We're not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon
svpow.com
svpow.com
"No shadowy Illuminati group deliberately made this decision, but as a civilization we have collectively ‘decided’ that three groups of people would get to peer inside the human body, and they’d all be hobbled."
Like the guy who built some of the first microscopes and discovered the sperm in semen, he wrote to the scientific community to discuss the discovery, but made sure to include that the semen he used was "what was left" after he copulated with his wife. Wouldn't want to give anyone the idea that he had masturbated, heaven forfend!
You know, diversity improves results.
The interesting thing is that it is in a human when they are born, grows until puberty, then gets smaller and smaller until it can be quite small and difficult to detect in a grown adult.
I can imagine medical explorers cutting open dead 40 year olds in the year 1900, probably not finding any obvious organ there -- while perhaps cutting open dead children may have been a lot less common (and perhaps distasteful). If you did find something there, you would not assume an important organ present in a child and essential for their immune system would shrink and almost go away.
It would be more likely to be labelled nothing, an abnormal growth, or even a cause for death or illness (pressure on the heart/lungs!).
Woody Allen's second favorite organ is the brain : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngizj5FIcjo
Basically, nobody has the job of discovering human anatomy except as a side hustle or byproduct.
I’m quite surprised at that. That’s a remarkable area to not have full time researchers in.
The way our scientific establishment works now is that you are rewarded for discovering things which fit into and shed new light on our existing web of understanding, not for things which are completely new and unconnected. I don't think this is entirely bad - science is useful because it's a densely connected web rather than a bag of unrelated facts. But it does mean that very little value is attached to observations of weird new things that don't fit in anywhere.
Back when I was a scientist, I was studying a known structure in the cytoskeleton. By chance, some of the cells I prepared went funny, and produced a radically different structure that I hadn't seen before, and couldn't find any mention of in the literature. I showed my supervisor, who basically said "so what?". On their own, this new structure was useless to a career scientist, because you can't say anything about what it is, what it does, why it's important, or how it connects to what anyone else is publishing about.
(It turned out this structure had been seen before, and published a few times, but still, nobody really knows what it's all about)
This surprises me (as a non-scientist). As the observation is clearly real and clearly fits in somewhere to the web (the human body works after all), so it is just not valuable because it cannot easily be published without additional work?
> because you can't say anything about what it is, what it does, why it's important, or how it connects to what anyone else is publishing about.
I guess I am mostly surprised that "it exists" is insufficient. Or that the discovery of this new thing wouldn't trigger further investigation rather than "so what?"
The part of this that baffles me is that there always seem to be untold billions to build particle accelerators. Spread the wealth, high-energy physicists!
I published a "regime diagram" improving the existing categorization of types of liquid jet breakup. There were a lot of changes from the status quo, but one that strikes me as particularly sad was the addition of a new regime that I called "turbulent Rayleigh". Every time men pee, they create a turbulent Rayleigh liquid jet. Yet this was a mostly foreign concept to spray researchers! You can find a few papers that identify what they view as an anomaly, but the papers seem to be mostly ignored and they don't go beyond saying something like "Something here is weird, future researchers should look into this". I did my share, making a theoretical model of the regime, showing how it's fundamentally different from the conventional laminar Rayleigh regime. Most spray researchers would consider a "Rayleigh" jet to be inherently laminar, but that's a misconception.
The reason why this happened is that liquid jet/sprays research is heavily biased towards fuel sprays, which rarely ever have this regime. You basically need a long tube (or something similar) to reduce the Reynolds number for turbulence to appear, which usually doesn't happen in fuel spray nozzles. Fuel sprays tend to have lower surface tension and higher viscosity than water/pee too, which makes seeing a turbulent Rayleigh jet even harder.
Is this why guys have so much trouble peeing only into the toilet bowl when standing?
Also: Peeing into only the bowl won't necessarily minimize the mess. Air gets "entrained" into the water and that creates splatter. Best practice is to target the porcelain inside the bowl (just above the water line) and adjust the distance so that the stream has broken up less as droplets will create more splatter than a solid stream.
The biggest one is that many guys are just vile. Sad but true. They don't even try to aim, because someone else will clean it; and they don't even wash their hands after.
The next biggest is that sometimes where you point isn't where the stream goes, whether from a random pinch in the tube or a proprioception error.
And sometimes the stream is split, and it's not entirely predictable when that will happen.
Spray?? Never had an issue like that. Can't speak for everyone though.
* all the structures grow from a single cell
* somehow it's all encoded in DNA (only 6 billion bits in humans, which has to also build cells and their ultracomplex machinery)
* this all had to evolve using only a very noisy objective function
> only 6 billion bits in humans
It’s probably not far off being easier to read DNA than a CD. And it’s surely less frustrating.
This makes me think that we need far more than just 6 billion bits to actually encode the entire process of new life formation (each instance always piggy-backs off the previous, and always provides processes/information).
(There is a contrarian theory that says that the cell membrane does not exist at all, look up Gilbert Ling. So it's no surprise that things can move in and out of the cell under certain conditions.)
Someone should write a short story about that.
The claim is biological, not sociological.
Or, more accurately, it's like having binary machine code for an unknown ISA with no information about the CPU, and no example CPU.
Also, even if we accepted that DNA fully specifies how a cell can create an identical copy of the cell that contains it, that doesn't mean that it specifies how to create a cell from scratch. The "instructions" in DNA could very well depend critically on details of the current cell. For example, the DNA could specify se thing like "take 1% of the substance secreted in organelle A and mix it with 90% water and 9% the substance secreted by organelle B". This instruction is perfectly good for specifying a copy of the current cell, and perfectly useless if you don't have the original cell for which it is meant.
This sort of thing could very well apply at the level of the whole fetus. Details of the uterus and other parts of the mother organism may well be critical parts of the "program" described by the DNA. For example, it's easy to imagine that the early fetus follows instructions like "let this much fluid pass through the umbilical chord", or "grow horizontally until you find this much pH difference between the extremeties" or whatever other instructions that are only useful in the context of an existing functioning mother organism.
And even beyond the individual, you would have a big problem recreating the species to allow for a second generation to exist at all. In particular, even if you had a whole living healthy female mammal, you would have no information at all for how to create a male of the species, so no way to create sperm cells, so no way to perpetuate the species. So the DNA of a female mammal doesn't contain information for how to make more of the species. And if all you had was a male organism, you would lack the information probably encoded in the living female that I was discussing earlier.
As a side note, this problem would not exist for birds, where the female bird does have both male and female DNA.
What we don't know is what that function is. Put differently, what is the question?
It's called maternal effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternal_effect)
He is studying exactly this. He found that when developing, cells move and grow in a particular direction. But when an obstacle is placed in their way, they move around it to somehow still end up where they’re supposed to.
DNA is not all of the encoding. Even cells appear to have some form of navigation or space search capabilities.
In addition to those unavoidable ones, there can also be things going wrong by accident (e.g. the pregnant woman suffer physical injury which kills the fetus).
for example (pre)eclampsia. we still don't know WTF is going on exactly (but it's basically abnormal blood vessel formation between the fetus and the uterus), and a few decades ago it was basically guaranteed loss of the fetus or the mother (or both), in about half a percent of pregnancies.
nowadays thanks to medical science it's a hundred-times more manageable.
It's unclear how much those non-genomic components affect organismal phenotypes; presumably, there is some minimal collection of factors that would suffice to allow us to construct an artificial egg cell that is viable for reproduction.
Couldn't this be proven by growing mammals in petri dishes?
If the entire information is encoded in DNA, then the fetus would grow fine.
If however, the fetus needs to be in a womb to develop, then there must be information (and resources) that need to be sent from the mother to the baby in a sort of quine fashion.
Consider a Java compiler or python interpreter, they are themselves written in the target language, unless we are talking about early version. So you already need a java compiler to compile Java, the code for the compiler does not hold all of the necessary information, as you need a mother compiler to execute it.
Which part of the target is in the code and which in the interpreter/compiler?
A thought experiment would be a language where a built in statement compile() compiles code according to specifications. Thus the code for a compiler would simply be compile().
My best guess is that fetuses can only grow inside a functioning human, and that the information in DNA is not sufficient, you need a functioning specimen to grow another specimen.
A 27-state two value Busy Beaver can implement "Give a counter-example to Goldbach's Conjecture" - if there are none the program never halts. We can recognise that, and say "Oh dear" but it gets us no closer to an answer. Six billion isn't even in the right ballpark, our ability to understand the meaning of every self-acting machine extends maybe to six or seven bits if we're very smart.
One has to be cautious to not assume that the only data DNA holds is in base pairs.
We know that secondary factors like inter- and intra-strand interactions or DNA-histone interaction encodes information as well.
A good analogy is a book. While it is made up of individual letters, the combinations build to words, which build to sentences, which build to ideas, which can interact with other ideas (sometimes in other chapters!) to create a complexity beyond just the combination of letters would suggest.
That's not even getting into the temporal aspects of DNA expression.
~750 megabytes (unit conversion via google)
Two cells: Egg and sperm
Define categories, silo information - who will ever recognise something unusual under their very nose?
They may be about as smart as australopithecus, so there could be an evolutionary feedback loop: tools-brain-better tools-better brain.
But you can only do so much with a beak.
Interestingly, a stark reminder for this came when image generating models could generate everything except realistic hands.
biological anatomy makes it pretty clear that biological bodies are complex layering of biopolymer sheets that perform incredible mechanical, biochemical and other subtle energetic processes.
We could learn a lot about the robots we hope to build by intricate studies of how Animal anatomy has really perfected the art of efficient and compact mechanical motion and advanced functions.
In a sense, the sophistication of the dense layering is akin to how modern processor architectures, motherboard and fully integrated circuits SOCs inside compact devices are kind of composite materials of fused layers of nevertheless separate components.
I believe this kind of work really should be funded.
The follow link work though: https://svpow.com/2024/09/07/
No, this would be like like giving the best programmers super computers in the 80's.
What's needed is a better way of doing anatomy. The tools and access are the problem.
One cadaver x-rayed and MRI'ed and ultra sounded in great detail then the raw data shared for free for instance.
Or do what really really matters and is also the end goal, a cheap way to see inside the living. Cheap ultrasound chips with open data APIs so people can try and find ways to increase accuracy for instance. Every farmer should have an ultrasound but they are too $$$