In emergency situations like on the battlefield, medics might have minutes or even seconds to save the life of a soldier who has been injured. However if DARPA has their way, they might have come up with an idea on how to make that window a bit bigger. How, you ask? By slowing down time (via Engadget).No, DARPA isn’t creating a time machine or some kind of device that can slow down time, but instead we’re talking about biological time. This is based on nature where certain animals have the ability to bring their cell activity down to a near halt which allows them to survive extreme temperatures.
According to Tristan McClure-Begley, the head of the Biostasis program, “At the molecular level, life is a set of continuous biochemical reactions, and a defining characteristic of these reactions is that they need a catalyst to occur at al. Within a cell, these catalysts come in the form of proteins and large molecular machines that transform chemical and kinetic energy into biological processes.”
“Our goal with Biostasis is to control those molecular machines and get them to all slow their roll at about the same rate so that we can slow down the entire system gracefully and avoid adverse consequences when the intervention is reversed or wears off.” If DARPA is successful in their research, this will prove to be useful not just on the battlefield or in combat, but in other medical applications, such as when paramedics arrive on a scene, or for use in the ER at a hospital, and so on.
Filed in . Read more about Science.