A High-Res 3D Video of the Embryonic Heartbeat 207
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the University of Houston, TX, adapted an imaging technique called optical coherence tomography to capture 3D video of the mammalian heart as it forms. They used the method to image a mouse embryo just 8.5 days past conception and about a day after it starts to form. In the remarkable video a normal heartbeat is visible. Normally optical coherence tomography is used for clinical imaging of the retina. Having such a high-resolution, non-invasive way to image the developing heart could perhaps help doctors treat congenital heart disorders in human babies."
Re:Here goes... (Score:2, Insightful)
Feel free to steal my sig. It's apropos.
Re:Cool tech. (Score:3, Insightful)
I can think of quite a few more problems — such as subjecting the newly-forming tissue to the high amounts of whatever energy is used in this particular kind of tomography. Getting close enough to the heart of a human embryo may also prove more problematic, than in the case of mice.
But hey, nothing like getting an "insightful" moderation for your off-topic frosty piss, is there?
Have you ever seen such language in an ad? Do you really think, no people with clean English think of embryos as humans?
Re:I don't think so... (Score:3, Insightful)
You forgot rape... And endangerment of the mother's life. Not every unwanted pregnancy can be prevented nor safely carried to term. I don't think anyone has the moral authority to force a woman to die as a consequence of trying to bring a dangerous pregnancy to term. Nor do I believe that unwanted pregnancies are solely the fault of the mother.
Re:I don't think so... (Score:4, Insightful)
Because with all those options to not get pregnant, accidents still happen. I'm not going to even touch the issue of health reasons, rape, etc.
Re:Cool tech. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't think so... (Score:3, Insightful)
No. There are some pro-lifers who base their position partly on the idea that an unwanted pregnancy is the result of immoral behavior on the mother's part. It's that level of idiocy that I am opposed to, not the general concept of the pro-life movement.
Re:Cool tech. (Score:5, Insightful)
The only real problem(beyond the usual high start up costs of new technology) will be the inevitable co-opting of this imagery for a new round of weepy anti-abortion ads. "Oh Noes!, Lookat the wittle heart..."
Yes. Showing people biological facts with new technology. How terrible pro-lifers must be.
Re:Cool tech. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Cool tech. (Score:5, Insightful)
I see human life as special. This may be because I am human and therefore extremely subjective.
I am sure that when an alien race lands on earth they will be a lot more objective than us.
Re:I don't think so... (Score:3, Insightful)
What good is having religious beliefs if you can't force them on other people?
Re:We're onto a new path now... (Score:3, Insightful)
In the end, the earth belongs to those who have the most babies, and, all those things you advocate, undermine your own culture as much as they undermine your genes.
Survival of the fittest is about adaptation, not about who can have the most babies. When resources start to run out it is the species that is ready to change and adapt that wins out. I don't think anyone will disagree with me when I say religions aren't exactly proponents of change.
So sure, please, believe it: marriage and having a person stay at home is quaint.... if you get your girlfriend pregnant, its better to get rid of the child than to ruin your lives, believe all of it. If we can then privati[s]e schools and do the other things so that your input to our culture can be blocked, we can exterminate liberalism all the more quickly, simply by out-breeding it.
Privatising schools won't do much to shield children from alternate viewpoints in the age of the Internet.
Re:We're onto a new path now... (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that, this is not true. The USA experienced a huge surge in population and really only ran into fiscal problems when our population growth rate dropped.
We experienced a surge in population because of a surge in wealth. Having kids you can't afford is a bad idea.
Old people are expensive to take care of, and the cheapest way to do that is have loads of kids so as to share the costs.
Loads of kids growing up in broken homes with inadequate attention, education, and nutrition aren't going to be supporting anyone. They're more likely to be stripping and robbing convenience stores. Don't ignore quality of life in favor of quantity.
BTW, whatever happened to planning for your own retirement? Raising a child costs $125,000 to $250,000. That could go a long way if you invested it instead.
Re:Cool tech. (Score:2, Insightful)
As evidenced by the overwhelming number of five abortion doctors killed since 1993!
Re:Cool tech. (Score:3, Insightful)
People do think of that, and these people are wrong. That was the point of my response...
As evidenced by, what, a whopping five abortion-providers killed since 1993? Although each death is one too many, you are still overly concerned with this particular injustice [anncoulter.com].
Re:I don't think so... (Score:5, Insightful)
Since you think abortion is murder because the fetus has a nervous system, you must consider killing anything else with a nervous system -- including worms and insects -- to be morally equivalent to the killing of a human. Is that a stance you're willing to take, or would you like to adjust your criteria?
Maybe you should find a more compelling reason to call something "murder".
A "nervous system" is utterly irrelevent -- we kill millions of living things with nervous systems daily, and whatever else that may be, we do not consider it to be murder. The hamburger you had for lunch came from an animal that had a nervous system, and one quite a bit more advanced than any week-old fetus anyway.
Nervous systems, heartbeats, lungs -- these things do not make one human. There is one, and only one thing that humans have that no other animal has. How can you consider a fetus to be fully human when it lacks the one basic characteristic of humanity?
Re:I don't think so... (Score:2, Insightful)
Provide evidence that indicates that an unborn child is not human.
Does that mean that persons with mental defects are somehow not human?
How about people with alzheimer's and very young born children? Are they inhuman because they lack some of these qualities you speak of? No sir... you are unequivocally wrong. A dog has the mental capacity of a 2 year old child yet you would not say that the line was drawn at that point; the dog is thought of being less than the human despite similar mental capacity. You value human life on a fairly arbitrary scale that favors your opinion but has little to do with reality.
Re:I don't think so... (Score:4, Insightful)
Individual rights aren't directly linked to genetics. Otherwise it would be perfectly moral to kill a sapient alien. He's not trying to say fetuses aren't human in a biological sense, but rather that mere human DNA doesn't necessarily confer individual rights.
Again, they're biologically human. But morally, a person who suffers irreversible brain death is no longer sapient, so our laws (correctly) allow families to "pull the plug." This is the most extreme case, of course, and it's common for this position to be used as a strawman position: "Pro-choice means that anyone with an IQ below X should be killed!"
This couldn't be farther from reality. Most people recognize the need for shades of grey. For instance:
People with alzheimers shouldn't be given driver's licenses, nor should they have access to firearms or heavy machinery. Very young children don't have the right to vote or enter contracts. But only a lunatic would say that they have the same rights as a brain-dead vegetable. Shades of grey are necessary.
For a very good reason; dogs don't ever progress past that point. Humans do.
All moral decisions seem arbitrary to me, in the sense that they can't be falsified. But I also arbitrarily think that all sapient beings have the right to life. This includes all humans except for those without the capacity for sapience (e.g. fetuses prior to the development of a "reasonably" complicated brain, and people who have suffered irreversible brain death.) It also includes sapient aliens, genuine artificial intelligences, and possibly cetaceans, cephalapods, and some of the other great apes.
I haven't conclusively figured out where to put the boundaries for individual rights. Anyone who thinks these issues are simple is either naive or a genius on a level I'll never be able to reach. Morality in the real world is messy and arbitrary for everyone who hasn't locked himself into a moral system prescribed by an omnipotent, omniscient deity.
Re:Cool tech. (Score:3, Insightful)
It is funny that your post is modded as insightful. I think you and I both know what this technology will be used for.
This is just a screening process. So foetuses that will have any sign of cardiovascular abnormalities will be aborted. It will become just another in a round of tests that determine if a foetus will be aborted or get to live.
Yes, this is technology that can be used for something some people don't like. That makes it bad.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to use this computer and this internet to hack into a bank and steal someone's life savings, then I'll go to a lab and make a killer virus and clone some serial killers. Then probably come back home and use my stolen money to buy some child porn and upload it with the previously used internet. Then I might take a nap... an EVIL nap.
Re:Individual rights. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because people are fundamentally herd animals, and fear anyone who's different. This prejudice affects everyone, even the people who wrote those "holy books."
Neither will single people, couples who can't have kids, or couples who choose not to conceive. But they're not all sinners because of their choices (depending on the religion in question and the method of contraception.) Also, homosexuals can have children through surrogates and should certainly be able to adopt children.
Because God creates people with homosexual tendencies (even though He wants us to all have children) just to watch them squirm. If they manage to suppress the desires He gave them, they don't burn for all eternity. Hey, this sounds plausible and reasonable. Where do I sign up?
The first time I met a Christian, it was immediately apparent to me that they were undergoing an epic internal struggle, the least of which concerned their theology. Yet, to them, this condition has persisted for so long it felt "normal" And without the ability to defer judgment to another's experience, they saw no reason to change. Without any understanding that things could be better, they thought of my position as merely trying to take away what little happiness they did posses.
I'm just kidding. I don't really believe that. But it was silly of me to justify a position with such a subjective anecdote, wasn't it? Maybe calling homosexual desires "afflictions" makes you tend to see more of an internal struggle than can be traced back to the fact that gays live in a world that hates and harms them [wikipedia.org] for no good reason?
Maybe it's very clear to you how that conclusion follows from witnessing an unexpected death. And maybe all the atheists in the world just haven't seen anyone die unexpectedly. (I wonder what the odds of this are?)
Or maybe grief affects everyone differently, and doesn't imply anything about any deity.
You simply have to trust them. I prefer to think for myself [dumbscientist.com].
Re:Cool tech. (Score:3, Insightful)
"The attribution of value to human life is completely arbitrary. "
It's not arbitrary, it's an consequence of the fact that we're human, and the simple that fact that humans that don't value human life either kill themselves or are psychopaths on which a functioning society cannot be based.
Attributing value to human life is probably the LEAST arbitrary thing in human civilization.
Re:I don't think so... (Score:3, Insightful)
No, I'm saying that actions have consequences. If you're not prepared to deal with the consequences, then you have no business doing it. It doesn't matter if it's sex, playing the stock market, gambling, racing, skydiving, etc.
Except your "consequences" are wholly artificial because they only exist if a simple medical procedure is actively denied for the sole reason of them 'learning their lesson'.
There is no reason why, in today's world, sex must ever result in an unwanted birth unless people like you intervene to try and tell others how they should behave.
Your argument is nothing more than saying that people should not be held responsible for their actions, which is the main reason that the world is such a shitty place today - people like you making excuses for those who do bad / stupid things instead of holding them accountable for their choices.
Not in the slightest. My argument is that babies are only a "consequence" of accidental pregnancy if you impose your beliefs on other people.