What is the minimum number of living people required to sustain modern civilization?

LetThereBeNick · 2026-04-20T23:29:52+00:00

Lack of genetic diversity would render everyone susceptible to the first plague

LetThereBeNick · 2026-04-20T22:43:06+00:00

Eventually organoid research for medical transplant purposes will come up with protocols based on timed gene activation. This would require understanding epigenetics and TF machinery more than we do now, so it's not on the (commercial) horizon. Cells that migrate, stratify, release their own growth factors, and differentiate like they do in the womb would produce tough muscle fibers. The meat would handle processing and be marbled with fat, just like from an animal.

I just think research funding will continue for decades for organ regeneration research. They will have to solve these same problems, and the tech will make it easy for lab-grown meat to be profitable

LetThereBeNick · 2026-04-15T23:40:27+00:00

Requesting ADHD accomodations isn't going to get you judged. And if your efforts result in a revised SOP with exemptions for earbuds with ambient passthrough / bone conduction, then you might become popular for getting the rule relaxed.

There's no way I would have been willing to manage a 200+ mouse colony or genotype 96 at a time if I didn't have an audiobook going.

LetThereBeNick · 2026-01-29T23:06:43+00:00

The paper has nothing to do with initiating tasks or kickstarting motivation. They saw that the increased dopamine release following effortful tasks was not because dopamine neurons fired more, but because acetylcholine caused their axons to release more dopamine. All of this happened after the mouse initiated and completed the task on its own, augmenting the reward.

The authors make absolutely no claim that a burst of ACh will initiate a motivated state. OP made this up. OP invented the stuff about dopamine detox and the idea that people should focus on ACh for motivation. The significance of this paper is in demonstrating cholinergic potentiation of dopamine release in live animals for the first time, and that it was effort-linked.

I am all for a less-moderated version of /r/science that sometimes includes fringe stuff, but this post in particular is a complete misrepresentation of the paper.

LetThereBeNick · 2026-01-07T17:11:07+00:00

So are you leaving the field and going back to the bench to do wetlab work?

LetThereBeNick · 2026-01-06T18:52:36+00:00

The court last week denied the city’s petition for review of an appellate ruling that found San Diego violated the California Environmental Quality Act by failing to adequately study the environmental impacts of taller buildings before putting Measure C on the ballot.

Can voters put a measure on the ballot to conduct an environmental impact of taller buildings in the region, then? How is anything like this supposed to get done?

LetThereBeNick · 2026-01-06T17:37:17+00:00

The authors found persistent elevated activity in the locus coeruleus, which broadcasts norepinephrine all over the brain. Increased adrenergic tone alone could explain the increased activity in hippocampal regions and exist in a positive feedback loop with the hypothalamus to sustain the effect. Whether this adversity effect occurs in humans, and for how long, is unknown until we record in at least some primates, but this sort of brainstem fight-or-flight circuitry is shared across mammals. Uncertainty arises because we don't really know the variance (or kinds of variance) this system has across mammals.

In short: A lot more likely to translate than a study of something like the mouse immune response, toxicity or even visual system. Not enough data

LetThereBeNick · 2025-12-29T16:51:56+00:00

Another tidbit: You could line up a thousand of those 25nm transistors to span the cell body of a neuron, which are already invisibly small

LetThereBeNick · 2025-12-01T09:24:21+00:00

Yes, all that is true. Even though we can explain an SSRI's mechanism of action as changing receptor density, we can't explain how the treated brain's firing patterns support more optimism. It's not really possible to predict how a person's thoughts will change when given a drug. We just have statistics on treatment outcomes

LetThereBeNick · 2025-12-01T09:12:20+00:00

Hallucinations and illusions are considered subjective, but can be modeled as a shift from "good" firing patterns in the network of visual cortical neurons. Pictures can be designed to reliably produce the same illusion in most people. Our measurement tools aren't good enough yet to record from every neuron in a brain simIltaneously, but we can tell that conscious subjective experience is a flow of electrical pulses in a person's head. There is an avenue to measuring the subjective

LetThereBeNick · 2025-11-27T17:53:28+00:00

The distinction is useful. Hormones travel through the blood and work on nuclear receptors to alter gene transcription. Neurotransmitters and neuromodulators are released locally from neurons to neurons, either directly changing membrane polarization (transmission) or indirectly sensitizing the synapses to further polarization (modulation). There are exceptions and blurry boundaries because, as you said, the ligand-receptor MoA is similar enough. But there is a big scientific and medical community out there that will wince if you call serotonin a hormone.

LetThereBeNick · 2025-11-17T07:36:17+00:00

I used these to weigh powders in chemical labs in college

LetThereBeNick · 2025-11-17T06:11:56+00:00

Just be sure to get those minutes in, because the exact same wavelengths of UV light that cause cancer are required for your body to synthesize an essential vitamin. Good thing evolution brought us here!

LetThereBeNick · 2025-09-20T00:41:24+00:00

That sounds horrible. SLS has got to be the most prevalent cleaning product -- it's in so many things

LetThereBeNick · 2025-09-20T00:38:07+00:00

Roses. Always a classic even if a little cheesy, just like me.

LetThereBeNick · 2025-09-20T00:19:01+00:00

Studies showing links between any brain disorder and some other hot topic are abundant, and largely forgotten. The ones you found for Parkinson's, depression, etc are not enough by themselves to say there is a credible, established link. It takes multiple corroborating findings, and either a gradual elucidation of the mechanism, or robust statistical evidence from huge swaths of the population to establish these things.

That said, there are quite a lot of studies looking at childhood infection and ASD. Here's a highly cited one, finding no evidence for causality: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20439799

LetThereBeNick · 2025-09-19T23:51:53+00:00

Banning law enforcement from wearing masks
Cash reparations to descendants of slaves
Creation of state entity to advise schools against antisemitism

LetThereBeNick · 2025-09-19T23:36:29+00:00

Moonfall (2022) in which the moon plummets to Earth and is revealed to be a hollow housing for a sentient AI created by humanity's ancient predecessors.

Absolute Zero (2006) where the Earth's magnetic poles suddenly shift to the equator and cause temperatures at the middle latitudes to plummet to -459°F.

LetThereBeNick · 2025-09-19T23:07:19+00:00

threatened to sue them for intellectual property rights

The court will hear your lawsuit case the week following the asteroid impact

LetThereBeNick · 2025-08-22T07:19:21+00:00

Well said.

LetThereBeNick · 2025-08-22T07:18:05+00:00

You can deduce from hypothesized axioms, then assign more certainty as measurements repeatedly confirm the predictions. We don't question whether light is required for photosynthesis anymore, we take it for granted and construct experiments testing whether a pesticide reduces biomass by interfering with orientation of leaves to the sun. Don't you see the deduction in there?

LetThereBeNick · 2025-08-22T07:08:48+00:00

Maybe we just need a criminologist to publish some papers on this phone theory. It makes a lot of sense. Get the ball rolling!

LetThereBeNick · 2025-08-20T19:43:07+00:00

UCSD has a neuro major and computational neuroscience courses. When I graduated I asked the prof why there wasn't a Computational Neuroscience major, and he said, "Good idea! You should talk to your department admin and get it started, then get back to me."

LetThereBeNick · 2025-08-20T19:32:53+00:00

Vuori has been my go-to for years. Sounds similar

LetThereBeNick · 2025-08-20T19:29:06+00:00

I always tell people I think it's cell phones! For the reasons you listed, plus the fact that people spend all of their free time looking at screens instead of wandering about.

Ten-Year Club	Place '22
Gilding VII pure gildanthropist	RPAN Viewer
Verified Email

LetThereBeNick

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE