Comment on send thoughts and peer review
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 2 days agoOf course, it’s all primitive dogshit, basically early 20th century sticks with fancier motors. Big deal.
We need to figure out how to regrow limbs. A stupid salamander can do it.
cynar@lemmy.world 1 day ago
There’s some evidence that mammals never lost the ability. Unfortunately, our scarring response is massively faster and locks wounds down.
A few years back, they engineered mice to lack a gene, to find out what it did. Initially, someone got in trouble for not properly marking the modified mice (via holes in their ears). They later discovered the holes healed completely, including regenerating fur etc.
Unfortunately, it also makes recovery from larger wounds difficult, since without a scarring response they don’t close quickly.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Yes, I’ve read some old books that talk about the “current of injury” and how you can induce something like regeneration in humans if you leave the scab alone, but only for small things like fingertips.
I suspect, as you say, that you trade one thing off for another, but we’re all office workers these days so we can probably figure out something even for large wounds, since we can just sit around for weeks and heal.
I hope that when this AI craze dies down that we can redirect our humongous computing resources to simulating entire cells, maybe entire organs.
Deep down I’m a life extension nutter but reality had a way to knock that out of me…