Author: foompy_katt

  • The Math That Tells Cells What They Are

    https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-math-that-tells-cells-what-they-are Really interesting article with quite a bit of work I hadn’t been exposed to. The tl;dr is that the traditional view of embryonic development is that organisms develop along a strictly linear pathway dictated by DNA, instead it looks like RNA expression gradients guide development. This is interesting in context of work which has…

  • Periodic Table of Nervous System Functions

    Over the past few months I’ve been thinking a lot about the transition between alchemy and formal chemistry, and how the current state of neuroscientific thought is eerily similar to alchemic practice. While alchemic practice produced the basis for a lot of modern chemistry, the field as a whole was essentially a non-stop fraud vehicle.…

  • Why is it so heterodox to view the human experience as biological/physical?

    Cue the Sponge Bob/Patrick license meme. Seems like everything is biological up until the point when it needs to be magical.

  • Biology

    DNA is an information storage molecule and DNA in and of itself does not have the ability to catalyze processes. RNA by itself is a “living” precursor to DNA, and DNA “evolved” from RNA. All cellular life requires ribosomal processes in order to translate out DNA codons. Ribozymes are an example of how RNA bridge…

  • GFAP (and possibly AB25, ALDH1L1, and GLT1) assays should be as ubiquitous as colon cancer screening.

    For most types of dementia, there’s building evidence that high levels of astrocyte products in serum is REALLY bad, and can provide a warning signal up to 20 years before onset of significant symptoms (in the case of Alzheimers). Currently, evidence supports the association between elevated astrocyte products and Huntington’s, ALS, Multiple Sclerosis (NfL ==…

  • Mea Culpa – Dementia pathologies

    In the past I’ve asserted that dementia conditions like AD were the product of advanced senescence, essentially the product of groups of cells “aging” faster than “average”, at least relative to the rest of the organism. This assumption is almost certainly wrong, and long telomere (or whatever measure of senescence we apply) dementia is not…

  • In case you were wondering…

    I try to avoid issues like this as much as possible (the interpersonal/social/political ones), but in case you were wondering why China is freaking out so bad about COVID chewing it’s own legs to prevent it’s spread it’s because COVID selectively targets astrocytes. For susceptible individuals, it’s literally a brain/body metabolism nuke, and produces dementia…

  • That did get me thinking though…

    If we were going to solve some of the problems that the Neuralink team is trying to address, what pathways show the most promise? First, from a construct perspective, the device itself needs to philosophically be viewed as an astrocyte/oligo package. In conditions like Parkinsons (side rant: I really wish medicine would get over naming…

  • Neuralink Presentation

    In Case You Missed It: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YreDYmXTYi4 You didn’t miss much. The team is so engineering heavy that they have no path toward making any genuine breakthrough on the physiological end because they are assuming nervous systems are simple electrical bleep bloops. I think the most telling part of the whole presentation was when one of…