I'm looking forward to taking shots out of strange snooters

Genetically coded.

They build dams instinctively to create a pond/lake which they then construct a nest (lodge) in. The nest has an underwater entrance, which keeps predators out. The point of the whole shebang is that underwater entrance.

Some dna isn't transcribed but has a significant impact on transcription/expression. Transcription is like the publicly exposed API

Typically the question of variance comes down to an aggregate statistic. The most common is "the maximum likelihood estimate", which for a normal enough distribution (bell curve) is the mean.

It's called maximum likelihood because most of x is most likely to be close to the mean.

The more samples you have, the more genomes in this case, the better you can estimate the actual average. With enough samples the actual population mean is overwhelmingly likely to be the same as your estimate.

If the vast majority of people have 99% identical whatever, that's a very tightly grouped distribution around the mean with very low variance. It's practically a vertical line instead of a curve.

Those aren't just anecdotal. They have a lot of support, though I'm not sure about the acne. Exercise does improve immune function, so that's one possible link. I'm sure someone has looked into it.

In the case where we use unobtanium to perfectly freeze and preserve the brain without damage then yeah. The electrical impulses aren't the important part. Neurons use those impulses to quickly signal themselves to signal other neurons chemically, or that a sufficiently stimulating signal/pattern has been received.

Memories aren't persistent in a normally functioning healthy brain which hasn't been scifi frozen in time.

The rate of information decay is going to vary directly with the rate of physical decay, with special importance placed (for non procedural memory) on the hippocampus (edit: and part of the prefrontal cortex), but there is a lot of memory all over the brain.

Which means that the extent to which the neurons are damaged/destroyed is going to determine the extent to which function is lost. Function and memory are the same thing.

Think of it this way: it's impossible to imagine throwing a ball without using regions of your brain responsible for actually throwing a ball. When you remember throwing a ball the neurons involved in throwing that ball are active.

If you damage the region responsible for remembering the sequence of events that led to you throwing the ball, and/or the regions involved in ball throwing, you won't be able to run the "I threw a ball one time" program.

Regarding freezing and thawing: I don't know but I imagine ice crystals would create some very serious issues.

Every single thought you have has a physical process behind it. Ideas are collaborations between neurons and groups of neurons to model the world.

An idea can be as simple as a small line at a 32 degree angle, in an image. The neurons responsible for detecting lines at precisely that angle have no concept of what a line is. They respond to a specific pattern of stimulus from other cells, and emit their own responses when that stimulus fits the pattern.

Knowing what pattern to respond to is a form of memory.

There is a specialized "memory region" (it does considerably more than that) in the center of your brain called the hippocampus which doesn't "store all your data", so much as a significant portion of its neurons are dedicated to coordinating activity in the rest of your brain so that you can learn, remember, and abstract ideas. It emits signals which propagate through most of the brain and signify whether or not information is in the past, present, or future.

Memory as we commonly discuss it is a simulation of the past. It's a rough approximate replay of coordinated activity pulsing through the brain. When your mind wanders, and when you sleep the hippocampus recruits other areas of your brain to replay past events. There seem to be two primary reasons for this:

1. To abstract/compress/refine the data. A little chaos is "injected" into the data by "loosening restrictions", which in statistical terms helps to avoid overfitting and promote generalization. Basically your brain wants to learn general patterns and ideas rather than extremely situationally specific ones. This is the heart of abstraction
2. To encourage individual neurons and networks to reinforce and remember ideas

Over time connections which enable/facilitate the recall/replay of patterns degrade if they aren't replayed. We don't remember everything forever, we barely even process most of the information our senses receive.

To answer your question then... volatile. However the rate of information decay is going to vary directly with the rate of physical decay, with special importance placed (for non procedural memory) on the hippocampus (edit: and part of the prefrontal cortex), but there is a lot of memory all over the brain.

Meaningful climate action is happening, but not quickly enough.

Every relationship isn't easily examined with statistics. It could be that n discrete events have a cumulative effect, when coupled with other factors. That sort of thing is difficult to model. History is far more a story of asymptotic punctuated equilibrium than a continuous function. Consider slavery and civil rights in the US

That isn't what the position paper is about. It's another high level proposal for a general ai based loosely on cognitive and neuroscience re brain architecture. It has nothing to do with your search history/whatever, and frankly a quick skimmy glance suggests that it's hardly news

The actual paper is here: https://openreview.net/pdf?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf

It's written for a general audience. I don't have time to read it now, but you're better off reading the paper than the article, as the latter says nothing new.