowledge, no bug is resistant to having its membranes chemically lysed. We can't use that kind of reaction for an internal antibiotic, because it'll also destroy normal tissue. However, when you're already cutting the tissue, you really don't care if a few more cells get popped.
But don't you see? This is all part of his plan! He's deliberately killed himself to set up the notorious Slashdot DDoS! I say they expand his supension to *twenty* days to make it clear that the school doesn't tolerate this.