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It's very endearing to me how many people are willing to keep an eye on a video feed so they can push a button and let a fish in the Netherlands get to the other side of a dam.

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Im so fucking smart ask me anything

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The ozone layer is not only healing, but will likely be back to its 1980-state within a Millennial's lifetime

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I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.

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Silly almost poem. I am delirious with flu.

It will wait, you know?

Death I mean.

You can manage another minute, thirty seconds

I won't stop you when it's time

But what comfort could you give yourself? If these are your final moments

Don't you deserve some comfort?

I hear they give dogs chocolate before they put them down. Don't you deserve at least that too?

Put your plans down and please give yourself comfort

Last moments can wait until you've done that small thing first.

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My second best darning of a jumper.

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people are like “I support sex workers” until they actually have to support sex workers by critiquing their ingrained ideas about sex and work and then they're suddenly like “we need to rescue girls from thinking selling their bodies is okay!1!!”

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sometimes I look at a fruit or vegetable and see how optimized it is and I'm just filled with love. ppl have the idea that edible plants are "organic" or have just sprung from the earth in their form but that's not true!! they were selectively bred for thousands of years by generations upon generations of people. that is love. that is faith. when you bite into a fruit you are eating the generations of labor instilled in it to make it just right for you

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When he was brand new!

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A new window into psychosis

A recent study in mice led a team of researchers in Japan to believe that psychosis may be caused by problems with specialized nerve cells deep within the brain, as well as a certain kind of learning behavior. The researchers hope this could provide insight into the emergence of delusions in patients with psychosis or schizophrenia with the aim of finding ways to help them.

Psychosis is a debilitating psychological condition with a long history. Described in the medical writings of Hippocrates as early as the 4th century B.C., the psychotic state of hallucinations, delusions and disordered thought represent an existential threat to an afflicted human mind. Now, a team of researchers from the International Research Center for Neurointelligence (IRCN) and the Graduate School of Medicine at the University of Tokyo, and the Graduate School of Informatics at Kyoto University, proposes that psychosis involves defective neural signaling in a deep brain area called the ventral striatum during a behavior called discrimination learning.

Led by Lecturer Sho Yagishita and Professor Haruo Kasai, the researchers studied the way mice predict future rewards in their environment, a behavior known as reward learning, which is shared by us humans and other mammals, too. Reward learning involves the release of a chemical messenger dopamine to a receptor protein in the brain called dopamine D1 receptor (D1R) to signal the anticipation of a reward. Specifically, the team searched for a second dopamine signal that occurs only when the anticipated reward fails to materialize — reward omission.

The researchers suspected this signal for reward omission existed in neurons of the ventral striatum area of the brain that contain a counterpart to D1R, dopamine D2 receptor (D2R). Coincidentally, D2R is the major brain receptor for nearly every antipsychotic medication used to date. The team showed that reward omission triggers a signal in these neurons called the dopamine dip, a drop in dopamine levels, which lasts less than a second.

(Image caption: Activity in neuronal tissue can be optically recorded with fiber optics. Credit: © 2020 Yagishita et al.)

These dips seem to contribute to the process of discrimination learning, which includes how all animals, including humans, judge previously learned rewards and punishments. To explore the connection between dips and discrimination learning, the researchers used sophisticated optogenetic technologies to artificially increase or decrease the dips for the first time and measured their effects on how the mice estimated rewards. Optogenetics is a way to activate artificial light-sensitive proteins with finely controlled laser light to turn neuronal activity on or off.

“We initially observed that dips caused certain synaptic structures called spines to expand and send signals within D2R neurons,” said Yagishita. “We searched for several years before we discovered that discrimination learning was the cognitive process that refines reward learning following dopamine dips.”

To establish a link to psychosis, the authors administered a well-known psychosis-inducing drug, methamphetamine, and showed that both discrimination learning and dopamine dips were impaired. As a result, mice showed exaggerated behavioral and dopamine responses even when no reward was presented, as is the case in human psychosis. These deficits could be prevented with an antipsychotic compound that blocks D2R activity.

(Image caption: Microscopic image of a neuron that expresses D2R. Credit: © 2020 Yagishita et al.)

“If D2R signaling and discrimination learning is impaired, subjects may be unable to assign an appropriate significance to objects or people in their environment, and their fears or insecurities may fill in the gap,” said Yagishita. “For example, persecutory delusions arise from mistakenly assigning malevolent intent to strangers who pose no threat.”

The authors propose that these findings open a previously unknown window into psychosis. Their data show that an antipsychotic D2R drug can reverse effects of a psychosis-inducing one by specifically restoring the dopamine dips and discrimination learning to normal levels. Their hypothesis is that an impairment in discrimination learning can result in an inability to predict the environment accurately, leading to overt symptoms of psychosis or schizophrenia.

“The brain seems to have an intrinsic capacity for fantasy or delusional thinking, but there are built-in controls like D2R discrimination learning that help us to correct our misjudgments,” commented Kasai. “Our study raises the possibility that when these corrective controls break down, we can risk losing contact with reality and may enter a downward spiral of pathology.”

Looking ahead, Kasai concluded, “We hope to build a general learning model to accommodate clinical disorders of cognition that can also lead to new principles for next-generation AI (artificial intelligence).”

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