[Bored chemist]

"And why do you assume God made any mistakes with me and other electrosensitives?"
At least most of us don't. I also don't assume that the fairies at the bottom of my garden made any mistakes in your creation.
Anyway,
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=17742.msg202245#msg202245

[lyner]

What fascinates me is how the information is supposed to be carried by these fields. What form of modulation and coding do you envisage? Presumably there will modems and codecs inside each cell with the ability to distinguish the particular signals which are addressed to them. Has anyone actually detected these signals and shown their information content? What sort of transducers would be involved?
Strange that a minimalist system like a living organism would double up on its long-term signaling systems.  Chemical AND em signals. When you think how complex the system for transferring nerve impulses around the body is, you'd think the body would use the existing 'radio communication' system for that purpose too - it would be faster as well.
We wouldn't even need to have developed speech -we already had a perfect  potential wireless communication system.
I should be interested in hearing a few more details about how information theory applies to your proposed system.

[blaze (OP)]

At least most of us don't. I also don't assume that the fairies at the bottom of my garden made any mistakes in your creation.

Bored chemist - ha ha funny.

Sophia,this deals with bone regeneration/healing, not the budding of trees, growth of hair follicles, etc... in response to electromagnetic/solar storms, but...

The Body Electric - Dr. Robert O. Becker - page 128

"We could now follow the control system of Wolff's Law. Mechanical stress on the bone produced a piezoelectric signal from the collagen. The signal was biphasic, switching polarity with each stress-and-release. The signal was rectified by the PN junction between apatite and collagen. This coherent signal did more than merely indicate that stress had occurred. Its strength told the cells how strong the stress was, and its polarity told them what direction it came from. Osteogenic cells where the potential was negative would be stimulated to grow more bone, while those in the positive area would close up shop and dismantle their matrix. If growth and resorption were considered as two aspects of one process, the electrical signal acted as an analog code to transfer information about stress to the cells and trigger the appropriate response."

"Now we knew how stress was converted into an electrical signal. We had discovered a transducer a device that transforms other forces into electricity or vice versa..."

Maybe they feel the same kind of 'stress' towards these solar and geomagnetic events that bone tissue does in response to injury, and they respond accordingly to the intensity and the direction of it? Either way, Dr. Becker likens it to an analog computer system. Since I don't know how computers work, maybe someone here could explain. I know he explains it earlier in the book as programming something to answer just 'yes' or 'no', very simple, and then moving on to the next yes-or-no until a biological process is completed.

[lyner]

But messages need to be coded in some way so that they only reach the appropriate destination. Else, all cells would be stimulated. A very blunt instrument.
What sort of coding do you propose?

[blaze (OP)]

I don't know - I think if I knew how to code cells to respond to my every whim, I'd be God.

[lyner]

That's an interesting comment. You are implying that Biochemists who are decoding the Human Genome and who have been identifying the complex messages transmitted by hormones are God. Or perhaps the truth is that there ARE substantial numbers of messages carried chemically and very little transmitted by 'radiation'.

[lyner]

There are two issues here.
It is true that some EM radiations have an effect of body processes. There are a number of established, mainstream, treatments which involve EM treatment. It is also possible that cells / organs may be sensitive to quite low levels on occasions.
The bit about 'instructions' and 'signalling' this way is just boloney. Such a proposal needs to involve a hypothetical (at least) structure which could achieve the effect. Has anything like that ever been found?
I think not. Yet again, the Non-Scientist confuses cause and effect.

They looked for nerves and found them - proof.
They looked for hormones and found them - proof.
Cell to cell radio.....? Has anybody actually looked for it?

[lyner]

Oh, of course: Cell Phones

[blaze (OP)]

I suggest you read Dr. Becker's book 'The Body Electric'. When he amputates a salamander's or frog's legs, he has been able to measure what he calls a 'current of injury'. In other words, the cells in the injured tissue itself are signaling other cells that there is a crisis and that they need to repair.

I don't think it is that crazy, therefore, to think that these radio bursts and electron fluxes and so forth are signals to the elements that make up all life forms on earth. And since a plant and a human likely have a different concentration of each of the elements, an electron flux likely tells a plant to do one thing and a human to do another.

If you check out Space Weather, notice how much activity was going on, especially radioburst-wise, when all the stuff about Colony Collapse started to hit the news? Same thing when the bats in the northeastern U.S. came down with White Nose Syndrome and started dying. Don't you find it interesting that both the honeybees and the bats became ill around the same time? - especially considering humans rely on honeybees for pollination (and thus, food) and on bats for pest control - without bats, we leave ourselves wide open to all sorts of mosquito-borne illness.

There's no way all the solar activity a couple of years ago was not clearly instruction to the honeybees and the bats, so why should I doubt I also was being given instructions? - not just my cells, but my thoughts?

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/alerts/archive.html#2006

[lyner]

Why use the word 'instruction'?
When the Sun rises in the morning is it an 'instruction' for plants to start photosynthesis or are they just reacting to the light?
When it rains, is that an instruction for the frogs to come out and hop around in the garden?
An 'instruction' is a message, deliberately sent from someone to someone else. It's just a matter of faith whether or not someone is sending these instructions of yours. I wonder - does that someone also put the Sunspots there to warn us that a signal is on its way?
This is a Science forum not a Magic forum.

If Dr Becker has made some money from his book, then good luck to him. There are books which told us the World was going to end. They were published and bought regularly up until the point when the World didn't end.
It doesn't surprise me at all that you can measure small currents all over the body. You can also measure chemical gradients and they correlate well with many physiological changes.

[blaze (OP)]

Dr. Becker is dead. He was nominated for the Nobel prize (twice, I believe) and was known as the Father of Electromedicine, but he's dead. He's not making any money now, and my experience on this forum (having my excitement/theories crushed) is pretty much what he describes in his book when he first started out.

People want to believe what they want to believe though. What does it really matter what word I use? Message? Instruction? Signal? Magic? They fit what I'm trying to suggest - the only problem, it seems, with my choice of words is that they suggest there might be a power greater than us (see, even I'm trying to avoid the word 'God' here) - a power though that knows more than we do and might actually care about us and have a plan for everything.

Explain happiness. I'd like to hear science explain happiness. Or love. If we're all just these eating, sleeping, reproducing nothings, then why do we need to feel happiness or love? Where's the chemical formula for happiness and love? If everything is only a rolling chain of chemical reactions, why can't we just do all of these things without feeling anything? Throw some chemicals in a beaker and show me some of those. Our thinking brains are our biggest flaw.

Do I think the sun rising in the morning is an 'instruction' for plants to start photosynthesis? You bet I do.

Do I think when it rains it's an 'instruction' for frogs to come out and splash around. Yeah.

By why do you think it's exclusive to just one life form at a time?

And we already know that the cycles of the moon have an effect and a purpose - one that's pretty vital to life. Why wouldn't the sunspots have some ulterior motive also? Just because it appears random to us and isn't nearly as predictable as the moon and other planets are, it just spews out these spots whenever for no reason? or for some chemical reason?

Birds respond to these instructions. Bees do. But we think everything we choose to do is of our own free will? - don't you think the birds and bees think they have free will, too? Or do you think the birds angrily go about their day flying south when they really wanted to do something else? They look pretty happy to me.

Life isn't just a bunch of chemicals. If it was, with our big brains we ought to have been able to create it on our own. But we've never created anything living without the use of something that was already alive, last time I checked.

I'm so tired of not being able to talk magic here though. Dr. Becker gave an example of how we'd be reluctant to believe that a caterpillar could emerge as a butterfly unless we'd seen it with our own eyes - makes me think maybe kids should be involved in science, and not adults.

[lyner]

This just a matter of interpretation.
If you believe what you say then you can't ask for a scientific explanation for these phenomena. Science is looking for some consistent rules to allow us to predict what happens next. You are saying that none of these rules can be relied upon to apply in any specific case because 'someone' might change the outcome at any time in order to send us a message. Remember, a 'message' contains some added information; that must imply that the rules are being changed from what you'd expect - else there would be no information involved.
There is seriously no point in pursuing Science under those terms.