Tag: medicine

Software emulates a living organism

The New York Times covers the story of the first ever living organism simulation in software.

Scientists at Stanford University and the J. Craig Venter Institute have developed the first software simulation of an entire organism, a humble single-cell bacterium that lives in the human genital and respiratory tracts.

The scientists and other experts said the work was a giant step toward developing computerized laboratories that could carry out many thousands of experiments much faster than is possible now, helping scientists penetrate the mysteries of diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s.

[…]

The simulation of the complete life cycle of the pathogen, Mycoplasma genitalium, was presented on Friday in the journal Cell. The scientists called it a “first draft” but added that the effort was the first time an entire organism had been modeled in such detail — in this case, all of its 525 genes.

The simulation, which runs on a cluster of 128 computers, models the complete life span of the cell at the molecular level, charting the interactions of 28 categories of molecules — including DNA, RNA, proteins and small molecules known as metabolites, which are generated by cell processes.

Super super cool!

This is What Snake Venom Does to Blood!

I’ve seen numerous TV programs and documentaries about snakes.  But none of them has been this crystal clear.  Here is a full understanding of how screwed you are if the snakes bites you, in just over a minute.  Just imagine your blood turning into this jelly while inside your veins! How much heart work would be needed to push it through, and how useful that would be to your muscles, internal organs, and the rest?

Via The Laomedon!

How fast is a modern computer?

Once in a while I get into one of those discussions on how fast modern computers are.  Unfortunately, most of the times, the metrics which are compared, are of those computers that were before, not the ones which are now.  Today I came across a story in Slashdot that very nicely shows how fast modern computers are.  Just read this snippet to get an idea:

Engineers at UCLA, led by Bahram Jalali and Dino Di Carlo, have developed a camera that can take 36.7 million frames per second, with a shutter speed of 27 picoseconds. By far the fastest and most sensitive camera in the world — it is some 100 times faster than existing optical microscopes, and it has a false-positive rate of just one in a million — it is hoped, among other applications, that the device will massively improve our ability to diagnose early-stage and pre-metastatic cancer. This camera can photograph single cells as they flow through a microfluidic system at four meters per second (9 mph — about 100,000 particles per second), with comparable image quality to a still CCD camera (with a max shooting speed of around 60 fps). Existing optical microscopes use CMOS sensors, but they’re not fast enough to image more than 1,000 particles per second. With training, the brains of the operation — an FPGA image processor — can automatically analyze 100,000 particles per second and detect rare particles (such as cancer cells) 75% of the time.

Robert Liston – a genius surgeon

Wikipedia lists some of the most famous operations performed by Robert Liston.  Among them the only surgery in history with 300% mortality rate:

Liston’s most famous case

Amputated the leg in under 21⁄2 minutes (the patient died afterwards in the ward from hospital gangrene, they usually did in those pre-Listerian days). He amputated in addition the fingers of his young assistant (who died afterwards in the ward from hospital gangrene, they usually did in those pre-Listerian days). He also slashed through the coat tails of a distinguished surgical spectator, who was so terrified that the knife had pierced his vitals he dropped dead from fright.

That was the only operation in history with a 300 percent mortality.

Via oper.ru.