Monster Train 2. I have 1 more challenge run left before reaching 100% completion of those. Then I might finally pick up the DLC and try to finish 100% of clan combos at max crucible level.

Only then will I allow myself to pick up Slay the Spire 2. I try to avoid early access games, but will make an exception here.

In MT1 last month, I beat 100% class combos at C20. The challenges were less fun because they required you to play at C20, and I felt like that difficulty permanently limited what strategies were viable. Challenges in 2 are zanier and most are at a lower difficulty, so it’s altogether more fun.

I’m somewhat new to Linux, too, but I have a dedicated hard drive partition for my OS. Had to do a reinstall recently (bricked my PC during the Arch NVIDIA debacle), all I did was wipe that partition and literally everything was ready to go on my data partition once I reinstalled. It should make hopping easier.

There are types of dwarfism that can lead to mental impairment, but not all. Calling on a personal anecdote, I work in a highly technical field, with two colleagues who are little people. I know one of them holds a PhD.

There are correlations between height and intelligence, but being tall doesn’t make you smart, it just means you have access to good nutrients that make you both tall and smart. Human ancestors had different diets - once we figured out how to control fire, use tools, amd farm, our caloric intake practically exploded. Evolution then took over, and now our brains consume something like 20% of our daily caloric intake. So, feed your brain and stay curious!

I would bet, dollars to donuts, it’s less that those parts of the brain have no designated purpose, and more that we just don’t know them. Brains are really complicated and the tools we have to study them aren’t perfect.

Part of what makes this so difficult to study is that we have very few regions of the brain with a single dedicated function. Outside of sensory and motor parts of the brain, many brain regions seem to do multiple things. Most function of the brain depends on networks of multiple regions firing together. Some regions of the brain can participate in multiple networks.

Then, consider that our best tool to study brain networks, functional magnetic resonance imaging, has poor spatial resolution. You may see the same region of, say, a cubic millimeter of brain tissue, active during two different cognitive tasks like memory and motor control, but it could be different populations of cells that happen to be next to each other. Also, functional MRI is going through some growing pains right now - we just learned in 2026 that fMRI signal isn’t necessarily measuring neural activity as well as we thought, so it’s back to the drawing board for a lot of these studies.

The biggest predictor of intelligence in the animal kingdom is the surface area of brain tissue, not size. You get more surface area by having more folds and bumps (sulci and gyri) on your brain.

Brains are made of neurons and neurons are organized into two types of brain tissue - gray and white matter. Gray matter is where the cell bodies are located, and white matter is where all their connections (axons) are located. Gray matter tends to be found on the surface of all these sulci and gyri, while white matter is located underneath this layer. More surface area = more efficiently connected brain cells.

I don’t know of any literature looking at human intelligence related to folds and bumps, but that’s not what I studied in graduate school. You have to be careful when looking at the older literature on intelligence because it was fairly prejudiced and designed to prove old ideas of race theory.

Academic publishing was definitely a contributing factor to why I left academic research.

I also believe we should incentive peer-review. Maybe every researcher should be evaluated on how many articles they peer-review each year, relative to the amount they publish. I knew some researchers who would publish dozens of articles every year, would peer-review zero of them, and then complain about poor quality peer review.

+1 for Endeavour, apart from the unfortunate update of legacy NVIDIA drivers (10xx series of cards losing mainline support) this December I’ve had 0 issues

This just in, hearing aids are woke?

Here’s the original press release for anyone interested: https://newsroom.heart.org/news/long-term-use-of-melatonin-supplements-to-support-sleep-may-have-negative-health-effects

The most important sentence: “They were matched with peers in the database who also had insomnia but never had melatonin recorded in their health records. People were excluded from the analysis if they had previously been diagnosed with heart failure or had been prescribed other sleep medications.” There are a few other sentences describing how well the control group was matched. I think it was a well-designed study.

I think there is still a risk of bias present, though, because people who decide to take melatonin might have more severe insomnia compared to people who just decide to just “live with it” and are not using sleep aids.

The next step should be a randomized clinical trial looking at heart failure rate in patients with insomnia dosed with melatonin versus placebo and/or a different medication. Until then, correlation does not mean causation. I don’t think such a study will be done in the US because melatonin is considered a dietary supplement and is not subject to the same degree of regulation as medicine. Maybe in the UK, since melatonin is prescription only?

Tiny castle or big banana?

It gets better - the local minor league baseball team is called the Florence Y’alls. And their mascot is a water tower. It’s so Midwest.

Jimthew.

By the time I finished graduate school, reddit was dead so I never bothered getting verified on the Science subreddits. It was a bummer!

I’ll be the pedant no one asked for - the sodium and potassium channels in the neuron respond to voltage changes in the membrane, so the author isn’t wrong.

Action potentials are generated when dendritic (input) channels bind with neurotransmitters like glutamate and GABA released by the axon terminal (output) of the pre-synapse cell. When these channels open, the let in ions like Calcium, Sodium, and Chloride.

These ions change the electric potential across the cell membrane, once this passes a key threshold, the sodium channels in the rest of the cell open up and generate an action potential. It’s driven by ions with electric charge (electrochemical).

Not quite, an iron lung replaces a dysfunctional organ. I’m saying we can already grow neurons onto circuits, and it’s difficult (not impossible) to implant neurons into a body. I don’t easily see how these bio-engineered neurons make those processes easier.

Credentials: I published in this field, but I don’t have time to read the entire paper right now.

This is exciting work. Based on the key highlights, it sounds like their work focuses on how plausible it is to construct the bio-artificial neuron, and they have done so with great success.

What I would like to learn about is what advantages this technology has compared to just cultivating neurons on a microelectrode array. Are the artificial cells easier to maintain? Do they interface with electrodes without developing glial scarring like our brains do? Can they bio-engineer special proteins (e.g. optogenetic channels) easier in these cells than in mouse lines?

The discussion section is fairly anemic. The authors say this will “spearhead” additional development but I was disappointed the authors didn’t clarify what will be additionally developed.

Until these advantages are spelled out, it feels like we’re re-invented the biological wheel. We already have cells that can integrate and fire at low voltages. They’re called neurons. Why did we need artificial ones?

I was about that age when I was gifted a microscope. No idea if you can still find them that cheap, though

This happened with an academic conference (physics iirc). A professor was asked to speak and she submitted a headshot for use in their advertising, but the conference wanted a different aspect ratio. Rather than crop the image, the materials designer asked ChatGPT to expand the photo to the correct size. It gave the professor a low cut shirt, and no one at the conference company noticed until the promotional materials were distributed and the professor contacted them.

Fold-tober sounds fun! I’d get into it

I’ve been watching this treatment for a while, in my opinion it’s one of the most exciting development in modern medicine. It represents a lot of potential - Huntington’s is one of many brain diseases related to protein aggregates, so this technology could be adapted to other diseases. Plus, this is the first curative treatment for what was otherwise a 100% fatal genetic condition.