This. First of all, I don’t think there is a “critical” period for learning programming like there is for languages, or motor skills (try learning to skateboard as an adult). My school curriculum, a foreign language and, yes, skateboarding have all been a lot more challenging than programming. I’d say that learning network administration is probably a lot harder too b/c stuff like that isn’t as logical as a programming language.
My dad had MS, they knew that MS was caused by demyelination years ago. Is this study important because they found the gene (or a gene?) that corresponds to that?
MS is not inherited, but it looks like they’ve already identified genes as well that increase risk, and risk increases if a family member has it.
> Is this study important because they found the gene (or a gene?) that corresponds to that?
The paper only concludes that the gene is inactive when there's demyelination, the paper doesn't actually say that it causes it.
The previous research I've read says that it is expressed during repair (i.e it is the repair tool, so is in play during repair of the cells).
So even for those of us who have GPR17, making sure it is expressed for repair (if it does repair) would mean a longer active brain life.
I've got half-a binder full of research on PRRT2 from a family incident & then the opposite with conductivity research for SCN1A.
The developmental myelination defects are really weird to read about, because if they are about expression rather than presence of a gene & often a single CNV doesn't mean anything (or everything, argh), the environmental factors overwhelm things ("what kind of fat and how much did you eat during your childhood synaptic pruning period").
University press release. The real science is too technical and boring, so the press release states the background of the research as the breakthrough, or makes wild unsupported speculative claims about applications, or both.
The word "discover" is a bit of a stretch here, but I suspect they mean that the "discovery" was that the loss of myelin is a part of age-related cognitive decline as well as MS.
But MS is not the only disease is in which demyelination occurs, not by a long shot. Even the definition of MS (when it comes to getting a diagnosis) is a lot more complex than just "degeneration of myelin".
> This new study found that the cells that drive myelin repair become less efficient as we age and identified a key gene that is most affected by ageing, which reduces the cells ability to replace lost myelin.
FYI. Sounds like it's related but maybe not directly.
A whole bunch of genes and environmental risk factors correlated but current knowledge is basically "something causes autoimmune attack of oligodendrocytes (myelin) for some reason"
That's the entire state of bio-medicine; nothing is known for sure and everything is too complicated to understand. And all treatments are based on general statistics. I can't wait for this stage to end.
A bio professor of mine described the field as being like “the ancient Greeks trying to reverse engineer extraterrestrial technology.”
Biology does not work the way humans design things. It’s not one part one function. It’s all parts some functions to varying and often dynamic degrees, a web of interrelationships that is itself in constant flux. It makes us look like cave men disassembling a UFO.
Pharmaceuticals is basically “we throw this molecule in and it seems to do that.” Sometimes we can divine some cause and effect understanding but it’s always surface level and incomplete. How SSRIs supposedly work for depression comes to mind as an example of such an oversimplification.
Haha, I love that one of the top questions asked on that book is "Why is this book praised so much? At least textbooks have pictures", which mostly speaks to the absurdity of the platform that goodreads has become.
Either way, thanks for the tip, will add to the list!
I’ve been asking myself since Trump’s Twitter ban - is it a violation of free speech if the banner is a private corp? To me the obvious answer is no, but I could see how a private Corp could be pressured by the state.
I don’t have the details but I’m pretty sure passage of time is due to a tendency for entropy to increase, and that if I go back in time a second by, say, walking backwards, it is no more a violation of the cons of energy as if I walk forward.
How do you know you aren't walking backwards back in time? To be complete you'll also need to be losing your new memories and becoming younger - it's experimentally undistinguishable.
Always conservation of mass is maintained by broadening the scope of the system under test. You can take matter out of a local system and make that local system less massive, but it’s not a violation of physics because the broader system maintains a steady state.
So isn’t the simple layman’s answer that the “system” also spans the 4th dimension and you are just displacing mass around in a 4D space instead of the typical 3D space?
I dont think conservation of mass works like this between "disparate" points in the 4th dimension. It has to be continuosly connected. Otherwise things could appear out of thin air without causality. Reminds me of this software: https://4dtoys.com/ (4d is time in this case not another spacial dimension but the intuition about discontinuity still applies)
I recently had blood work done bc I thought I might be low T and mine was actually over the high band. I am a pretty serious hobby jogger. I run every day and I try and follow something close to what a serious HS runner would do. Is that why, or enough to explain it? Idk, but I do know if I didn’t exercise to compensate for screen-life, everything would be fucked
I have a super snotty nose and live in a cold place so I don’t wear it outside. I walk away or cover mouth when someone gets close. But I’ve read articles that give numbers ie. x% chance of getting it if you are within y feet for z minutes in an enclosed room, so I think me walking outside without a mask is not an issue, despite the dirty looks from lots of people.
