SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Research demonstrates a molecular dance that keeps your heart beating:
Filament-like proteins in heart muscle cells have to be exactly the same length so that they can coordinate perfectly to make the heart beat.
Another protein decides when the filament is the right size and puts a wee little cap on it. But, if that protein makes a mistake and puts the cap on too early, another protein, leiomodin, comes along and knocks the cap out of the way.
This little dance at the molecular scale might sound insignificant, but it plays a critical role in the development of healthy heart and other muscles. Reporting in the journal, Plos Biology, a WSU research team has proven for the first time how the mechanism works.
[...] "It's beautifully designed," said Kostyukova, whose research is focused on understanding protein structures.
And, tightly regulated.
[...] "The probability of being able to show this mechanism was not high, but the impact of the discovery is," said Tolkatchev, an expert in nuclear magnetic resonance. "This was a very important problem to study and could have a significant impact in the field of muscle mechanics."
Journal Reference:
Dmitri Tolkatchev, Garry E. Smith Jr., Lauren E. Schultz, et al. Leiomodin creates a leaky cap at the pointed end of actin-thin filaments, PLOS Biology (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000848)
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2020, @11:49PM
Your heart doesn't beat for long after a Muslim beheads you.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday October 18 2020, @01:41AM (14 children)
Just from reading the summary, this sounds like a Rube Goldberg machine, and surely prone to failure. We could just replace this whole ridiculous contraption (the heart plus the molecule-scale machinery that keeps it beating) with a simple pump and a microcontroller. Better yet, replace it with two parallel pumps for redundancy, and make it easy to swap one out in case of failure. The engineering on these human bodies is nearly as bad as that on the Boeing 737MAX MCAS system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 18 2020, @02:01AM (1 child)
The extension cord would get in the way.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday October 18 2020, @05:23AM
Modern lithium-ion batteries would have no trouble powering an artificial heart for a decent amount of time.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by EvilSS on Sunday October 18 2020, @03:10AM (11 children)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday October 18 2020, @05:21AM (10 children)
The problem with biological lifeforms is that they've evolved staggeringly complex systems that frequently only serve very simple tasks, which is exactly why I thought of Rube Goldberg. I think the heart is a prime example here: it's nothing more than a fluid pump, albeit a variable-speed one. This is a fairly simple thing for us to build now with our current technology, and our pumps don't need to be as ridiculously complex as a biological heart (though I guess you could argue that slapping a microcontroller onto one to give it variable speed does make it fairly complex, but modern semiconductors are extremely consistent and reliable now). And worse, the human heart is probably one of the biggest failure points in the whole human body. If you look at the causes of death every year, you'll find that cardiac problems are one of the most common causes. So we've got this great brain, and some other systems that seem to be relatively reliable (like the kidneys and lungs), and are even redundant!, but then some problem with this singular fluid pump causes the whole system to fail. It's no wonder the heart was the first organ (I think) where there was an attempt at making a permanent artificial replacement.
(Score: 3, Touché) by EvilSS on Sunday October 18 2020, @06:27AM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday October 19 2020, @02:01PM (2 children)
Simple: rejection. The human body doesn't like things it doesn't recognize as its own. It's a problem with organ transplants too, so people have to take immunosuppressant drugs, which of course have a bad effect on life expectancy.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Monday October 19 2020, @03:57PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday October 20 2020, @05:45PM
So what is the problem?
From my little bit of research, it seems there's a lot of problems, and not that much demand: many patients these days use ventricular-assist devices (VAD) which do much of the function of an artificial heart, but without replacing the heart entirely (Dick Cheney has one of these). Also, artificial hearts need a lot of power, so wires have to penetrate the skin (risk of infection) to be connected to a battery, which the patient has to make sure stays charged, **or else**. And people who have problems *so* bad that a VAD doesn't suffice are apparently frequently not good candidates for surgery, or can't be relied on to take care of themselves and keep the battery charged and avoid infection. Basically they're people who are already on death's door. So the number of people who are young and otherwise healthy enough to be good candidates, and for whom other solutions (like VADs) aren't sufficient, is very small. But it looks like there is continuous progress in the area, including some new Swiss artificial heart that came out in 2017 using 3D printing with silicone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 18 2020, @03:10PM (3 children)
Average life expectancy is 73.2 years. Try getting that out of an automobile with little or no maintenance.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday October 19 2020, @02:05PM (2 children)
Why would you want to do that? That's the whole problem with the human body: it has this ridiculous "no maintenance" requirement (I'll ignore things like doing regular exercise and getting proper nutrition for the sake of argument). It's like that stupid Space Shuttle: the whole thing was a bad idea, and performed badly, because of bad requirements.
Sure, I guess "no maintenance" made some sense when humans were just living in caves, grunting, and waving sticks around, but we can do better than that now. You wouldn't design a car that has to use the same set of tires for 100 years, so we shouldn't expect that of anything else either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 20 2020, @02:14PM (1 child)
The human body is nowhere close to "no maintenance", it is "self-maintaining". Some parts maintain themselves better than others, though.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday October 20 2020, @05:47PM
That's splitting hairs. It's "no maintenance" from the point-of-view of the user (who doesn't even fully understand all the processes going on within his/her body).
It's a bit like a car that was designed to have 100k-mile no-maintenance operation, but after that be mostly unrepairable and disposable.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 18 2020, @05:10PM (1 child)
This is a neat example of evolution solving a problem: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ [damninteresting.com]
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday October 20 2020, @05:52PM
That's very interesting, but it's horrible engineering. They used an evolutionary algorithm to make an FPGA configuration that differentiates two audio tones, but the configuration only works on that 1 FPGA (meaning, that particular chip, not any other identical chip, even from the same manufacturing batch). The thing is depending on peculiarities on that chip resulting from variations in the manufacturing tolerances, so it isn't a scalable solution at all. It's a one-off, and this isn't really useful for much. They don't even say if the thing still works when environmental factors (temperature, pressure, external EM fields, etc.) are changed.
The whole point of engineering is to create a solution that is reliable and robust and highly repeatable, and this completely fails at that. So this is interesting as an academic exercise, but is not yet showing itself to be a good way to design solutions to problems.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 18 2020, @06:40PM
I can feel it pounding whenever I stand for the pledge of allegiance.