IMO, one of the most damaging conceits to our understanding of how nervous systems function is the idea that nervous systems behave in a series of sequential discrete processes. The idea that neuron a emits a particle that activates neuron b then returns to homeostasis is a naive at best metaphor for nervous system (or […]
Systems in tension Read More »
Spontaneous and multifaceted ATP release from astrocytes at the scale of hundreds of synapses – Wow, shit’s got levels. Interpreting this, astrocytes can “encourage” information from particular neurons by adjusting the amount of ATP on a synapse by synapse basis (and conversely suppress input by reducing energy). This granular control is independent of the global
Just… wows all around. I figured there had to be clusters like this, even if it was only as ubiquitous as something like Tay-Sachs. Also, significant protein gunks start building up in the 20’s, and this is probably consistent for most people albeit at a much slower rate. This suggests that once “maturity” kicks in,
How one woman became the exception to her family’s Alzheimer’s history Read More »
A systematic review and multilevel meta-analysis of the prenatal and early life stress effects on rodent microglia, astrocyte, and oligodendrocyte density and morphology – I absolutely loathe work like this even if it produces interesting results. It’s frustrating that we are still at the point where it’s either intentional torture or unintentional/lower intensity torture (control
Dendrites Under Morphological Pressure Read More »
Eh, that title is a bit of a trainwreck. Perception of external events in an organism is driven by chemical messaging between cells. This is consistent from bacterial auto-induction to human vision perception. There is no evidence of any cellular organism (to my awareness) that functions without chemical messaging (this probably deserves a whole other
Haha, I wrote the rant but accidentally deleted it. Time to check my s100b plasma levels. Hopefully I can recreate the gist. This is sparked by Single substitution in H3.3G34 alters DNMT3A recruitment to cause progressive neurodegeneration One of the most frustrating things for me exploring this field is how many conceits are deployed by
Another look at “neuro”-degeneration Read More »
Octopamine metabolically reprograms astrocytes to confer neuroprotection against α-synuclein – Ants have fascinated me for awhile because they appear to be “super organisms”, or a discrete organism comprised of individual organisms with external signalling capacity. We could probably make this argument for most “species” level conceits including humans, but ants are neat because they still
Pump n’ Dump – Day trader or Truck Stop? Read More »
I often go on rants about how terrible clinical diagnosis is, and worse that we create descriptions of conditions based on clinical diagnosis. The jist of those rants is that clinical diagnosis, no matter how many structured surveys we create, are ultimately subjective and that subjectivity obviates any chance at reliability. In the first article
Clinical diagnosis is the enemy of progress Read More »
This Animal’s Behavior Is Mechanically Programmed – This conceit underlies the current version of the model, that all interactions in cells are essentially mechanical, and complexification of those interactions scale up to organisms like humans or blue whales. This article is particularly interesting because I hadn’t actually come across a multicellular organism without some type
When is a brain a brain? A few interesting articles Read More »
