Came across this idea in one of the zaadz pods and started thinking
about how this could operate. There are so many pressure/tension
sensors in the cell that could be interfered with given the appropriate
frequency. The pod creator made a point about vibrations interfering
with DNA. Unsurprisingly, I got kicked out of said pod. Common starting ground necessary for communication is hard enough to attain within the various scientific disciplines, nevermind outside science. I have the idea which is what counts.
 

Healing through the application of vibrations is not implausible. In the human
body, DNA is wound up very tightly, both around itself and around
proteins. Its tensile state is monitored and signalled within the cell
at any time, but particularly during cell division. For double-stranded
DNA (dsDNA) viruses too, DNA pressure in the virion procapsids is
closely monitored and constitutes a check-point for further assembly.
One can imagine setting up a resonant frequency that interferes,
disrupts, viral dsDNA spooling and thus aborts viral assembly. But
could such a frequency be specific to viral dsDNA? Internal virion
capsid pressures have been measured and found to exceed, by 10-fold,
that of bottled champagne (Science, v.312, pp.1791-1795, 2006 - see also October 18th 2001 issue of Nature).

 

A bottle of champagne is typically under pressure of 5 to 6 atmospheres,
the equivalent of nearly 100 pounds per square inch. That pressure is
used by to virus to inject its DNA into the host. What's the
pressure/tension of chromosomal packaging? I don't know but maybe
someone out there has measured it.

 

DNA aside, there are other areas where mechanosensing (tension,
pressure) is a vital process. Cell-cell and cell-extracellular matrix
attachment for starters. This is my area of specialization and has huge
ramifications in biology. Cell adhesion and migration are involved in a
variety of chronic inflammatory and neurodegenerative diseases.
Alzheimer's. The immune response (normal, such as wound healing,
diseased, such as auto-immune disorders). Tissue formation and
embryogenesis. Cancer metastasis. You name it.

 

There are lots of measurements on this. 

 

I need to get hold of some numbers. 

 

 

 

 

You've probably heard it before, monkeys using signals from the brain to control computer cursors. A BCI (brain-computer interface, think a 4mm chip) is implanted in the motor cortex (the part of the brain responsible for control of bodily movement), the electrical signals that arise in the brain when motion is willed are sensed by its sensors and transmitters transmit them to a computer where they are translated into machine language.

 

The future for neuroprosthetics is looking bright. This week's issue of Nature magazine (volume 442, 13th July 2006) reports a 25-year old human with a severed spinal cord (quadriplegic) who upon acquiring the BCI implant, found he could move a cursor on a computer screen, read e-mail, open and close a prosthetic hand and exert control over a robotic arm. The hope is to give paralyzed patients greater ability to interact with their environments and maybe, ultimately, to bypass damaged spinal cords and restore movement to lifeless limbs.

 

Is the BCI user friendly?

 

The patient adapted to the system within minutes and was able to conduct a conversation while using it.

 

Surely this sounds too good to be true - what's the catch?

 

The implant carries risks of infection (solution: think wireless signal transmission), speed is still slow (but rapidly increasing with multiple electrode recordings), the current prosthesis is bulky and requires constant fine-tuning and, more seriously, microelectrodes tend to lose their ability to record neuronal activity over time (reasons unknown). But these are for the most part engineering problems, not intractable ones.

 

Did anyone say 'telekinesis'?