From antidepressant chemicals in tobacco smoke, to supplements on Amazon, I consider the importance of enzymes & catalysts in facilitating human biochemistry activation enabling life, & attempt to tie it all together.
For the typo & grammar mistakes bellow, I must apologize. I have been adapting to wake up at 4am for my new job & went to bed too late last night to wake up fully mentally sharp this morning, but wrote this wild tangent connecting a bunch of things I think about, hoping to inspire someone else to understand more, thus enabling other people to innovate, create, solve problems or help other people with novel insight, especially if it helps them forgive the smokers in their lives, knowing that people are only smoking for relief from stress, and that nicotine the most addictive substances known to mankind!
Tobacco smoke contains some powerful pharmacologically active substances with tremendous market potential to revolutionize the way we treat mental illness, helping patents with chronic stress, anxiety or issues with depression for example! I refer to other people as patients in a medical context because I read a physiology text book for fun & have an extensive knowledge of the human body, biochemistry, chemistry & physics, mostly from reading Wikipedia for tens of thousands of hours, a few hours every day for nearly 20 years now :) I am not saying that smoking is healthy, though some daily smokers live into their 80's & 90's & even living to over 100 years alive, like the oldest living WWII veteran who smokes cigars daily, even though he is 109 years old! I think the health impacts of smoking tobacco are strongly influenced by individual genetic & epigenetic & mindset & ideology factors that vary considerable between different people. I had a young cousin die of brain tumors as an 8 year old boy, sadly. I have an uncle who is in his late 80's who has been smoking cigarettes since he was a teen, and can keep up with me hiking, incredibly, seemingly unaffected, almost in a bewildering or confusing way, given what I know about the toxicity of smoking tobacco or tobacco smoke's negative impacts on human health, even according to the worlds tobacco companies & labels on the packages from the Surgeon General.
I really wonder why Government does not communicate about these highly important genetic & epigenetic & dietary factors that have huge effects on health & wellness! I think greed & corruption might be explicatory factors, collusion between big chemical, pharmaceutical & industrial food companies & the federal government, with lobbyists represent special corporate interests that go against public health in many instances, for example.
I was on Amazon poking around last night when I noticed people were selling Harmine/ Harmaline powder, and other Russian Academy of Sciences compounds with pharmacological effects, known as nootropics that improve cold tolerance, used by cosmonauts to improve stress resistance during extended missing in lower Earth Orbit for example. What does this have to do with plasma physics or catalytic chemistry. Let's start with enzymes in the human body.
A catalyst works by lowering the activation energy needed to initiate a chemical reaction between the reactants, chemical compounds, such that the reaction can preceded forward to make the products with less initial energy to start the reaction. Incredibly this does not violate the law of conservation of energy in Physics, because all the catalytic action doing is enabling electron exchange to proceed by facilitating the valence electron shell exchange between the reactants so as to initiate the chemical reaction. A catalytic electron exchange almost like a short-cut, so that less activation energy required to start the reaction proceeding forward.
While this is a gross simplification, I want to mention it because of tobacco smoke combustion, a reaction kicked off by heat energy from the lighter or match flame from the combustion of carbon into H2O & CO2, that provides energy to ignite the tobacco which then combusts driving out essential oils, terpenes, alkaloids & many other compounds into the resulting tobacco smoke. This gets back to the Harmine / Harmaline observation, since these compounds in tobacco smoke are dopamine reuptake inhibitors that can promote pancreatic cell proliferation to help people with diabetes, with a short duration treatment with Harmine. Harmine toxic, so the course of treatment must be less than 10 days. Pancratic alpha & beta cell production up regulated because the Harmine interfere with an enzyme pathway, getting back to why I mentioned catalytic reactions.
The human body has thousands of enzymes facilitating chemical reactions in every cells such that hundreds of chemical reactions are happening in each cell as body temperature just above room temperature that would not even proceed forward as reactions without the protein catalysts known as enzymes present. These chemical reactions that facilitate DNA transcription are going 1000 miles per hour, many hundreds of these reactions in each cell happening every second. Without enzymes helping to initiate human body chemical reactions, human life would not be possible. All lifeforms make use of enzymatic catalytic activity to enable biochemistry reactions to happen with less activation energy (at lower temperatures) Remember that temperature just a measurement of the average kinetic energy of vibration inside a atom or element or molecules or substances or stuff. The absence of any molecular vibrational energy caused Absolute Zero and can only be approached by the use of vacuum laser traps that are based on advanced physics from Einstein & others. These university ion traps costs hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars & are at the forefront of applied technology in physics, the application of advanced math in science.
To go back around, one of the reasons that people find stress relief from smoking tobacco, because the chemistry of the tobacco smoke delivers a small metered dose of Harmine & Harmaline which act as an MAOI monoamine oxidase inhibitor. Well, MAOI is an enzyme used to breakdown stimulating neurotransmitter compounds like norepinephrine & acytylcholine & dopamine & serotonin. You can reasonable conclude that the brain makes all of its own drugs & the brains endogenous psychoactive compounds means that, in the words of Wim Hof, the dutch super cold record setting althetes "everyone is getting high on their own supply" such that we do not need to take drugs like nicotine to get activation of our Nicotinitic Receptors, NCAHR's, the ligand target of nicotine, some B-vitamins & other substance with similar chemical geometry. Did you know that the shape of a molecule of a given substance strongly affects how it impacts the human body.
Consider how a neutral charged substance like ethanol diffuses through the body, taking around 12 hours to be metabolically cleared by the liver mostly, but also leaving the body in sweat, breath, saliva. A BAC testing unit that measures your blood alcohol concentration when you breathe into it, works my measuring the voltage produced by an ethanol fuel cell powered by ethanol your breathing into the machine as a vapor in your exhaled breath. It takes a typical average human adult around 1 hour to break down 1/2 oz or or about 14 ml of pure ethanol, noting that beer only round 5-8 ABV, wine 7-18 ABV, spirits 20-77 ABV, or typically a mixture of water & other substances with ethanol. Few people actually consume pure ethanol, since refining it to remove water difficult chemically because it forms an azeotropic mixture with with water. To understand why ethanol & water bind so tightly that distillation stops beyond a certain concentration, we have to consider the polar ethanol molecule & its interaction with dipole in the bent water molecule so as to facilitate hydrogen bonding, the same reason that water does not evaporate easily like other chemical solvents with similar molecular weights that lack waters special dipole moment & the ability to engage in powerful hydrogen bonding.
All chemical bonds are facilitated by valence electron sharing, and how those electrons are shared or distributed in the model mostly significantly affects its chemical activity. An atoms outermost electron orbital shells are the ones that interact in chemical interactions, forming bonds with other elements thereby. I studied chemistry for many years, formally in High School & College & continued studying chemistry & still study chemistry & physics, because those interactions between chemical elements & molecules influence every aspect of life on Earth & have widespread implications in every sector of every economy & affect everyone now & in the future, by influences how energy moves through food webs, into the human body, brain & mind facilitating thinking & thus enabling human activity of all kinds with relevance in every aspect of life on Earth.
Plasma physics means atoms that have been energizes by electricity that strips off their electron shells placing those atoms into a plasma state of higher vibration energy, typically a higher temperature. Very important for the development of improve electric thrusters for spacecraft with much lower specific thrust or specific impulse, or how long the engine can run. Most chemical rockets can operate for a few hundred seconds maximum, before the fuel tanks run out of fuel. The materials available to make rocket engines make them very expensive & place thermal limitation on the reaction temperature, such that they even result to ablative carbon lining in some rocket nozzles, amazing given carbons high melting point, sorta like the tiles on the underside of NASA's Space Shuttles made of carbon foam to resist extreme atmospheric heating encountered as the Shuttle reenters Earth's Atmosphere, which becomes thicker with gas molecules as the Shuttle continues to lose altitude. This means that the high velocity forward movement of the shuttle & turbulent air resistance under it shoves gas molecules at the underside with energy energy to super heat the insulating tiles. Without these fragile carbon foam tiles which were fastidiously applied in an intensive time consume delicate process, the reentry heat would melt the metals in the frame of the Space Shuttle.
I was watching an Applied Science YouTube video last night about pulling carbon-nanotube fibers out of a small sample of graphene, making a fiber with unmatched physical strength, called graphene thread, its a Holy Grail of material science proving difficult to make in significant quantities without a major improvement to manufacturing techniques to enable high volume production of graphene. Graphene batteries are going to be 20x better energy density & 100x longer life than current common EV' batteries of the typical lithium ion chemistry employed by Automakers like NCA, NMR, NMC, Iron Phosphate, Cobalt Oxide, etc since there are more than 12 different Li-ion batteries in high volume production worldwide.
Sony created & first produced Li-ion batteries in 1991, as none of the other commercial battery manufacturers in Japan at the time would help Sony, and Sony needed a high energy density battery to empower the Walkman, which went on to become an Iconic media device, enabling listers to take their favorite music on the go! This portable personal music Walkman revolutionized the way that regular working people could enjoy their favorite music, all made possible my battery innovation because Sony spends a significant portion of their operating revenue on research & development sincere & technological innovation development, I think more than any other company worldwide.
Energy is everything, even matter is made of energy. E= MC^2
This means that energy conversion, energy storage, energy applications, calorie energy in food, batteries in electronics & electric vehicles of all kinds, I am talking about Grid Power, industrial GW scale electricity that energizes modern life, powering bulbs & lamps & heaters & appliances & motors & pumps & making fridges possible, microwave ovens possible, wifi possible, nearly all aspects of modern life require electrical power to function.
If people do not eat for more than 40 days they shrink down & end up dying of starvation. If people stop drinking water, after about 4 days they can die from fatal dehydration. When I do long duration fasting for 3+ days, I drink 5 liters of water per day to rinse out all the funk cleared out by autophagy kicked off by extended fasting. Fasting easy, stop putting food in your mouth & just drink water, skip a bunch of meals in a row. If you're fat & or sick with metabolic diseases like Type 2 diabetes, this can really help. If you're taking insulin, you need to cut your dose in half or take way less insulin & keep track of your blood glucose carefully with a CGM or blood testing with a glucometer via finger prick testing. If you are an insulin dependent diabetic, please consult your doctor about how to safely fast before trying to fast. Make sure to drink enough water to stay well hydrated when fasting & taking a pinch of salt if you're feeling hungry at first can really help. I am not a doctor, and not giving out medical advice, but I know a lot of people IRL in first person, that lost a lot of weight by fasting for 4-7 days at a time. I know some really overweight people who lost many tens of pounds of body weight by fasting for 10-14 days.
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