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I was going to call BS on this one, but after crunching some numbers, if anything this is likely an underestimate. human nuclear genome size (haploid): 3.1 billion bp mitochondrial…

I disagree. > I think it would be better to describe this as an ‘organelle’ transplant as it would be easier for people to understand and discuss. Unlike previous attempts, the don…

Natural sciences: about 3 years at best. You finish your degree, and start your PhD. The first year, you are busy learning techniques and getting caught up with the relevant litera…

> A Dutch speaker can't read or understand German. A Dutch speaker can't necessarily read or understand German. However, a Dutch person nearly always does, and often flawlessly so.…

Garten / garden derive from garte / yard, which just meant an enclosed outdoor space.

Huge fan of Distill here (and your personal blog). > In retrospect, I deeply regret trying to run Distill with the expectations of a scientific journal, rather than the freedom of …

The range notation indicates 95% confidence intervals, not the minima and maxima. If the lower bounds are close enough to zero (and the interval is large enough), then there may so…

I am a biochemist and neuroscientist and also thought it was fantastic read. It's rare that someone manages to cater to both audiences this well. Kudos!

Some animals get most if not all of their sleep through microsleep [1]. So whatever mechanism "refreshes" the brain, it can work on short time scales. The switch in brain firing dy…

It is worth noting that these topical applications are quite controversial in the medical literature. The evidence supporting a dermal absorption of magnesium (or other electrolyte…

It is worth noting that these topical applications are quite controversial in the medical literature. The evidence supporting a dermal absorption of magnesium (or other electrolyte…

In theory, there is enough magnesium in your bones (~12 g) to cover your RDA (~400 mg) for 30 days [1]. However, only a third of that is available without strongly negatively affec…

> For example, let's say instead of gradient descent you want to do a Newton descent. Then maybe there's a better way to compute the needed weight updates besides backprop? IIRC, f…

> it always automatically happens This is exactly the framing the author is criticizing. It assumes that the placebo effect is a constant that cannot be improved upon, and thus des…

> sizeable camps on both sides There are dozens of us! Mostly because Nedergaard's lab(s) are like 50 people all by themselves. I always find it interesting what people's perceptio…

I am also not a fan of the pivot to Snap. However, it is worth mentioning, that it has only been two years (I think, at least 22.04 LTS was the first release I had to wrestle with …

You are referring to the critical period [1] of (second) language acquisition, which is generally thought to end with the onset of puberty [2]. Neurodevelopmentally, this period co…

> I find I feel more rested with more REM cycles which generally means REM starts earlier. This is probably the case because your NREM / slow-wave sleep need was low to begin with.…

> The data quality of wearables to detect sleep stages is in the 90%+ accuracy range now. Citation needed.

> Yes I’ve made a whole procedural map generator & renderer just for this example, and I have zero regrets. You can be salty about excessive use of animations in modern UI all day …

Not to mention a fantastic writer. Already his PhD thesis was brilliant, and one of the few [1] I have ever read cover-to-cover. "Advanced data analysis from an elementary point of…

Some octopus species use rudimentary tools, which would put them ahead of elephants and whales in at least that aspect.

This grug not big brain. This grug ate food and read article on big screen at the same time. Now food on screen, not in belly. Grug still hungry, but need to find rag now to clean …

Oh, I misunderstood you then. I thought you meant classical Greek in general. My apologies.

That's nonsense. Greek has prepositions, conjunctions, and cases that leave little room to interpretation. It is a rather precise language (much more so than English or even Latin)…