It isn't designed to know things. It doesn't know what exactly it knows, where it could check before answering. It generates an output, which isn't even the same thing every time. So this again is a problem of not understanding how it functions
Aging doesn't seem to be inevitable: some animal species live for very long times even hundreds of years. And yet we have a predetermined lifespan far below that. Seems as though that's an purposeful systematic difference etween species that control how long each generation survive before death.
To be fair that last part was probably always true. The future belongs to the next generation, and not everyone values having kids. Probably why most major faiths encourage having kids. The people who were too smart to have kids died out along with their ideas. It's like survival of the fittest, but with ideas. I have a theory that long in our past we've went through periods of secularization like our current modern age. It's just a phase that dies out when the people who believe it do.
>He is currently developing plants that use the mushroom luciferase system to communicate when they are stressed or infected by a virus. He imagines that future farmers might get an early heads-up about problems with their crops from satellites or drones flying at night.
Now this would be really cool. Seems pretty useful as well. Though I wonder if there's a risk of the gene spreading
In general he's good at not being so pushy, but that part bothers me. There's nothing explicitly wrong, but it's not a great look. And it's a little bit unethical depending on how you think about it.
For 90% of people the most in impactful thing they can do for their health, focus, and success is to eat well and sleep well. Unfortunately no one actually wants to do this. Instead they'd rather find "life hacks". I get the appeal, I honestly do it too. But the most important stuff here is, as often, pretty boring.
It's kind of amazing. The issue is that the cells have a dysfunctional copy of the OTOH gene, which leads to production of a dysfunctional otoferlin protein that does not work. There are virii that inject their DNA into cells. They modify one of these to make them inject a working copy of the OTOH gene into the cell. Cells have a mechanism where if there is a gene floating around nearby it will sometimes pick it up and integrate it. This is the process that is exploited in gene therapy to change individual cells to produce the correct protein. If enough cells produce the correct protein, there will be enough to have the desired effects. It's really unbelievably cool. I wish there were more appreciation for how these things work.
I've always been fascinated by these trace alcohols. They are very rarely talked about. Some people will say 'alcohol is alcohol' but that's actually incorrect. Alcoholic drinks are bioactive concoctions made of organic materials with multiple active ingredients-- the hops in beer for example has a slight effect on cannabinoid receptors which is why beer tend to makes one sleepy. Like you said there are a lot of trace alcohols as well. People report having different effects from different alcohols-- vodka can be numbing while wine feels more relaxed, etc.
By categorizing an inventory of these trace alcohols and their effects, one could hypothetically create customized alcohols with varying effects and levels of metabolic load. These trace alcohols are also called fusel alcohols. A lot of these are very weird chemicals with varying effects, though, not all positive. Propan-1-ol is a fusel alcohol that is thought to be 2-4 times stronger that alcohol and similar in effects, but can lead to high anion gap metabolic acidosis as a lethal side effect. So there are likely safe maximum levels of each fusel alcohol that can actually be added. Fusel alcohols are something brewers take great care to avoid, after all, as they can cause many negative effects. There's something interesting there and I'm surprised no one has pursued this before(AFAIK)
It gets used that way in the tech-adjacent community of twitter. It's a very particular culture. I think it's a way of sort of re-claiming the autism label from being atypical to being a 'superpower'ish thing.
Biological beings so indeed code information at multiple levels including genetic, epigenetic, at the cellular level in the form of interneuronal connections, etc. Whether you can that memory or not is irrelevant eyes, as it's still information that the biological being has encoded at some level to achieve some function
It's odd how silent people remain about this. The CDC said there was an epidemic of "sadness and violence"[1] among teen girls to.. basically no response. I've brought this to in conversations and most people don't seem to care very much. I don't understand it to be honest
What's conflicting about this, except that she converted to Islam? She pointed out abuse by the catholic church, the next night Joe Pesci went on SNL and said if it was his show he'd have hit her[1] to a round of applause by the studio audience. She was lambasted by the public and many fellow Catholics, until eventually she and all the children were proven right on the abuse claims. She later left the religion to join Islam which she spoke highly of. It's not entirely surpassing given how she was treated, that she would join Islam(a religion without any intercessors between God and man ex the pope)
Once secularism changes peoples beliefs, no one is actually in control to decide what they choose to replace it with. They might choose yoga, they might choose astrology, or they might choose qanon. Nietzsche and other philosophers talked about these problems a lot, but most this society failed at the task of living up to what was needed(ie society as a whole guiding peoples and establishing healthy alternatives).
The truly sad thing is they have sky-high depression rates and all anyone cares is that they use too much social media and believe in astrology. The way the west regards love is supernatural anyways, so it's not surprisingly that they'd accept the idea of fate in this too.
Indians? This is sort of like saying "many Americans pray to Jesus". Hindus are the ones that believe in astrology-- the majority religion among dozens.
Confabulate is more of a neurological term so I think that's why it never caught on, but I've always thought that was the perfect word for what's happening