It’s less about managed culls and more about raising funds for conservation.

Hot take, I’ll offer an alternative perspective. Obviously, poaching is one of the most disgusting crimes. Sourcing animal parts for folk remedies is reprehensible.

Responsibly managed hunting generates a ton of money, some of which which gets invested into the local community and into conservation efforts.

The key word here is responsible. If a land manager shared wealth in an equitable fashion with the locals, and demonstrates careful management of animal herds by close monitoring of populations, that’s responsibility. I wouldn’t want to hunt on lands owned by, say, a literal nazi in South Africa. But, unfortunately, as long as we live under capitalism, I have a hard time imagining a different way to encourage the world to preserve our natural resources.

Ducking autocorrect strikes again. Astrocytes

That’s a surprising statement to me. Honestly, those aren’t even the most important. Glutamate is the most common neurotransmitter in the brain. But dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin are responsible for some very “classic” bodily functions like reward, adrenaline, and sleep.

Now, hormones are typically separate from the brain - there’s a barrier between neurons and your circulating blood maintained by astrocytes. This is the so-called blood-brain barrier. I do not know if there are examples of Oxytocin and Epinephrine crossing the BBB, as I did not study it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood–brain_barrier?wprov=sfla1

Sorry, that was maybe too pithy for a science post. https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3339

Dopamine does a lot in the brain. Much of its function depends on where it’s active. When released in the ventral tegmental area, it causes reward and happiness. In the basal ganglia, dopamine helps us coordinate movement.

Since I’m already on my soapbox, I’d like to point out there’s more than 3 neurotransmitters. These are the basic ones:

• Dopamine - reward and muscle movement
• Acetylcholine - motor neurotransmitter
• Glutamate - primary excitation transmitter, important for memory and overall function
• GABA - primary inhibitor transmitter
• Glycine - inhibitor in the spinal cord
• Serotonin - the other happy hormone, involved in a lot of complex stuff like sleep, depression, and hunger
• Norepinephrine - fight or flight, adrenaline
• Epinephrine - the other fight or flight hormone
• Oxytocin - the nipple clamp hormone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotransmitter?wprov=sfla1

This one tilts me the hardest. It’s like saying a 3-ligjt stoplight only uses 33% of it’s lights.

Actually, no, the bio soster shares the same biological father. This was an embryo adoption, not IVF

Personally, I disagree. The baby’s bio sister is, literally, a biological sister whose DNA comes from the same parents.

The limiting factor in utero is the health of the placenta. Past a certain point, the organ no longer functions and the baby does not survive. This is why (at least in the US) inductions are required past a certain point.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9320537/

Because, I shit you not, it’s cheaper than adoption in the US.

That’s not quite the same thing - the 7 digit phone number has more to do with short-term memory capacity than visual perception. Miller’s Law of short-term memory is we can store 7 +/- 2 items at a time, depending how complex they are.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two

As much as I love that, it’s likely this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublimation_(psychology)

I’m a tall guy that fenced in college. You’re a monster. But every fencer consents for this torture, so you can keep on keepin’ on.

PhD in neuroscience here. I didn’t specifically study musicology, but i did study the neuroscience of music.

The theory that holds the most water, in my opinion, is that music activates all the same parts of the brain as motor processing. It makes us want to move, and to make predictions about what’s coming next. People like makimg predictions. It’s also a pro-social activity that encourages bonding and communication. These are typically positive experiences.

Edit: you mentioned we like the breaking of patterns in music. Very true, we love syncopation. But we don’t tap our foot to the rhythm, we groove to the beat.

I’m jealous. I have a hard time getting it to the table, but when it’s there I’m living my best life.

Have you tried learning Japanese / English after learning the other? I studied Japanese and learned how to pronounce the /r/ in Japanese correctly.

For some people, the difficulty is less in production, and more in interpretation for someone who is native Japanese speaking and later learned English.

Chiming in with more context, my PhD was in neuroscience and I worked in a language lab. As others have stated, there is a critical window for learning a language. The biology behind it is fascinating.

As early as about 9 months of age, your brain begins to decide what speech sounds are important to you. For example, in Japanese the difference between /r/ and /l/ sounds doesn’t matter, but in English it does. Before 9 months, most babies can tell the difference between the two sounds, but babies living in Japanese-speaking environments (without any English) LOSE this ability after 9ish months!

Language is more than just speech sounds, though. Imagine all these nuances of language - there are critical moments where your brain just decides to accept or reject them, and it’s coded somewhere in your DNA.

It proved there were benefits, read the article.

Very few things are proved definitively in science. You test a hypothesis with statistics, which always carries a margin of error. Usually, it’s 5% - the probability that your data randomly supports your hypothesis, even though there’s no true relationship.

Personally, I prefer when journalists coach their language to avoid overstating the truth.