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.
We talk about the use of tools because it's a very significant conceptual leap. Once you understand that you can manipulate your environment to accomplish your goals the abilities in your list are comparatively incremental.
Our use of tools isn't the only measure of specialness, but I'm not sure there are many cognitive leaps quite so significant... language would be one but seems trickier to pin down because there are degrees of sophistication.
I think the real only limiting factor prevent them from accomplishing what we have is that they do not have the limbs and dexterity available which we have. This enabled us to perform many tasks which are out of the question for them. I'd say they do damn well for what their body's allow them to do.
Of course not, but there just has to be one apart from ours, right? Besides we will all be extinct anyway before that because evolution takes billions of years.
That's probably a question that CS researches will get to address one day in the future... Estimating what percentage of reasonable length DNA arrangements leads to intelligent organisms.
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.
Looking at it a different way, if productivity is defined as the combination of all relevant features (education, experience, ethics, etc.) then racism/sexism imply non-zero coefficients in
wage ~ productivity + race + gender
This also assumes a competitive market where wage will asymptotically approach productivity.
In general, stimulants were once more popular as apatite curbing agents. When the drug was developed, they probably thought people would use it to lose weight, so 'glucose eater' has the same general effect they were going for: weight loss.
A lot of people don't like to hear that. It's simmilar to when people call Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, etc. "monsters", they weren't monsters, they were human. Humans are capable of some pretty fucked up things
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.
