Submitted via IRC for Sulla
When Georgia Bowen was born by emergency cesarean on May 18, she took a breath, threw her arms in the air, cried twice, and went into cardiac arrest. The baby had had a heart attack, most likely while she was still in the womb. Her heart was profoundly damaged; a large portion of the muscle was dead, or nearly so, leading to the cardiac arrest.
Doctors kept her alive with a cumbersome machine that did the work of her heart and lungs. The physicians moved her from Massachusetts General Hospital, where she was born, to Boston Children's Hospital and decided to try an experimental procedure that had never before been attempted in a human following a heart attack.
They would take 1 billion mitochondria — the energy factories found in every cell in the body — from a small plug of Georgia's healthy abdominal muscle and infuse them into the injured muscle of her heart.
Mitochondria are tiny organelles that fuel the operation of the cell, and they are among the first parts of the cell to die when it is deprived of oxygen-rich blood. Once they are lost, the cell itself dies.
But a series of experiments has found that fresh mitochondria can revive flagging cells and enable them to quickly recover. In animal studies at Boston Children's Hospital and elsewhere, mitochondrial transplants revived heart muscle that was stunned from a heart attack but not yet dead, and revived injured lungs and kidneys.
[...] In the only human tests, mitochondrial transplants appear to revive and restore heart muscle in infants that was injured in operations to repair congenital heart defects.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/health/mitochondria-transplant-heart-attack.html (alt)
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday July 11 2018, @11:11AM (13 children)
Thank fuck for the single L in the headline. For a moment there I was having flashbacks of IPX and other horrors of managing networks in the 90s.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Wednesday July 11 2018, @11:24AM (6 children)
You really confused me for a moment. "Dying organs restored to ife?" What does that have to do with... oh.
There are actually two 'l's in the headline, not a single 'l.' I believe you meant to be thankful for the fact there were no more than that.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Wednesday July 11 2018, @02:20PM (5 children)
He's referring to my beloved defunct Novell Networks. They had their own IPX / SPX network protocols which I had no trouble with, including working with and integrating our stuff into world-wide Novell networks. Mayo Clinic was an example.
In those days (80s - early 90s) there were many popular competing networking protocols. Until the Web was born, IP wasn't so super-special, but it did exist world-wide, so...
As IP grew, in the early 90s Novell made IP encapsulation for its IPX packets, so your physically separated LANs could be connected- a "VLAN" (Virtual Local Area Network).
Later they included native IP functionality, but I was out of that world at that point.
Like most things in life there were compromises. I felt (and tested extensively) that Novell stuff was the most efficient for a given hardware. I could move more data per second through IPX than IP, SMB, LANMAN, Vines, etc.
The servers ran "Netware", a dedicated OS that ran the CPU in flat memory model. Very little protection, but basically a funny car engine on a go-cart. A bad crash would result in an "abend" screen. Exceedingly rare for me. Our servers ran for years with NO admin. Some of the only failures were that log files grew and filled up the hard disk. Sometimes they wouldn't boot, so you just connect them as a secondary drive, mount, clear out junk, put it back, go back to goofing off. Productively of course. :)
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday July 11 2018, @05:41PM
Novell wasn't perfect but it was better than the competition. A bit later in that decade, at a different site, I got to watch while Microsoft's best replaced a single working Netware server that had never given any problems with two NT 3 boxen, running on faster hardware, which choked and died horribly under the load. For a good 6 months they were flying in and out every weekend, applying patches, upgrading hardware, trying to get this to work right. Maybe they did, eventually, but by then I was somewhere else.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Thursday July 12 2018, @12:49AM (3 children)
Jesus H. Christ!
I tried IPX/SPX over an international leased line and had all sorts of trouble; talked to some guy at Novell and voilá, they sent a patch that allowed the connection to kind of work. It was slow as hell but we could transmit enough data to make it, but no more than that.
Of course, IPX/SPX was much better than anything else out there in a local network, just wasn´t designed for wide area applications. I hated (hate?) Eric Schmidt for killing Netware with (IMHO) so many false starts.
Anywy, get off my lawn you dirty children!
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday July 12 2018, @03:44AM (2 children)
I know we're off topic, but I can't help myself.
Actually IPX was designed to work well in a WAN, you just have to use routers that correctly handle IPX. IPX has 32 bits of network address, like IPv4, and 48 bits of "node number", or device address, which was usually the MAC address but didn't have to be. So you see, IPX could handle way more addresses than IPv4. Then it has 2 bytes of "socket number" - same as IP.
By "international leased line", I'm guessing some kind of T1, X.25, frame relay, ?? As to slowness, you can't blame Novell / IPX - my guess is that the leased line couldn't handle IPX properly or at all, and maybe you were using IP tunneling?
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Thursday July 12 2018, @05:43AM (1 child)
Oh God! This was in the early 90's, can't quite remember but probably 91 or 92, maybe even 89. The leased line was just that, a line where we could get four voice channels or two voice channels and a data link, 128 Kbps if I remember right.
Anyway the problem was a timeout because of the slow line, which was made a configurable parameter in the patch I got.
The guy who sold me on Netware was so sure, that he gave me a written "your-money-back" guarantee. We were using HP 832 minicomputers (HP-UX) at the time and I was not very comfortable switching, but he said he would refund the money. I never gave the letter to my boss, if it didn't work it was a "cover your ass" letter, but I could not let my boss know I had doubts, otherwise he would have never approved the project.
In the end, I fell in love with Netware and hated having to move to NT, forced by other people (mostly the CFO) and Schmidt's bungling Netware.
I will always miss the simplicity and strength of Netware; after so many years, everything seems so much more complicated and prone to failure. Maybe some engineers decided on job-insurance and created the mess we have today.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday July 12 2018, @08:54AM
I can't speak about other engineers because I don't know, but it was the exact mess you described- non-technical managers making "business decisions", buying into MS, NT, etc., and killing off Novell, that opened my eyes to the problem. To this day I don't see a solution to the problem of us engineers being forced to use a technology we would not choose if given the option.
Yeah, the timeout problem is an interesting issue in communication protocol theory. WANs are a good thing, as we all know, and long timeouts are to be anticipated. I'm glad they gave you that patch, but I feel it should have been configurable from the start.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @01:01PM (5 children)
Since you like 1990s LAN protocols so much, you must love IPv6 which is the love child of AppleTalk and IPX.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday July 11 2018, @02:04PM (4 children)
Yep, my feelings about IPv6 are pretty much the same as for IPX. Any address scheme where you can't expect a human being to be able to easily commit an address to memory is a worthless address scheme.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday July 11 2018, @02:24PM (2 children)
Oh noes, you're sounding like a curmudgeon. Don't take most_cynical's job! He has union backing.
IPV6 is awesome. What, did you expect something like 124.45.12.182.45.67? There's no fun in that, every schmuck will get their hands on it. We need something too complicated for average idiots so that we nerds can keep our grip on the world.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday July 11 2018, @02:28PM (1 child)
Too complicated for average idiots but not for me is the goal. Changing that dynamic removes a lot of the fun of being an admin in the first place.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday July 11 2018, @03:05PM
It's the never-ending carrot chase. If I just run a little faster...
(Score: 2) by insanumingenium on Wednesday July 11 2018, @06:22PM
That is basically a prerequisite of an IPv4 replacement, address space is one of the primary goals, and address space and memorability are inversely related.
It isn't like IPv4 addresses are especially memorizable in the first place. If your networking relies on humans memorizing full addresses you are doing it wrong.
In short, your metric is asinine, and not useful besides.
(Score: 2) by Kell on Wednesday July 11 2018, @11:16AM (1 child)
The powerhouse of the cell.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @05:43PM
Considering that Mitochondria are technically a bacterial species that lives in all Eukaryota cells, I think it might be more:
Mitochondria: the most successful life form ever.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @11:20AM
How about brain cells? Oh wait, that would lower the number of organ donors then.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Wednesday July 11 2018, @01:02PM
It's alive! ALIVE!... oh, now it's dead again, how embarrassing.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday July 11 2018, @01:29PM (1 child)
These experiments in bringing dead cells and organs to life MUST BE STOPPED.
It is immoral, unnatural, and worst of all, it will destroy the commercial market for organs harvested by ISPs from their customers.
Everyone get your torches and pitchforks!
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @08:39PM
It's FrankenSTEEN!