497. beheaded piggies

Every moment is a battle between "right" and "wrong". The optimal and the worst choice. When your ultimate goal is to strip yourself of fear, joy, sadness, agony, eagerness, hope, hate in order to function purely on logic, then... Then this next news-related article will surely fill you with joy, an emotion that under non-carnal cicumstances serves the human condition zero to nothing.

Κάθε στιγμή και μία μάχη ανάμεσα στο "σωστό" και το "λάθος". Το βέλτιστο και το χείριστο. Όταν έχεις σαν υπέρτατο στόχο να απεκδυθείς το φόβο, τη χαρά, τη λύπη, την αγωνία, την προσμονή, την ελπίδα, το μίσος και να λειτουργείς με μόνο γνώμονα τη λογική, ε τότε.. Τότε η παρακάτω είδηση δεν μπορεί παρά να σε γεμίσει με χαρά, ένα συναίσθημα ωστόσο που υπό μη-σαρκικές συνθήκες δεν εξυπηρετεί τίποτα στο ανθρώπινο ζήτημα.

Scientists Partly Restore Activity in Dead-Pig Brains

The brain, supposedly, cannot long survive without blood. Within seconds, oxygen supplies deplete, electrical activity fades, and unconsciousness sets in. If blood flow is not restored, within minutes, neurons start to die in a rapid, irreversible, and ultimately fatal wave.

But maybe not? According to a team of scientists led by Nenad Sestan at Yale School of Medicine, this process might play out over a much longer time frame, and perhaps isn’t as inevitable or irreparable as commonly believed. Sestan and his colleagues showed this in dramatic fashion—by preserving and restoring signs of activity in the isolated brains of pigs that had been decapitated four hours earlier.

The team sourced 32 pig brains from a slaughterhouse, placed them in spherical chambers, and infused them with nutrients and protective chemicals, using pumps that mimicked the beats of a heart. This system, dubbed BrainEx, preserved the overall architecture of the brains, preventing them from degrading. It restored flow in their blood vessels, which once again became sensitive to dilating drugs. It stopped many neurons and other cells from dying, and reinstated their ability to consume sugar and oxygen. Some of these rescued neurons even started to fire. “Everything was surprising,” says Zvonimir Vrselja, who performed most of the experiments along with Stefano Daniele.

There have long been signs that oxygen deprivation doesn’t necessarily kill neurons as quickly as is often assumed. Still, Jimo Borjigin of the University of Michigan says that when she started studying brain activity in dying rats, “my colleagues told me that as soon as oxygen isn’t there, every cell dies within minutes.” Sestan’s team “showed that cells are still intact not just a few minutes later, but a few hours later. This kind of study is long overdue.”

Disembodied brains in jars are a familiar and disquieting science-fiction staple, but in those stories, the brains are alive, conscious, and self-aware. Those in Sestan’s experiments were zero for three. Though individual neurons could fire, there were no signs of the coordinated, brainwide electrical activity that indicates perception, sentience, consciousness, or even life. The team had anesthetics on standby in case any such flickers materialized—and none did. “The pigs were brain-dead when their brains came in the door, and by the end of the experiment, they were still brain-dead,” says Stephen Latham, a Yale University ethicist who advised the team.

READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE @https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/04/scientists-partly-restore-activity-dead-pig-brains/587329/

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