Natural Gas to Offer Breakthrough in Suspended Animation? 133
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"
Farts are healthy? (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:Farts are healthy? (Score:5, Funny)
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:
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I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.
--Mae West
That's only half the story (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Farts are healthy? (Score:5, Funny)
Incomplete science (Score:5, Informative)
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 [utah.edu]), 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....
Science in Motion (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Science in Motion (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Science in Motion (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Science in Motion (Score:5, Insightful)
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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That is an honest enough response. But first consider a possibility and understand I propose the possibility without even beginning to look at the researchers to see if it might apply in this specific case. You are working on promising research that could well have a large range of almost immediately implementable applications tha
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Seriously, why do you have to resort to ridiculous movie-plot science in an attempt to understand this? I doubt many grants are issued because of newspaper articles. It's more likely that either the researchers wanted some fame and sent out press re
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You win grants the same way you win anything else; in a popularity contest. The more popular the research you are doing is, the better your chances are of getting it funded. One way to get your area popular is to get press coverage.
Did you think they were awarded based on merit or something? On paper they are. Just like everything else in life, the real story never matches the paper.
"Seriously, why do you have to resort to ridiculous movie-plot
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Bringing results to the press (and especially sensationalizing them) before they are ready (peer-reviewed, etc.) will result in a much higher rate of retractions, simply because scientists are sometimes wrong. This is why we have peer-review in the f
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Also, I tend to be more wary of what the media is implying. The only portion of this that is actually attributed to the original researchers is quantitative data. The two scientists mentioned by name don't necissarily have any involvement with the researcher
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I'll tell you that it is a scary world out there in science funding right now. NIH paylines have been cut from ~33% to ~14% over the last five years, so that scientists applying for funding under that system are less than half as likely to get their grant as they were five years ago. Senior researchers I've talked to are scared and junior scientists like me are terrified.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Incomplete science -- Conference Proceeding (Score:1)
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 toxici
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I don't recall if it was Discover or Scientific American. They go into more
detail about the research they did do and this piece is a very poor recap of
an old article.
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the Discovery (Score:1, Funny)
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.
"would be very useful" (Score:2)
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.
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Hmm... as a solution to prison overcrowding, perhaps?
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Yes. So you slept for 20 years and aged 5 while in prison. But your wife aged 20 years, your mother and father died. Your friends and family aged 20 years. That is still a punishment, everything you know is gone or changed and you lost 5 years of the only resource you can't get back. Believe it or not the worst parts of prison are things that AREN'T supposed to happen, being gang raped in the shower or worrying about being killed for an extra helping of mashed potatoes is not part o
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Right, because we all know ex-con's get a fair shake in the job market. As for getting educated, I am not willing to pay for con's to get a free ride. I would rather invest that money in the younger generation.
"so their only option is to go back to crime"
You can argue until you are blue in the face. The current system results in almost every convict going back to crime. In fact, the crimes they commit usually escalate after doing time. It would be tough to come up with a sys
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So...n
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Are you sure? I thought the problem was that you wake up and the world has become overrun by sex-crazed, corporate-brainwashed morons [imdb.com]...
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I'm
Massive scale is relative... (Score:3, Interesting)
Paul B.
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Since when is freezing a viable method of suspended animation? We can't freeze a body without causing massive cellular damage. And even if you could, how would you revive it from such a state?
-matthew
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Good luck freezing anything larger than an embryo without destroying it. Freezing a human without killing him (and, almost as difficult, reheating said human without killing him) are about as far off into soft scifi fantasy land as you can get.
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Airflight safety (Score:2)
See "Fifth Element"
Nice Misleading Headline (Score:5, Informative)
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That's right. When I read the headline I thought "natural gas" as being a naturally occuring hydrocarbon, the stuff you burn for hot water, stove, central heat.
But maybe the orig poster thought hydrogen sulfide is considered part of "natural gas" because it is added into the gas line so that if there is a gas leak, you can smell it and get the hell out of there.
Grump.
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Anyway, the only reason I remember -SH is because the prof told a story of his former boss terrorising a K-Mart with it over a bad microwave they wouldn't take back. The store thought they had a gas leak and the fire dept was out there and everything.
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He was good friends with the guy who ran the local newspaper. They used to fill the paper with mentions of Ethyl Mercaptan --- the Society pages, the Women's section. She even crept into local news stories, once or twice being quoted.
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My experiments (Score:1, Funny)
I call dupe! (Score:1)
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Stop beating around the bush and say he's full of gas.
Its TIME you realized this (Score:2)
Even one single piece of fart does that.
Fart jokes are not funny. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Just remember, the farts are funnier when they are your own. And yes, the concept is interesting....sigh.
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if you want to see suspended animation... (Score:5, Funny)
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Attempting to run Windows Vista will also cause this. Now if you want the ultimate try running Doom 3 on Windows Vista on that machine.
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If this is true... (Score:2)
...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?
Buck Rogers (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Not really suspended animation (Score:2, Insightful)
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 de
Sewer gas suspended animation..... (Score:1)
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Might wanna get that checked out.
Hydrogen Sulfide is not Natural Gas (Score:1)
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mercaptan (murkp'tn) [key]or thiol (th'l) [key], any of a class of organic compounds containing the group -SH
That -SH group is the same on as in H-S-H better know as Hydrogen Sulfide gas.
mercapton compounds are also made by decaying or decomposing organinic matter, which is gives the distinct oder to flatus
http://www.factmonster.com/ce6/sci/A0832739.html [factmonster.com]
I use to work around mercaptans in the university, and later did work in a me
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And the two are very much related, as most natural gas deposits discovered these days are "polluted" with H2S. Lots of money is spent removing this highly toxic gas from CH4 supplies. See sour gas [wikipedia.org].
Lastly, it's not surprising that H2S slows heart rate, breathing, etc. This is why it kills dozens of people in the petroleum industry every year
Car That Runs on Air (Score:1)
ewww! (Score:2)
So What's New? (Score:1)
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Man oh man.. (Score:2)
what the man says (Score:2)
More fart jokes please!
TMNT (Score:1)
Umm yeah... (Score:2)
Yeah asphyxation/suffocation.. that does it every time.
Other gases? (Score:1)
How about trying tiny amounts of carbon monoxide or hydrogen cyanide? Maybe an interesting discovery will be made.............
has to be fake (Score:1)
Natural gas? (Score:3, Informative)
Dupe (Score:1)
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John Wayne (Score:1)
"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.
Breath in deep (Score:2)
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I don't mean the 'magic' technology, such as the SGs themselves, but when ever they try to use real science is sucks ass.
"This sound is outside the human hearing, I'll turn it up so we can hear it."
guuaaahhhh
Re:The REAL problem with CRYOGENICS (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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This, boys and girls, is a fantastic example of what we like to call a "Bitch Slap".
LK
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This is incredibly stupid. First, the proper terminology is cryogenics. Hypothermia is a condition, not a method of suspended animation.
Actually, it is called cryonics [wikipedia.org]
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