I'm tired of drugs, /sci/. Every interesting drug I can think of comes with a nasty body load, and a whole array of undesirable side-effects. It seems like flooding the brain with chemicals is just too crude a method: you have no control over which parts of the brain are kicked into higher gear.
So here's my question: how viable is it to manufacture pharmacological nanobots that can be programmed to not only bind to specific receptors, but do so only in specific parts of the brain? Are we going to see such a thing within our lifetime? Could we one day simply program our own stimulants, psychedelics etc. to get more out of our brains? It seems like a more viable path towards mind enhancement than traditional drugs or cybernetic implants.
It seems all this social distancing and extra hygiene could be a problem for our immune systems.
>A century ago, British scientists suggested a link between increased hygiene and allergic conditions — the first hint that our immune systems are becoming improperly “trained.”
>She’s referring, with a facetious touch, to the fact our immune system can become disrupted if it doesn’t have regular interactions with the natural world.
>“Our immune system needs a job,” Dr. Lemon said. “We evolved over millions of years to have our immune systems under constant assault. Now they don’t have anything to do.”
What's the best way to deal with this? Got some relevant studies?
My current theory is that intermittent exposure to harmless pathogens and unclean conditions would be best.
Should one eat some dirt/soil once in a while? What about air cleaners at home? Is it possible to have the immune system run fine without any/lots of close social contact for a while? How to stimulate and train the immune system during isolation?
>The World Health Organization (WHO) has honoured an African-American woman whose cells have led to crucial medical breakthroughs
>Henrietta Lacks, a tobacco grower, died aged 31 in 1951 of cervical cancer and samples of her cells were collected by doctors without her or her family's knowledge.
They were the first living human cells to multiply outside the human body.
They have been used in research that led to the polio vaccine, gene mapping and IVF treatment.
These and other advances have resulted in Henrietta Lacks being named the "mother" of modern medicine.
That's setting low standards, but then again the media gave credit to Salk, a lab assistant and not the two men who got noble peace prices for curing Polio.
What is chemical engineering like? Is it like pic related, where you get to build systems for efficiently producing chemicals in bulk. If so, that sounds awesome. How many of the classes in uni are about engineering compared to classes on chemistry. I've always had an autistic thing for making large amounts of useful chemicals. If I didn't have family responsibilities, I definitely would have considered going into it.
I want to know a few things and you're the smartest people I am in contact with
How far away are we from human immortality? Just basic biological immortality for starters, but also, how close have we gotten to Godliness? After biological immortality what obstacles are there to us constructing utopia?
