Comments on: Meat is Neat: Cellular biophysics video

Meat is Neat: Cellular biophysics video

five fresh fish — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 20:19:00 -0800

Meat is Neat. We are but tiny machines. Remember the YouTube video of a funky animation of cellular activity? Here it is with a voice explanation of what's going on. Absolutely mindblowing. some sort of embedded video, dsl-quality with sound. see here for other forms

By: five fresh fish

five fresh fish — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 20:21:38 -0800

I'm finding this mind-blowing to watch. That we know so much about the mechanics and physics of life is just incredible. We seem so fractal in nature: as complex as our minds are, our cells are equally complex and yet in a wholly mechanical manner. It's going to be absolutely bitchin' when we know how the brain works as well as we do these parts of cell biology...

By: carsonb

carsonb — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 20:39:17 -0800

I understood about half of what the narrator was saying, and about twice as much as I did from the silent animation. really awesome, but it makes me kinda itchy.

By: bonehead

bonehead — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 20:42:34 -0800

(don't worry carsonb, the leukocytes are taking care of that for you)

By: odinsdream

odinsdream — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 20:42:41 -0800

Really great - a huge improvement on the already awesome video.

By: aliasless

aliasless — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 20:54:53 -0800

It was fun watching the ribosome take a protein dump in the endoplasmic reticulum.

By: brownpau

brownpau — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 21:29:34 -0800

Cruder animation of the same process. While "Inner Life" is a wonderful visual menagerie detailing the workings of leukocyte extravasation, I find the simpler depiction a bit more digestible for understanding the basic interactions behind the process.

By: MrLint

MrLint — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 21:44:19 -0800

Ya know 'life' was much simpler to 'understand' when it was all magic.

By: scodger

scodger — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 21:53:26 -0800

This player doesn't seem to want to play with videodownloader, anyone know how to download a copy of the superspeed version downloaded?

By: quite unimportant

quite unimportant — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 22:09:54 -0800

Wow. I watched the non-explanation version about a dozen times yesterday, just marveling at what what probably going on in my body. Now that I see that there's a narrative to it? Way, way too cool for words.

By: maryh

maryh — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 23:03:59 -0800

I have my own Golgi Apparatus?! Crap, I just PayPal'ed some joint in NY a bundle in a "BuyNow" eBay bid, and now they're insisting I invest in an accessory kit. This is going to make for an awkward AskMe...

By: nightchrome

nightchrome — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 00:54:27 -0800

Man, we are seriously complex.

By: Twang

Twang — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 01:38:14 -0800

Ladies and gentlemen, consider Lewis Thomas. 1974's "The Lives of a Cell" deserved its accolades. Here's a brief interview. "Luminous phrasing" aptly describes his writing. "The viruses, instead of being single-minded agents of disease and death, now begin to look more like mobile genes...We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party." Each of us contains a whole universe. One single loss is a tragedy. Consequently, there is no word that comprehends the losses of war. "... And yet no man sees it."

By: elpapacito

elpapacito — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 03:43:27 -0800

Fascinating, fantastic, interesting ! The protein motor also beats any mechanical engine I can imagine.

By: Malor

Malor — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 03:52:40 -0800

I wish they took some time to better define their terms early on. I kinda-sorta understand what they're talking about (covalent bonding, for example), but there are so MANY oddball terms and they throw them at you so quickly that it's hard to sort out what they're actually saying. I think they'd improve intelligibility a lot if they simply slowed the narrator to half speed. My ordinary mortal brain needs more processing time. Still... super cool. Thanks for the post.

By: hoverboards don't work on water

hoverboards don't work on water — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 03:53:54 -0800

Very, very cool. I think I'm in love with motor proteins too. There are a lot of words I don't know the meaning of, but I never imagined there were so many words I'd never even heard of. When he mentioned I-cams, I had a sneaking suspicion the whole thing was an elaborate joke.

By: Termite

Termite — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 04:26:07 -0800

I'd like to see a feature-length movie like this in a cinema, a tour within the body.

By: Brandon Blatcher

Brandon Blatcher — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 04:31:39 -0800

Is there an English translation?

By: rxrfrx

rxrfrx — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 06:00:05 -0800

ICAMs

By: five fresh fish

five fresh fish — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 08:39:40 -0800

I found I had to pause and rewind every thirty seconds, just to get a faint grasp on what mechanism was actually being shown and how it essentially worked. And I still find large parts of it — Golgi Apparatus, frinstance — a complete mystery. It's enough to shake one's faith in mathematics.

By: peacay

peacay — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 08:45:20 -0800

Insane in the membrane. Thanks five fresh fish.

By: rxrfrx

rxrfrx — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 08:47:46 -0800

It's enough to shake one's faith in mathematics. How's that?

By: Rhomboid

Rhomboid — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 09:47:18 -0800

Double.

By: BaxterG4

BaxterG4 — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 11:16:07 -0800

It was fun watching the ribosome take a protein dump in the endoplasmic reticulum. I am so turned on right now.

By: Zack_Replica

Zack_Replica — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 12:48:10 -0800

Wow, I've realised I look so much more interesting microscopically than macroscopically and my body uses a lot of odd words, so it must be pretty smart!. So all those floaty bits can't be wandering around in air, so I guess it must be goo*, right? * Proper Scientifical Term.

By: Arcaz Ino

Arcaz Ino — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 13:31:30 -0800

Just brilliant.

By: five fresh fish

five fresh fish — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 14:12:01 -0800

It's enough to shake one's faith in mathematics. How's that? As one watches the wozzit trundle up the thingummy, dragging that big bag of stuff behind it, all because the cytoplast emitted a chain of genetic material in reaction to an imbalance in a complicated soup of organic chemicals, an obviously deliberate act on the part of a cell that is nothing more than an incredible machine... well, it just seems wildly impossible. I remain convinced that it's all a big equation, but I doubt we'll ever comprehend it.

By: five fresh fish

five fresh fish — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 14:14:36 -0800

Zack: apparently the truth is that the animation doesn't show most of the cell contents. It is, in fact, packed wall-to-wall with a soup of active chemicals, so dense that if it had been animated in, we wouldn't be able to actually see what the animators were showing us. The bits where the cell walls were shown as a jostling sea of small strands, no gaps between the molecules? Same applies to the cell interior, but moreso.

By: Dougoh

Dougoh — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 14:22:01 -0800

More biological and cellular animations! With all this fun stuff, I think college is different now.

By: five fresh fish

five fresh fish — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 16:33:30 -0800

Maybe the nutter "Gaia Theory" is correct after all: read this and compare it to what happens in the cell! Conditions change, genes are expressed, and the world around changes... ...just in the video, the "world around" is more meat, while in the news item, the "world around" is the ocean and atmosphere.

By: lisalisa123

lisalisa123 — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 17:05:42 -0800

i'm taking a bio 101 course right now, so it was fun to watch this since i know what a golgi apparatus and endoplasmic reticulum are, among other things. very cool.

By: Maias

Maias — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 18:30:12 -0800

I always have an almost religious sense of awe looking at the complexity of even the simplest biological processes-- and it's easy to see how someone might find it hard to believe that such complexity evolved via random mutations and natural selection. Of course, that is because of the limitations of our minds in imagining the time scale-- but it still amazes me that all that insanely complicated stuff happens every second of our lives. And then when you think about reproduction and development and how quickly that all occurs and so often normally... I still don't buy Gaia though-- makes zero evolutionary sense.

By: five fresh fish

five fresh fish — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 20:30:27 -0800

Dunno, Maias. Seems to me you need a self-stabilizing environment if you're to have any chance of organic soup becoming complex life. In other words, systems must have evolved to specifically moderate the sulpher balance, or it wouldn't have been possible to have brainy life. It wouldn't surprise me if our survival depends on the health of innumerable viruses and bacteria. We'd be toast if the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in our soil die. We'll be toast if the sulphur-fixing plankton in our oceans die. Essentially, we live and die by how we treat the smallest amongst us!

By: progosk

progosk — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 12:31:48 -0800

scodger et. al.: here's the direct download link to the 47,4mb flv file. convert it for your ipod with isquint (mac) or super (pc). made by the funky folks at xvivo; more stuff on their site.

By: chrispy

chrispy — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 12:39:56 -0800

Did the voiceover make anyone else think of the retro-encabulator? Having zero bio knowledge I can't say I found it particularly enlightening, but still fantastic to see and good to know that someone out there knows what it's all doing.

By: twoporedomain

twoporedomain — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 16:32:13 -0800

To further elaborate on FFF's response to Zach_replica's floating in goo question, yeah, there are a lot more components in the cell that they haven't shown. Remember the parts talking about the actin filaments and microtubules? Well, those are in a thick matrix packed all through the cell, and basically nothing "floats," the proteins are carried along those structures in a very well regulated way (using the super awesome walking motor proteins), just like they showed with the vesicle. (I love this)