A REMEDY FOR DEATH

"Humans may not be alone in having insight into the minds of others, a chimpanzee study suggests."  You'll find the link to that article in the London Guardian below.

I'm including that link as background here in this post as "Chimp Donnie" plays a role in two aspects of my speculative scientific thriller, THE LIFE AFTER LIFE CONSPIRACY.  You'll meet Chimp Donnie is the chapters "Cannibals, "Chimera," and "Chimp Donnie," which you'll find in these sample chapters. (In the book, Donnie is a chimera, a hybrid of human and primate.)

Sample chapters: THE LIFE AFTER LIFE CONSPIRACY

And for the link to the Guardian article on  mind-reading chimps:

London Guardian article: chimps as mind-readers?

Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine are both elements in my scientific thriller, THE LIFE AFTER LIFE CONSPIRACY.  Though the book is finished, I still to keep up with the new findings in labs --- mainly (to be modest, and honest!) for the satisfaction of seeing ideas I'd predicted coming about in the real world.

In another post  here  recently, I picked up a Wall Street Journal report on a replacement windpipe grown from the patient's own cells, using a scaffold as a kind of framework for the cells to grow into shape. That is just one instance of tissue engineering breakthroughs using scaffolds and a patient's own cells ("pluripotent stem cells," in the jargon of regenerative medicine).

This week, Mo Costandi in his blog  Neurophilosophy, which appears in the British  newspaper The Guardian, reports on a different breakthrough: using pluripotent stem cells to grow replacement body parts without the use of a scaffold.  That is, using 3 dimensional cultures to (among other things) ". . . to self-organize into functional brain tissue. . ."

"Growing a complete, functioning brain is unfeasible , but there is real potential in growing functional neural tissue . . . for transplantation into the human brain," Mo writes. ("Unfeasible" right now, I respond. But just wait.)

This article can be a bit technical for the layperson, but four short videos embedded in the piece make it make sense.

Britain's New Scientist magazine ran two articles recently on consciousness. They drew my attention, as lost or altered consciousness plays a role in my scientific/spiritual thriller, THE LIFE-AFTER-LIFE CONSPIRACY.

In "Banishing consciousness: the mystery of anesthesia"  writer Linda Geddes begins and ends with her experience "going under" for an operation, then puts that into context with an exploration of what we know about the kind of lost consciousness that results, and what science knows about what actually happens.

What does happen? How does surgical anesthesia really work? At this point, no one really knows, though current research studies are moving toward some understanding.  In these studies, anesthetized subjects are subjected to EEG and fMRI scans while under.

Of particular interest to me and THE LIFE-AFTER-LIFE CONSPIRACY, much of what is being discovered about anesthesia also seems to carry over to expand our understanding of PVS (persistent vegetative state) and other levels of coma.

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For the record, the second New Scientist article, "Consciousness is a matter of constraint" by Terrence W. Deacon, is based on his new book, Incomplete Nature: How mind emerged from matter. (W.W. Norton). The article and the book explore how mind or consciousness can be "generated" (or whatever  you care to term it) from matter.  Put differently, how is it that consciousness seems to come from the three pounds of wet matter in the human head, and not from three pounds of wood or coal or sand?