hibernation

Image: Apple/GettyI want to love Siri. I really do. Every day, I walk around with a little robot that lives in my pocket and responds to simple commands. It is a full-blown miracle, the kind of thing our ancestors could only dream of. The problem is Siri’s an idiot. My digital assistant and others like it from Google and Amazon are close to useless for anything more sophisticated than checking the weather. In 2024, that’s going to change. Thanks to AI, Siri is about to get a whole lot smarter, and in small but meaningful…

Near Toolik Field Station in northern Alaska, an arctic ground squirrel pokes its head out of a burrow. Credit: Oivind Toien/University of Alaska FairbanksUnique long-term research sheds light on how biological responses to climate shifts.Arctic ground squirrels possess a unique trait among mammals – they can resist freezing even when their body temperatures fall below the freezing point, allowing them to survive harsh winter environments. A recent study published in Science that reviews over two decades of climate and…

There are times when hibernating would be useful, like surgery or space travel, and we’re getting closer to being able to do so on demand in humans. Scientists have now demonstrated a way to induce a hibernation-like state in mice and rats using non-invasive ultrasound pulses to the brain.Torpor is a sleep-like state that animals such as mice and birds can go into to conserve energy, by bringing their body temperature and metabolism right down. It’s thought to be a survival mechanism for when food is scarce, allowing them…

A manned mission to Mars would take roughly six months one way for astronauts to travel to the Red Planet. When you start looking at planets and even other star systems beyond that point, you start talking about years spent traveling through space. To conquer this time issue, science fiction movies have come up with the idea of spaceflight hibernation. The next 10 years could make that sci-fi trope a reality.  The European Space Agency (ESA) says that induced torpor – the act of putting someone into hibernation…

Japanese researchers have demonstrated that inducing a kind of hibernation state could be a new way to protect organs from damage when blood circulation is stopped during surgery. The technique slows down the metabolism and has been found to work well in tests in mice.During some kinds of surgery on the heart or aorta, doctors need to interrupt the flow of blood, but of course the resulting oxygen deprivation would have a devastating effect on organs and tissues. For decades, the main solution has been to induce a deep…