Moment of heart's formation captured in images for first time

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/may/13/heart-cells-mouse-embryo-science-research

90 18 1 year ago

Cool

It is absolutely insane to me I get to witness these things in my lifetime. This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen, probably even beats the black hole photo.

dylan604• 1 year ago

The black hole image to me was somewhat less impressive since it was so heavily computed. It's not like a camera was pointed in that direction and created an exposure over the course of minutes/hours/days like the Hubble/JWST Deep Fields. The images of Gargantua in Interstellar were more impressive than the black hole image to me.

tomrod• 1 year ago

Aye. We had to collect one photon at a time for that one...

Wait, I love them both!

grues-dinner• 1 year ago

If anything that makes it more impressive to me, technically. It's pulling allusions to hints to information out of absurdly tiny fluctuations in the universe. Anyone, metaphorically, can just build a bigger camera and hold the shutter open for longer. Not to denigrate the engineering behind these awesome instruments, which is where my heart really is, but the design is driven by ever sneakier ways to coerce reality into telling us what's going on.

True, the image itself isn't especially exciting graphically (with the things CGI and AI are producing, what real thing even is these days?) but what it represents is.

telesilla• 1 year ago

Yes, this is extraordinary and I'm excited for the medical innovation that will come from it. For me until now it's been the photo of earth by Michael Collins, from the the first moon mission as he was above the moon lander, being the only living person not in the frame.

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/05/05/micheal-collins/

trebligdivad• 1 year ago

Very impressive! (On a more geeky note, I note that the movie zip's have a _MACOSX/Movie EV10 dir with a _Movie EV10 legent.txt with an OpenAI / Chatgpt URL in - I guess probably just making the (boring) titles for the video files. Odd. I hate to think what other _MACOSX dirs contain in released zips

reelsareacrime• 1 year ago

I've always been wondering how cells "know" where they're supposed to move.

relaxing2• 1 year ago

Same ways cells know how to be anything - DNA.

adtac• 1 year ago

this is like saying "same way cells know how to be anything - quantum electrodynamics"

akomtu• 1 year ago

Why is it the way it is? God knows.

The only difference is today's biologists have replaced God with DNA - the almighty molecule that knows everything about humans.

kevlened• 1 year ago

You'd be really interested in Michael Levin's work (et al) on morphology and bioelectricity [0]. Cells are problem solvers.

His lab has shown functioning eyes on the backs of tadpoles, allowed frog leg regeneration where none existed, and performed several other modifications that change the communication between cells to trigger desired growth. Surprisingly, the interventions are point modifications, then the system handles the rest of the process.

Cell-to-cell communication has a lot of explanatory power for a cell (or collection of cells) "knowing what/where to be".

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzFFeRVEdUM

alteringjanitor2• 1 year ago

Wow! Thank you for sharing!

jebarker• 1 year ago

I don't know the answer to the question in this case, but this quote from [1] has been stuck in my mind for a while and feels relevant:

"I wish my high school biology teacher had asked the class how an embryo could possibly differentiate—and then paused to let us really think about it. The whole subject is in the answer to that question. A chemical gradient in the embryonic fluid is enough of a signal to slightly alter the gene expression program of some cells, not others; now the embryo knows “up” from “down”; cells at one end begin producing different proteins than cells at the other, and these, in turn, release more refined chemical signals; ...; soon, you have brain cells and foot cells."

[1] https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/

ramshanker• 1 year ago

That is like perfect order emerging in chaos. Awesome.

methuselah_in• 1 year ago

This is so mesmerizing to see.

Moment of heart's formation captured in images for first time

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