It looks like the question surveyed was just "When somebody loses weight, where does it go?" The reason why FM physicians got this wrong is most likely just a framing issue. It's not a wrong answer; fats are broken down by beta-oxidation and the products are used in oxidative phosphorylation to generate ATP - which is then used for energy.
Honestly the question itself seems opaque and intentionally vague to generate surprising results. It's like asking a chemist "What happens to bonds during IR spectroscopy?" and then when they start talking about induced dipoles you say,"WRONG! The bonds stretch!!"
Yeah a reflex is innate by definition and not learned. They're also much more simplistic responses than this - think a baby fanning its toes out when you touch the sole of its foot.
I think they might have been thinking of a conditioned response, but then again you can't classically condition an animal to do something it's not already capable of. It's only the associations that are changed
This is a really great point and I believe it is (at least partially) driving the anti-science rhetoric that seems to be metastasizing. When a topic is inaccessible to the general public, and only experts in the field can understand it and hold a monopoly on information, then you inevitably start to see pushback against it.
That being said however, making certain fields more accessible to the populace often comes with the price of a false sense of understanding. You see this a lot in medicine with WedMD, where heuristics that largely ignore the deeper pathophysiology have empowered some to believe they are more knowledgeable than their doctors.
This must be doubly true for the more abstract forms of physics - where any simplified analogy is going to give rise to false notions via extrapolation. I think there has to be some sort of balance between the two
Not as a correction but more of an into the weeds clarification; neurons at rest have a pretty stable cytosolic ionic composition, they hover around -80mV resting potential due to leak channels.
The firing of an action potential, on the other hand, only happens when they become depolarized enough to reach their threshold potential. If they reach the threshold (generally due to ligand-receptor binding) then voltage gated sodium channels open up and the neuron gets flooded with positive charge - this is the electrical impulse that moves down the axon.
To be honest I'm not someone who knows much about about computer science, but in terms of a boolean type operator the closest thing that comes to mind is the threshold potential? It's an all or nothing process, either T or F, and if it's true then an action potential is generated.
It's a metabolic intermediate of the citric acid cycle - the cycle is needed to reduce electron carriers (NAD+/FAD) which are then used to drive the electron transport chain for making ATP. In simplest terms: it's an important part of aerobic respiration.
That being said, it can be synthesized de novo very easily so long as your cells have enough glucose/fatty acids and enzymes are functioning properly. It's even formed directly by deamination of glutamate. I'm not sure these results would be very transferrable to humans.
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3196277/