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THE END IS HERE. It’s all there, right in the title: scientists have managed to partially revive the brains of dead pigs, hours after they were killed.
Oh god.
While your brain swims with images of pig zombies coming to seek revenge on us all, let me try to explain the science. A research team at Yale restored some cellular activity in the brains of dead pigs, hours after they’d been killed in a slaughterhouse. They did this by soaking the brains in a “specially formulated chemical cocktail” for six hours.
Mmmmmmmkay.
The team has been careful to clarify that the revived brains are not conscious or aware.
“This is not a living brain,” neuroscientist Nenad Sestan explained, “but it is a cellularly active brain.”
The discovery marks a major breakthrough — but not because the scientists are actually trying to bring pigs back from the dead.
Instead, they’ve been trying to figure out how to directly study brain cells while they’re still in an intact organ. Restoring cellular function to a deceased brain is one way to do that.
With this breakthrough, researchers will be able to study brain diseases and injuries in an entirely new way.
“We could actually answer questions that we can’t now,” researcher Zvonimir Vrselja said.
https://twitter.com/nkjemisin/status/1118565564367163392
Still, this comes way too close to zombies for comfort. People are kinda flipping out, and can you blame them?
Given the apocalyptic-feeling state of the world in 2019, we can just go ahead and add this to the long list of possible ways that the world might soon end. More nightmare fuel, NBD.
