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.
Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves
21–30 of 132 posts
Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves
#22I'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?
Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves
#23I'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.
Repairing severed nerves is more like an entropy-reversal class problem. I don’t think we could even put a sufficiently broken tea cup back together exactly as it was.
Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that they grow back in place makes the whole thing 1000x easier, no?
Only if it grows back correctly! Imagine attempting to wire up a datacenter that is actively trying to rewire itself (and not necessarily to your plans).
it's all connected to an organic deep neural network
which means that the specific arrangement of the physical wires doesn't matter. because there's a training period in which the neural network literally learns to control the body anyways
Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves
#25Researchers oversell their results for publishing and funding purposes. Then the university oversells those results to draw in students/investors.
Curious if others feel the same way or if I'm just too cynical at this point...
Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves
#26I'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.
Some things turn out to be hard to do.
It's just interesting the way we've progressed.
Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if it grows back correctly! Imagine attempting to wire up a datacenter that is actively trying to rewire itself (and not necessarily to your plans).
here's the kicker it's all connected to an organic deep neural network which means that the specific arrangement of the physical wires doesn't matter. because there's a training period in which the neural network literally learns to control the body anyways
Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if it grows back correctly! Imagine attempting to wire up a datacenter that is actively trying to rewire itself (and not necessarily to your plans).
here's the kicker it's all connected to an organic deep neural network which means that the specific arrangement of the physical wires doesn't matter. because there's a training period in which the neural network literally learns to control the body anyways
Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves
#29University hosted announcements (e.g. rice.edu announces a major breakthrough) have incentives that are so out of wack it's basically clickbait at this point. Researchers oversell their results for publishing and funding purposes. Then the university oversells those results to draw in students/investors. Curious if others feel the same way or if I'm just too cynical at this point...
at a minimum, this isn’t far off
Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves
#30University hosted announcements (e.g. rice.edu announces a major breakthrough) have incentives that are so out of wack it's basically clickbait at this point. Researchers oversell their results for publishing and funding purposes. Then the university oversells those results to draw in students/investors. Curious if others feel the same way or if I'm just too cynical at this point...
The non-cynical version: Half of a researcher's job is disseminating results -- to other researchers & the populace at large. I'd much rather have excited university announcements (even over-reaching ones) than the rage-porn news that dominates the airwaves & "mainstream news" homepages.
Besides: Any serious researcher will just revert to the actual peer-reviewed source material. It was linked in the article. Here it is: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-023-01680-4
And here's the PDF: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.24.477527v2....
As someone who has peripheral knowledge in this space (piezeoelectric & magnetostrictive devices and neural stimulation & recording): I've never seen a magnetostrictive material capable of developing a DC bias. Further, driving the device in a non-resonant mode for neural stimulation is even more new to me -- that's quite fascinating, and I'd say that article lives up to the hype from my 1000-ft vantage. I.e. This was effective reporting.