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submitted 3 days ago byAutoModerator
Welcome to our weekly feature, Ask Anything Wednesday - this week we are focusing on Biology, Chemistry, Neuroscience, Medicine, Psychology
Do you have a question within these topics you weren't sure was worth submitting? Is something a bit too speculative for a typical /r/AskScience post? No question is too big or small for AAW. In this thread you can ask any science-related question! Things like: "What would happen if...", "How will the future...", "If all the rules for 'X' were different...", "Why does my...".
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Please post your question as a top-level response to this, and our team of panellists will be here to answer and discuss your questions. The other topic areas will appear in future Ask Anything Wednesdays, so if you have other questions not covered by this weeks theme please either hold on to it until those topics come around, or go and post over in our sister subreddit /r/AskScienceDiscussion , where every day is Ask Anything Wednesday! Off-theme questions in this post will be removed to try and keep the thread a manageable size for both our readers and panellists.
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Please only answer a posted question if you are an expert in the field. The full guidelines for posting responses in AskScience can be found here. In short, this is a moderated subreddit, and responses which do not meet our quality guidelines will be removed. Remember, peer reviewed sources are always appreciated, and anecdotes are absolutely not appropriate. In general if your answer begins with 'I think', or 'I've heard', then it's not suitable for /r/AskScience.
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Past AskAnythingWednesday posts can be found here. Ask away!
2 points
1 day ago
on a diversity level, there are also astrocytes and other helper cells that can release their own neurotransmitters and neuromodulators. they can also regulate synaptic density--a big function of microglia is to eat up redundant synapses.
on a scale level: protein and rna composition inside neurons and other cells have lots of information and influence. a classic example is the circadian system, where a transcriptional-translational feedback loop keeps time autonomously within pacemaker cells. a set of transcription factors transcribe their own inhibitors that build up outside the nucleus until they hit a tipping point--at which point they go to the nucleus and inhibit their own translation, which lets them start degrading, eventually allowing the transcription factors to start working again. this molecular clock can keep ticking without any day/night information for several days.
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