Hi All

Here's an interesting study - so far only in mice - which activates Alzheimer's then turns it off to see if the brain will recover... and it does!

Scotsman news-bite

...which adds more credence to the view that brains can repair themselves - but if they do are you still "you"?

An earlier piece on suspended animation - the woefully entitled "zombie dogs" article - well I found an article from the Safar Institute's local paper which clarified one point. The 3 hours the dogs were hypothermic and clinically "dead" was an upper limit. Past that and the dogs either didn't revive or showed substantial impairment. In a clinical emergency those 3 hours could well be life-savers, but there's a long way to go before spaceflight-friendly long-term suspended animation.

I suspect that those 3 hours could be used to infuse the body with some sort of cryo-preservative, but that's a long way off. I've tried to track down some old links on preserving organs indefinitely but the company, CryoCor, seems to have had an emphasis change and that's gone.

More good news is that tissue engineers have managed to get blood vessels growing into their cultured tissues - a significant step along the road to full reconstruction of organs from stem-cells. The hope is that some sort of "organ printer" will allow whole organs to be made with a detailed enough microstructure to be viable, and inducing blood vessels is a significant advance.

Adam