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Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

news.rice.edu

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Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#51

Post by londons_explore »

kmeisthax wrote: post #10
unsupp0rted wrote: post #6

I've always found it incongruous that we can move a person's body around the globe at 900 kilometers per hour for 25 hours for under $1500 but for 1000x that price and even with 1000x that time we can't bridge the distance between a brain and a foot.

So, I'll put this into terms that a sysadmin can understand: imagine if all the Ethernet or fiber going to a datacenter rack was bundled up, and I cut that bundle up. Now you have to splice them back together so that every port is still connected to the same port it was before I cut the cables. Oh, and also, the cables are microscopic, incredibly fragile, and we don't know how to actually repair them. We sort of just…

For scale, a human spine has coming off it a few hundred thousand nerve fibers inside 31 pairs of nerves.[1]

I was actually expecting more, since that is effectively IO for the whole body, and each individual nerve fiber tends not to fire more than tens of Hz.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4612209/

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#52

Post by rbanffy »

rpmisms wrote: post #8
markisus wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article, the device is more like a bridge rather than something that helps the body heal.

Yeah, as far as I understand, it can act like a bridge between two ends of a severed nerve.

Give me a pair of bridges and a conductor to make the nerve signals travel at electric current speeds and I’ll give you almost instantaneous reflexes.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#54

Post by rbanffy »

londons_explore wrote: post #51
kmeisthax wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I'll put this into terms that a sysadmin can understand: imagine if all the Ethernet or fiber going to a datacenter rack was bundled up, and I cut that bundle up. Now you have to splice them back together so that every port is still connected to the same port it was before I cut the cables. Oh, and also, the cables are microscopic, incredibly fragile, and we don't know how to actually repair them. We sort of just…

For scale, a human spine has coming off it a few hundred thousand nerve fibers inside 31 pairs of nerves.[1] I was actually expecting more, since that is effectively IO for the whole body, and each individual nerve fiber tends not to fire more than tens of Hz. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4612209/

Not the whole body. Eyes and ears have their own high bandwidth direct attachment interfaces to the cortex.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#55

Post by jillesvangurp »

m463 wrote: post #50
codeisawesome wrote: post #45

Would it be possible in a sci-fi near-future to transplant a new, lab-grown vertebral column, using something like this?

speaking of scifi I wonder... especially after reading about people developing limbs or fingers they don't have: "Some of CTRL-Labs’ goals are mind-bendingly exotic, like training a model for controlling extra fingers. https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/6/17433516/ctrl-labs-brain-c... I wonder if we could augment/cross our nerves to control things we normally can't control? what if we could release hormones on demand, l…

Reminds me of a few hilarious plot points in a few Ian Banks novels. One of them, the Hydrogen Sonata had this passage:

“Is it true your body was covered in over a hundred penises?” “No. I think the most I ever had was about sixty, but that was slightly too many. I settled on fifty-three as the maximum. Even then it was very difficult maintaining an erection in all of them at the same time, even with four hearts.”

Silly as this is, Ian Banks had a way of taking the mere hint of the possibility of a thing to it's logical extremes. His characters change sex, regrow limps, or morph themselves into a different alien species basically in an orgy of hedonism and utopianism. Definitely science fiction/fantasy when he wrote it but eerily close to becoming science fact as time progresses.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#56

Post by newZWhoDis »

rbanffy wrote: post #53
codeisawesome wrote: post #45

Would it be possible in a sci-fi near-future to transplant a new, lab-grown vertebral column, using something like this?

Imagine a lab-grown vertebral column where nerve signals travel at electric current speeds.

CS:GO and StarCraft would need new leagues

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#57

Post by tomcam »

m463 wrote: post #50
codeisawesome wrote: post #45

Would it be possible in a sci-fi near-future to transplant a new, lab-grown vertebral column, using something like this?

speaking of scifi I wonder... especially after reading about people developing limbs or fingers they don't have: "Some of CTRL-Labs’ goals are mind-bendingly exotic, like training a model for controlling extra fingers. https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/6/17433516/ctrl-labs-brain-c... I wonder if we could augment/cross our nerves to control things we normally can't control? what if we could release hormones on demand, l…

Bought by Facebook years ago.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#58

Post by Nextgrid »

grishka wrote: post #46
unsupp0rted wrote: post #6

I've always found it incongruous that we can move a person's body around the globe at 900 kilometers per hour for 25 hours for under $1500 but for 1000x that price and even with 1000x that time we can't bridge the distance between a brain and a foot.

Given enough curiosity, anyone can understand how and why a jet plane works in as much or as little detail as they want. Planes were engineered by humans from first principles and we're good at both documenting our inventions and understanding those first principles. Building something to interface with a biological system, though, is another matter entirely. It could as well be alien technology. It requires reverse…

> that was not designed by our civilization

To the best of our knowledge, it wasn't designed at all. It's more like giving a monkey a typewriter and millions of years, with a very crude feedback function (evolution/natural selection) that makes it very hard to backtrack out of a local maximum.

It's quite hard to interface with it because it's not designed to be interfaced with and the whole thing works pretty much by accident, and where changing any variable could throw it off.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#59

Post by calvinmorrison »

rbanffy wrote: post #52
rpmisms wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as far as I understand, it can act like a bridge between two ends of a severed nerve.

Give me a pair of bridges and a conductor to make the nerve signals travel at electric current speeds and I’ll give you almost instantaneous reflexes.

Oh boy wait till this guy finds out about copper

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#60

Post by 14 »

busterarm wrote: post #4
rpmisms wrote: post #2

I'm not a medical person, can anyone who knows more than me explain exactly how cool this is? Fixing spinal cords, or just repairing simple nerve severance?

Neuropathy affects a lot of people. Diabetics, for example. This could improve a lot of lives.

I don’t think it will ultimately help a diabetic. More worrisome then loss of feeling is loss of circulation. With High blood sugars you’re essentially get sugar crystals that build up on the capillary walls, which prevent blood circulation. Even if you cure Neuropathy will still have the issue of poor circulation.
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