Pain is just an oil away
From wired, it now happens that nerves may transmit information using a mechanism akin to sound waves, not electric signals!
Since olive oil is similar to the lipid molecules that make up nerve cells, Jackson and Heimburg started questioning the generally accepted belief that anesthetics block electrical pulses by fitting themselves into pain receptors on cells. That seems next to impossible, they said, because anesthetic molecules come in many shapes and sizes, and it’s difficult to imagine that they all happen to physically fit into all receptors.
People are not happy:
The theory has not been well received. Few are convinced that the inexplicability of anesthetics is reason to dismiss the Hodgkin-Huxley model. One molecular biologist and ion channel expert even refused to comment on record about the theory because he found it too preposterous.
Links to the paper, and the researchers’ websites: Andrew Jackson and Thomas Heimburg.
Thomas Kuhn wrote that our understanding of science changes according to the new and unexplained facts that challenge our world view, generating a crisis, and debunking old theories. This might be happening here: anomalies that generate new knowledge, and bring the old owners of a theory into a crisis: that’s how science advances.
[...] Pain is just an oil away [...]