World's Fastest Cells Raced On Petri Dish 61
ananyo writes "In a tongue-in-cheek contest of microscopic mobility, a line of bone marrow stem cells from Singapore beat out dozens of competitors to claim the title of the world's fastest cells. They whizzed across a petri dish at the breakneck speed of 5.2 microns per minute — or 0.000000312 kilometers per hour."
Speed demons (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think you just insulted yourself by accident.* The constituents of Congress are the voting public.
* Unless you're from outside the United States, in which case you've insulted America, and the drone missile is already on its way free-of-charge.
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Speed of Congress debating a bill: NaN
Debating bills went the way of buggy whips. Modern political technology initiates the filibuster simultaneously with the bill's original proposal. Politicians are excited about the recent neutrino results, and the possibility of initiating the filibuster process prior to bill proposal.
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I want congress to be even slower. (Score:2)
Still faster than congress debating a bill.
Every bill that becomes law is that much less freedom. The slower the better.
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Some might argue that laws can increase freedom too. Take the 13th amendment, for example.
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Heh, the amendment that worked by banning whole classes of existing laws?
Misleading summary (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Misleading summary (Score:4, Funny)
Although my sperm normally moves at one-quarter impulse, it can achieve warp 9.7 for up to 3 hours.
Your boyfriend farting doesn't count as self-mobility so the 9.7 warp data is invalid.
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"just sayin, y'know"
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This just in: Winner of contest actually a contestant - crowd riots ! News at 11 !
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The first thing that came to me was Listeria [wikipedia.org]. These bacteria are intracellular pathogens, using the host cell's cytoskeleton (actin filaments) to shoot around the interior of the cell (and eventually punch through the cell wall IIRC) at 0.12-1.46 microns/sec [nih.gov], faster than the cells tested.
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They were simply the fastest cells that were among those that were raced; many cells from various species of protists, not to mention sperm cells are capable of faster speeds than that.
This is a fair point - though the story points to the fact these cells were being raced for a reason - it tells us more about embryo development. Racing sperm cells wouldn't tell us much about that (well, except how quickly a species could actually create the embryo in the first place).
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I have watched some spirochetes (Score:2)
moving pretty fast. Hard to believe cells that are not normally motile (bone marrow stem cells) would beat cells that are exquisitely evolved for high speed locomotion. Come to think of it, paramecium can move pretty fast, too.
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Come to think of it, paramecium can move pretty fast, too.
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/RossKrupnik.shtml [hypertextbook.com]
2 mm/sec?
I believe it. Those things are a PITA to observe under a scope without adding this slime stuff that slows them down.
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Detain. I remember that stuff from bio labs. One of the dumbest labs I ever did. First, they expected freshmen undergrads to have the skill to catch a paramecium with a dropper and a dissecting microscope. Then, they expected us to know just how much detain to add to the slide so that we could find the damn thing, but not so much that it was totally immobilized. Then, they expected that if we added some food to the slide, we would be able to observe it eating...
I don't think anyone in my lab class managed a
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Detain. I remember that stuff from bio labs. One of the dumbest labs I ever did. First, they expected freshmen undergrads to have the skill to catch a paramecium with a dropper and a dissecting microscope. Then, they expected us to know just how much detain to add to the slide so that we could find the damn thing, but not so much that it was totally immobilized. Then, they expected that if we added some food to the slide, we would be able to observe it eating...
I don't think anyone in my lab class managed all three. I remember wishing I was still at home, in my bed...
And the joke ends thus: ... immobile, covered in slime stuff, and eating?
That's nothing... (Score:1)
Who cares about speed anymore? Power efficiency is what counts!
Let those cells race, and then decide winners on criteria like "microns moved per sugar molecule" or something.
0.000000312 kph is XXX in scale speed? (Score:3)
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If they're 0.000000312 kilometers per hour how fast is that "scale speed"? If they were the size of a car, how fast would they be traveling?
That's kinda variable, like how fast is a person, you mean a kenyan olympic sprinter or a 600 pound walmart shopper?
None the less, figure "about a dozen microns" within an order of magnitude bigger or smaller. I do not have a prepared slide of those for my little microscope, but I have a gut sense they are about that big based on pictures. Figure about one an a half times the diameter of a red blood cell? Supposedly they vary a lot more in size than a RBC.
In "car speed" for the standard /. car analogy, t
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well I f'd that up pretty well. a mile is about 6000 feet and theres about 60 minutes in an hour so 3 mph is about 6000 / 60 * 3 = 300 feet per minute, so that would imply my car is 150 feet long if I'm going two car lengths per minute.
In car speed that would be a lot more like two car lengths is 2 * 10 feet = 20 feet per minute, times 60 to get about 1200, call that 1000 Kft, divided by about 5000 Kft per mile, thats about a fifth of a mile per hour.
Re:0.000000312 kph is XXX in scale speed? (Score:5, Funny)
theres about 60 minutes in an hour
About sixty? Now I'm scared.
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Well see, you've got Imperial hours and metric hours. One of 'em is about 1.2 times the length of the other.
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A nautical mile is 6076 feet, which is pretty close.
Does that mean that if a sea dries up, the places that were on the coast get closer together?
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I did all the math in my head. If you need a calculator to divide 6000 / 60 you got problems. Doing 5280/60 in my head is a waste of time. There is no point in calculating to 8 decimal places if you only have about one significant figure (or technically less, if you aren't even sure what order of magnitude is correct).
Would have been more accurate to spec as "divide thousands by tens and get hundreds"
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If they're 0.000000312 kilometers per hour how fast is that "scale speed"? If they were the size of a car, how fast would they be traveling?
If a "Adult bone marrow stem cells" is ~ 25 microns = 25E-6m
http://www.biology-online.org/biology-forum/about154.html?hilit=Stromal [biology-online.org]
If an average car is 4.12m
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_average_length_of_a_car [answers.com]
Then 4.12/25E-6=x/(0.000000312km/h)
x=0.0514176km/h
Wait for it... (Score:4, Funny)
Bone marrow stem cell vs Space Shuttle (Score:1)
It's all relative. (Score:1)
Faster cells (Score:2)
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If those cells were to be placed in an exoskeleton build by other cells, the opportunity to increase the travelling speed become realised.
Ob. Trek reference (Score:2)
Four hundred Quatloos on the brown ones.
- "The Gamesters of Triskelion"
Post now has video (Score:1)
Cell splits in video? (Score:2)
About 8 seconds into the video that they show, in the 4th lane from the bottom, am I seeing a cell split into two? It looks like it splits, then the daughters go in opposite directions more quickly than their parent cell moved...