Mind Soup

This is a feature story done for Cloud 961 Magazine Issue 4 . The main purpose of medicine and the thousands of years of trying to perfect it is to extend a human’s life and eventually achieve immortality (through robotics for example). What the internet, social networks in particular, unexpectedly achieved is another type of immortality: digital immortality. Yet, people don’t usually think about what happens to their social profiles online once they are deceased, until they are forced to when someone close to them dies. According to a study done for the purpose of this article, 65% of the respondents have at least one deceased person as a connection on their social media platforms. Only 12%, however, are aware of Facebook’s and Twitter’s procedures for deceased people. Facebook’s official policy for deceased people who have profiles on their site is to turn it into a memorial where “people can save and share their memories of those who've passed.” This setting hides the prof...

The  turritopsis nutricula  species of jellyfish may be the only animal in the world to have truly discovered the fountain of youth. Why I am particularly interested about this? Well, partly because I am majoring in biology and have taken a whole course about lower invertebrates such as jellyfish and other slimy animals, but the huge part is because of the huge capability this animal presents to the scientific world! If scientists could discover the mechanism of this reversion of cells, this can advance the medical field tremendously, possibly by regenerating failing organ cells such as liver cells, heart cells or even brain cells. Here's the original post from the Mother Nature Network   (check this article about the animals with the longest life span, very interesting) , via Maurice Salem . Since it is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again, there may be no natural limit to its life span. Scient...