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The question of what weight to give to human interests and to nonhuman animal interests is difficult.67 Humans are literally outweighed by farmed animals: land-based farmed animals have 70 percent more biomass than all humans.68 Land-based farmed animals also outnumber humans greatly, by a factor of three to one, with…
When genes are activated, the instructions encoded within their DNA are first transcribed into a related molecule called RNA. Shepherd’s colleague Elissa Pastuzyn showed that the Arc shells can enclose RNA and move it from one neuron to another. And that’s basically what retroviruses do—they use protein shells to…
Neocortical neurons have thousands of excitatory synapses. It is a mystery how neurons integrate the input from so many synapses and what kind of large-scale network behavior this enables. It has been previously proposed that non-linear properties of dendrites enable neurons to recognize multiple patterns. In this…
Let me suggest a new axiom: juxtaposition is the spice of life. Humanity’s biggest talent, unique to us, is juxtaposing, finding and operating novel relationships between things or ideas... Recent ideas on neural activity suggest that the brain operates in a very associative way, with small neuron clusters containing…