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Scientists regenerate neurons that restore walking in mice after paralysis from spinal cord injury
  • While that's true, this isn't a specific engineering problem. You need to grab a single cell from each relevant subcluster of neurons in the spinal cord, spatially record the exact positioning, send it off to have RNA seq. done, sample all of the subclusters of the target area, spatially record exact positioning, send it off to have RNA seq done, resample based off of RNA seq data, begin axon regrowth of a single subcluster, and then repeat after every growth cycle to ensure the targeting is holding.

    You can improve RNA sequencing machines to reduce runtime, improve spatial tracking to make it easier to keep track of the anatomy, but without sci-fi advances in implant technology you can't get around the sheer amount of procedural time requiring MD-PhDs and post docs to be involved in every visit.

    One of the issues with medical technology is that we know far more about how the human body operates than we can control, so compared to biological structures our manipulation of biology at the cell specific level is relatively crude. I'm not saying tech won't catch up, but it's going to be ruinously involved for a very long time.

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    I feel like we're all stuck in a movie where all the rich people live on some kind of floating island or satellite with everything they need to live well, and all of us have zero chance of going there
  • Well, you'll be pleased to know there are a lot of projects working on indoor vertical farming. Both as a method to spin up food production in heavily populated cities, and as a method for sustainable Mars and Moon bases. Which are effectively just bunkers, in space.

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    Scientists regenerate neurons that restore walking in mice after paralysis from spinal cord injury
  • It's a little grim, but there's a standard SCI (spinal cord injury) guillotine that drops a weight with an angled wedge to cause a near perfectly replicable SCI. The mouse is sedated, but it's not exactly a good time for the mouse.

    But yeah, the alternative is testing on humans, which, I really don't think we need a reminder on why that's super illegal.

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    Scientists regenerate neurons that restore walking in mice after paralysis from spinal cord injury
  • The difference though is that this treatment would require hundreds of hours of ongoing work from medical professionals for each treatment. What they did was use single cell RNA sequencing to determine which subpopulations of cells are supposed to connect and where, before stimulating cell growth and guiding each RNA mapped subpopulation to where it's roughly supposed to go. That's one thing for anatomically complete sub-millimeter spinal cord injuries in mice, but a massive endeavor for human spinal cords.

    If you've seen the bioengineered cancer treatments where researchers grow immune cells to target a single individual's tumor, the amount of specialized work that goes into that pales to what current technology would require for this sort of spinal regeneration, and that's for relatively simple small scale lesions. Multiple lesions or large scale cell death could result in attempting to selectively guide millions of microscopic axons in neat clusters for over a foot.

    I wouldn't be surprised if insurance companies refused to pay for cell regrowth, and instead went for implants that are comparatively much simpler to install and modify in brain-computer interfaces that skip over the damage. This is a great advancement and does open the door for recovering from spinal cord damage, but this is one of those treatments that people are going to get because they need to fill FDA trials and won't charge, or because the patient is filthy rich.

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    tragedy
  • To be fair, they probably inherited the place and got to be the lucky person it closed down under, which probably doesn't feel great.

    At least, it'd raise some eyebrows if its had the same owner since 1883.

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    TIL Children as young as eight can and have been put on the sex offender registry, which lasts the rest of their lives.
  • Yeah, I remember when everyone was starting to get decent camera phones and then news articles started popping up about high schoolers being picked up by the FBI for producing child porn by sending nudes, and their girlfriend/boyfriend for seeing them. There was a bit of panic, that was then promptly ignored because "it'd never happen to us".

    Can't imagine how different someones life would be if they were tagged as a sex offender before even turning 18.

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    George R.R. Martin and other authors sue OpenAI for copyright infringement
  • Well, I mean we kinda are, capitalism and all that. There are thousands of authors of Patreon, Kofi, and the like that you can pay to write you the fanfiction you want. Further, if you don't know the provenance of a fanfic, how do you tell which ones are the copyright violation? The only way to do so is if you have records of its birth, especially as generative AI improves.

    I'm not blind to the plight of creators here, but isn't the issue that a machine can, in theory, out compete the authors at their own style? If a random human can write Stephen King's style better than Stephen King, it's forgiven because that took time, effort, and talent, where a machine doing it alarms us. No author has ever been sued because they read a book and were influenced in their writing, unless they outright plagiarized without attributing. I just think that there needs to be a significant frame shift, since artificially limiting generative AI to protect the current business model instead of allowing it to reshape how people produce and consume media isn't realistic. The issue is figuring out how creators are still compensated for their work.

    People are already building small generative AI projects, so there's no containing it, and it's only going to grow.

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    55% of women say listening to Joe Rogan is a red flag
  • You got downvoted a lot, but they are literally the exact same red flags. The only difference is the percent of men and women surveyed that view each thing as a red flag, but those are pretty similar with men being more conservative the women according to the poll.

    There are a few standouts, but after looking at the actual poll its pretty obvious that the one or two "opinion" questions are overwhelmed by political flags.

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    Would you take a cheap and effective once-a-day anti-aging pill? What if it were a suppository?
  • Yeah, I'd be uncomfortable, but immortality is immortality.

    Now, if the requirement was a daily barebacking by the ultra-rich engineering their cum to be the elixir of immortality, I'd be a little more conflicted.

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    That or being relegated to Step-Mom roles
  • Feels a little like an Eldritch corporation that doesn't totally understand humanity, but produces simple guides to existence in a an effort to ease the suffering of our poor squalid souls.

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    James Webb telescope finds potential signature of life on Jupiter's icy moon Europa
  • Yeah, I was real excited until seeing the "sign of life". It's just like all of the articles saying "Evidence found for the formation of life on Mars!" And then you read it, and they just found signs of water, which is neat, but not that level of headline neat.

    There's a whole geological carbon cycle that occurs without the presence of life, so all this really does is provide a place for further investigation with the upcoming Europa space missions.

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    I have fire arms therefore you are wrong
  • Imagine the timeline, Elon never became an asshole, the ultimate pyrotechnic show, fireworks going off, this strange happy man has flamethrowers and a jetpack, behind him a dozen synchronized Falcon 9 rockets take off and engage in a choreographed aerial ballet.

    People post videos of it online, because Twitter still exists as a functional platform.

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