TIL the faintness sensation come from hyperventilation is a result of respiratory alkalosis, which is caused by reduced CO2 (acidic) level in blood. CO2 is equilibrated with HCO3- (basic) in blood as a pH buffering solution. The lung controls the amount of CO2 whereas the kidney controls the amount of HCO3-. So breathing rate is determined by the level of CO2. Although the CO2 exhaled contributes to the majority of weight loss in human, hyperventilation is not a feasible way to lose weight because the benefit is marginal compared to the downside of respiratory alkalosis. A better way to lose weight is through producing more CO2, which is achieved by increasing metabolism rate.

Even life as simple as virus has evolved mechanism of cooperation and competition - on a molecular level. Amazing!

Chemotaxis is a great slice: it’s a triumph of systems biology—we understand it holistically but also in fine detail at almost every level.

Intelligence: what is it? Is it fair to consider human the only intelligent animal? This article talks about various traits animals exhibit that we typically associate with having a intelligence.

I wonder if there is man-made machine that's capable of replicating itself from a sequence of instructions that sort of act like DNA. Turns out there is!

John von Neumann's universal constructor is a self-replicating machine in a cellular automata (CA) environment.

This world runs on a cellular automaton system devised by von Neumann. The grid consists of cells where each can be in one of 29 states at any point in time. The state update is local to its environment. Similar to Conway's GoL.

The article proposed a mechanism called "Predicative Coding" that doesn't require backward flow of information to perform weight adjustment as backward propagation. Futher the author showed that the performance of Predicative Coding is similar to backward propagation.

The author, as such, concluded that predicative coding is a plausible way for biological neuron system to operate.

<blockquote>In this post, we’ll be taking a character-by-character look at the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine.</blockquote>

Very nice read about biology!

<blockquote>Imagine arriving at the airport just in time to catch a plane. Everything in your behavior betrays the heightened concentration of your attention. Your mind on</blockquote>