dp-tyvek

Glutamate doesn't have any psychoactive effects because it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier (to a significant extent). You are correct that theanine and glutamate in theory should have a similar effect on receptors, but receptor activity is only half the story. Other factors like transport and metabolism are important too. For example amphetamine and phenethylamine are structurally very similar, but will have a vastly different effect on your body.

It's not that uncommon for scientific journals, sadly.

We are special though. Birds carrying burning sticks to spread fires is significantly different from humans:

-Starting fires

-Using fire to process food

-Using fire to process raw materials into something that can be used for tools, structures etc.

According to my understanding, rimliu is proposing that

  wage ~ education + experience + gender + race + additional_factors + error

where additional_factors consists of other unknown factors (e.g. charisma, intelligence, appearance?). In which case, if education, experience, gender and race are kept constant, there is still going to be a fair bit of variance in wage caused by these unknown factors.

Either way, it would be pretty hard to model when these factors are far from orthogonal. Imagine the impact race would have on work experience if race is a big factor when hiring people.

OT, but how did the brand name Glucophage get approved? I don't see how calling a drug "glucose eater" is anything but misleading.

You don't have to be a sociopath to do horrific things. A lot of people are capable of doing the same in the right (wrong) circumstances.

I'm not familiar with the book, but behavioural therapy has acutally been shown to be useful for managing back pain.

Soy (and other crops) are modified to be resistant to pesticides and pests, so I presume it makes no difference for their phytoestrogen contents. For example, glyphosate ("Roundup") resistant crops are only modified to have a different version (which still preforms the same function) of the enzyme that would otherwise have been inhibited by glyphosate, IIRC.

In my (anecdotal) experience a lot of people just go for the familiar brands when buying commodity products. Surely creating brand awareness must have some kind of effect.

The moon has ~no atmosphere, so any gas released there would diffuse into space.

What I was trying to say is, because any gas will diffuse from an area of high concentration to one with a lower concentration, there is no place in Earth's atmosphere one can release gas without it diffusing throughout it. The best you can do is slow the process down.

The moon

Any gas released into Earth's atmosphere would diffuse quite quickly.

A lot of cost of drugs comes from R&D, quality control etc. The chemical synthesis itself generally isn't that expensive. And expired pills would be a quite unpredictable precursor, which isn't very desirable in the pharma industry (or anywhere else for that matter). In other words, I doubt you could make much of a profit (if any) from purifying non-decomposed chemicals from pills.