Biology is very strange yet mechanical

[Dogmeat]

I was looking for a picture of a snarling dog and somehow I came across this video which supposedly visually demonstrates what life is like inside of a cell. check it, it's kinda cool.

http://aimediaserver.com/studiodaily/videoplayer/?src=harvard/harvard.swf&width=640&height=520

[Blick]

Holy crap, that was really cool. I was expecting something like "And here we have the ribosomes and the mitochondria are these little ovalish objects and what they do is..."

[Sherman Gill]

Wow... Dude, that was amazing .

[Ryumaru]

holy shit.

[Feron]

holy shit.

I second that motion.

[Ryumaru]

this clip makes the things happening inside the cell... almost epic, like that one thing carying the huge thing(im so precise arent i?)

[Oded]

funny, i just had a test today in AP biology about how the cell works... it was fun pointing out things i knew...looks a lot better in a 3d video than in the text book lol...good find

[Dogmeat]

yeah and I wasn't even on drugs when I found that, aaaaaamazing! cha cha cha !

Joking aside,

I agree with the epic part.

When you really think about it, size is limited by our perception.
By adjusting perception, we adjust size.

Just think of the things that make up each component of a cell, or the ones they don't know about

[Conzeit]

Holy crap, that was really cool. I was expecting something like "And here we have the ribosomes and the mitochondria are these little ovalish objects and what they do is..."

I for one wished there was more of that =O I wonder what the hell all this is supposed to be, if all this epic stuff is going on inside me I wanna know when so I can get all giggly inside :p

[robalan]

Well, I could only tell what a few of those things going on were, but I can tell you that all of it is going on all the time 

I also agree with earlier statements regarding the coolness of this.

[Conzeit]

heheh. I know...but...what is the larger subject of the vid? the first part makes me think of the bloodstream...and as far as I know nothing similar goes inside of a cell, so I'm never really sure of what I'm looking at in here...I suppose my best guess is a cell's absoprtion of proteins carried by the bloodstream...but that shows just how much I DONT know wtf is going on XD boy....I should've really memorized the cell theory back in 4th grade instead of just temp-learning it for the exams :p

my favorite parts are definitively when those tendrils start extending in 3d, and when all the little blue particles  come together to form a platform to support for the orange retracted tendrils

[robalan]

Hmmm...lemme see if I can tell what each thing is:
-Blood vessel with red blood cells whizzing along and white blood cells rolling along the vessel walls
-a bunch of things I can't identify... perhaps exterior shots of cells being connected and communicating?  I'm not sure.
-more things I can't identify that look more interior-like...
-the next one that looks familiar is the purple spirals, I think is DNA being built.
-next is DNA being cut for use by something
-next is microtubules being built, then taken apart [I think]
-next is something (big blue blob) being carried to another part of the cell along a microtubule [I think]
-then it does some panning, taking in the nucleus, a mitochondria, some microtubules, and other stuff
-next is some messenger RNA being sent out to do stuff (it shoots then curls into rings) [I think]
-then ribosomes hook on to the messenger RNA and read it, using the information to build proteins
-the proteins fly off and hook up with other proteins, heading for the mitochondria
-then a ribosome makes another protein inside some other organelle, I'm not sure what
-I'm not sure what the little blue blobs popping out of a larger blue blob are
-Then we see the Golgi Complex doing its thing
-next is a breif shot of something being transported again, followed by a vacuole evacuating out of the cell
-the stuff that came out is then moved somewhere else and unfolded (don't know what's going on here)
-next is another shot of the blood vessel, with a white blood cell flowing its way out of the bloodstream
-then it goes back to the blood vessel one last time and ends

Okay, if anybody can clarify the things I wasn't sure about, explain what the big blue blobs are, or tell me what the scenes between the blood vessel and the DNA construction are, please do.

And Conceit, almost all of that was inside the cell; I think the only part that was on a cellular scale was the blood vessel part.  If I'm correct, there were a couple parts on the exterior of a cell, but they were on a scale such that the proteins were visible and the cell membrane appeared as a vast plain.  The rest, however, was inside a cell.

[Conzeit]

aw robalan you are too nice, this kinda attitude is what keeps me coming back here 

[robalan]

Heh no problem.  It was good exercize to see if I could bring that biology back; it's been a couple of years since I've had to use it.

[Lick]

Wonder how much time they spend creating the 3D animations.. Aren't they biologists??

[Akira]

3d team working with biologists i think. i saw the original post a while ago. and they specialize in medical 3d animation i think?

[Conzeit]

original post? you mean here? because I hope you mean on some other comunity which this video came from cause I'll be damned if I just have to accept having no clue what all that stuff is

[Akira]

yah it was on another blog/forum/website. i'll try find you a link after i've eaten

edit: heres the company that created it: http://www.xvivo.net/press/harvard_university.htm
no proper mention of what all that stuff is (from my skim through) so perhaps you'll just have to accept it and be damned

[TheAbyss]

  That was cool.

[Ryumaru]

what makes my brain hurt is that, shouldnt all this stuff have things even SMALLER going on inside of them? does it ever end!?

[miascugh]

Well, I think the next step would already be atomic level (we once had the atomic structure of a dna string in biology class, it's rather simple, but that's long gone), then you'd have your Electron/Neutron/Proton deal and anything below sub-sub-atomic is such wild ad-hoc speculation that it is really kind of hard to take that too serious.

[Conzeit]

I be damned :p 

actually...

, "The Inner Life of the Cell" takes undergrads beyond textbooks and vividly illustrates the mechanisms that allow a white blood cell to sense its surroundings and respond to an external stimulus. This animation explores the different cellular environments in which these communications take place.

=D I can settle for that until I see something more of this...as the page implies will happen.

[Noiprox]

Millions of chemical reactions are continuously happening inside every human body at all times, of which scientists only know relatively few, and even fewer are understood.

Also, quantum mechanics is neither ad hoc nor wild speculation. At least not much more so than other Science is. It is just that it happens far enough outside our intuition that it seems strange to us. That and our best models of them are statistical because reality at such a low level is nondeterministic. The experimental method is breaking down there because it is becoming increasingly difficult to conduct reliable experiments.

[Conzeit]

...our best models of them are statistical because reality at such a low level is nondeterministic. The experimental method is breaking down there because it is becoming increasingly difficult to conduct reliable experiments.

and that is simply beautiful, it's almost poetic to me that reality at it's purest is above scientific methods.

sometimes it makes me think that maybe we are all just made up....and the bizarre functioning of quantum mechanics is like a plothole, or a glitch

sheesh....I'm an ignoramus :p