Spyke

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Intelligent Design

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Another fun fact: retinol is regenerated by your liver. Not your eyes, not some part of your brain, not some organ near your head like your thalamus which could probably get the job done if it tried, your fucking liver. Your eyes taking a while to adjust to the dark has basically nothing to do with your eyes; it’s because of the delay in adjustment by your fucking liver to produce more retinal, dump it into your vascular system and wait for it to hopefully reach your eyes.

This is fascinating, I had no idea that there was another mechanism at play to improve low light vision other than pupil dilation

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Cubic millimetre of brain mapped in spectacular detail

The 3D map covers a volume of about one cubic millimetre, one-millionth of a whole brain, and contains roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses — the connections between neurons. It incorporates a colossal 1.4 petabytes of data.

Assuming this means the total data of the map is 1.4 petabytes. Crazy to think that mapping of the entire brain will probably happen within the next century.

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We Need to Rethink Exercise – The Workout Paradox

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That's one of the takeaways here, there were a lot more details.

The stuff about everyone's baseline energy consumption being pretty much just linked to your body weight (and in the long term being unaffected by the amount of exercise you do) was pretty eye-opening for me. I had no idea that if you live a sedentary lifestyle, your body uses that extra energy budget for stuff like your immune system (which is bad), and this could be why exercise reduces inflammation, etc.