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Category: neuroscience

Neuroscience biweekly vol. 46, 10th November — 24th November.

“It’s amazing that you can still find areas of the brain that are important for basic survival behaviors that we had never before implicated,” Betley says. “And these brain regions are important in robust ways.” The work, shared in the journal Nature, suggests that neurons in the cerebellum’s anterior deep cerebellar nuclei (aDCN) are involved in helping animals regulate their meal size. Since its start, Betley’s lab has unraveled a variety of neural circuits related to how the brain regulates food intake. That work as well as other research has implicated areas of the hindbrain and hypothalmus in this control.

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Well beyond Descartes and his mind-body duality, new questions have emerged that are as exciting as they are nebulous: Does quantum physics play a role in how the brain works? Or, more profoundly, is the mind, viewed as a collection of possible brain states, sustained by quantum effects? Or can it all be treated using classical physics?

There is nothing better than mixing two great mysteries to produce an even bigger one.

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Natural selection, the evolutionary process that guides which traits become more common in a population, has been acting on us for the past 3,000 years, right up to the modern day, new research suggests.

And it seems to be acting in surprising ways on complex traits encoded by multiple genes, such as those tied to intelligence, mental illness and even cancer.

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𝐌𝐀𝐆𝐈𝐂 𝐌𝐔𝐒𝐇𝐑𝐎𝐎𝐌 𝐒𝐓𝐔𝐃𝐘 𝐒𝐔𝐆𝐆𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐒 𝐏𝐒𝐈𝐋𝐎𝐂𝐘𝐁𝐈𝐍 𝐌𝐀𝐘 𝐑𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐑𝐒𝐄 𝐀𝐋𝐂𝐎𝐇𝐎𝐋-𝐈𝐍𝐃𝐔𝐂𝐄𝐃 𝐁𝐑𝐀𝐈𝐍 𝐃𝐀𝐌𝐀𝐆𝐄

𝘼𝙁𝙏𝙀𝙍 𝙃𝘼𝙇𝙁 𝘼 𝘾𝙀𝙉𝙏𝙐𝙍𝙔 𝙤𝙛 𝙗𝙡𝙤𝙘𝙠𝙨 𝙩𝙤 𝙧𝙚𝙨𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙘𝙝 𝙤𝙣 𝙥𝙨𝙮𝙘𝙝𝙚𝙙𝙚𝙡𝙞𝙘𝙨’ 𝙥𝙤𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙖𝙡 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙩𝙧𝙚𝙖… See more.

The psychedelic drug psilocybin can restore alcohol-induced damage to the brain’s glutamate receptors — that’s the finding of a new study published in ‘Science Advances.’

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😳! Circa 2018

Some animals live fast and die young. That means they need to grow up fast, too. This week, researchers crowned a new record holder for quick growth: Susan Milius at Science News reports that the turquoise killifish, Nothobranchius furzeri, found in Mozambique, can reach maturity in just 14 days, the fastest of any known vertebrate animal.

That rapid maturation is an adaptation to the killifish’s habitat, according to the study published this week in the journal Current Biology. The fish spend most of their lives as tiny embryos that have been deposited in sediment in small depressions across the savannah. When rain fills the ephemeral pools, the embryos mature rapidly reaching sexual maturity and depositing their own embryos before the pool once again dries up. Not only do they make babies quickly, they bulk up fast, too—typically growing from about 5 millimeters to 54 millimeters in their lifespan.

Researchers have been aware of the turquoise killifish’s super-fast maturation for a while. In fact, the fish is used as a model animal in aging studies because of this trait. In the lab, where the fish live a relatively leisurely lifestyle, the average rate of maturation is 18 days.

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Two new methods make it possible to delete long sections of the genome, expanding the capabilities of the gene editor CRISPR. The techniques could lead to therapies that excise large insertions or duplications tied to autism, such as the DNA repeats that underlie fragile X syndrome.

To remove a segment of DNA, CRISPR systems typically use an enzyme called Cas9 to snip double-stranded DNA at two target sites. The cell’s own repair machinery can then join the cut ends, omitting the intervening sequence. But this process is error prone and can insert or delete unintended segments of DNA, called ‘indels,’ or rearrange large sections of the genome. Snipping double-stranded DNA can also cause cell death.

A different CRISPR-based system called ‘prime editing’ can make DNA repair more precise. In one version of the technique, a protein complex called a prime editor cuts only one strand of DNA at one of the two sites and the opposite strand at the other site. The prime editor adds a sequence to one of the cut strands to guide the repair.

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The Connection Between Tesla’s New Phone Model Pi And Neuralink: So Elon has been one busy boy lately, from his incredible Twitter Poll the other day, to the subsequent selling of nearly 5billion in Tesla Shares. But one announcement that went under the radar updates to the rumored Tesla Pi.

So why would you want a phone from Tesla, well the same reason people have an iPhone with their iMac and their iWatch and their iTV sorry Apple TV…it’s the ecosystem, it’s the seamless transition.

Except we now going from your phone to your car, to a satellite to potentially directly to your brain. Now it’s still early days so information is scarce on exactly what will be included, however, information has leaked recently about possible features and I am excited.

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In this video I explain why free will is incompatible with the currently known laws of nature and why the idea makes no sense anyway. However, you don’t need free will to act responsibly and to live a happy life, and I will tell you why.

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Sabine.

The reference I mentioned is here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5239816/

#physics #science #philosophy.

0:00 Intro and Content Summary.
0:30 Free will as the possibility to select a future.
1:21 Free will is incompatible with the laws of nature.
3:02 Chaos and quantum mechanics make no difference.
3:50 Free will is nonsense.
4:28 Other definitions of free will.
6:32 What is really going on.
6:58 Reacting to a prediction is not free will.
8:00 Free will is unnecessary for moral behavior.
9:30 How to live without free will.

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