“Glucose appears to vanish” i’m sure it does, the matter just does that
Scientists solve 200-year-old puzzle of how tobacco plants make nicotine
31–40 of 62 posts
Re: Scientists solve 200-year-old puzzle of how tobacco plants make nicotine
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modafinil? Ritalin? The latter is great for tedious tasks.
“1 hour, full power” is the dream. Something where I could get those last things done in the evening without disrupting my sleep. Chemically possible? Why not?
Lots of drugs will get you where you’re looking to go.
Going to bed and waking up an hour earlier,
working immediately upon wakefulness,
will keep you there.
Re: Scientists solve 200-year-old puzzle of how tobacco plants make nicotine
#33“Glucose appears to vanish” i’m sure it does, the matter just does that
Glucose appears to vanish around me as well.
Re: Scientists solve 200-year-old puzzle of how tobacco plants make nicotine
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great to see this here. CIGS are bad, nicotine is pretty neutral to good, as a lozenge or patch or gum. Edit: Nicotine can be way more medically relevant than “less bad”. Not sure what the person replying to me is even on about, tbh
Really inhaling something burning is bad. Pretty much every other form of tobacco that is not cigarettes is less bad.
Chewing tobacco causes mouth cancer. Nicotine is okay, everything else in the tobacco leaf no so much.
Re: Scientists solve 200-year-old puzzle of how tobacco plants make nicotine
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really inhaling something burning is bad. Pretty much every other form of tobacco that is not cigarettes is less bad.
Inhaling? We're talking about a compound here, not tobacco.
The HN guidelines say "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says". The way I understand it is that different people on the thread often have different ways of thinking about the topic, and we shouldn't dismiss something because it's not what "we" were talking about. In this case, it was obvious to you that the parent was talking about smoking tobacco, right? So you can either engage with it, or not, but there's no need to reject someone's comment for not adhering to what you decided is the topic.
Re: Scientists solve 200-year-old puzzle of how tobacco plants make nicotine
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
How exactly would they ask that question 10,000 years ago if they didn't know what molecules were, much less nicotine?
A curious question. Those same people also bred brassica oleraceae into so many different crops so they had to have SOME idea of how plants worked. Maybe they did not attribute it to molecules but growing conditions or locations, or something. Either way somebody somewhere wondered about this before 1820.
Humans have definitely had some understanding of selective breeding for a long time, but only partial understanding of recessive genes and the risks of inbreeding (almost all societies have incest taboos, but that didn't stop the Habsburg lip).
Re: Scientists solve 200-year-old puzzle of how tobacco plants make nicotine
#37Paradoxically, nicotine has some medical use in e.g. displacing viral debris and autoantibodies from nAChR (nicotinic acetylcholine receptors) due to having highest affinity to these receptors, which seems to help with (long) Covid; "smoker paradox" in lower covid-related hospitalizations.
I was expecting to see a longer list of medical uses, but the wiki says that nicotine has performance impacts on cognition, improving fine motor motion and memory.
The pharmacology section is sophisticated.
Re: Scientists solve 200-year-old puzzle of how tobacco plants make nicotine
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really inhaling something burning is bad. Pretty much every other form of tobacco that is not cigarettes is less bad.
Chewing tobacco causes mouth cancer. Nicotine is okay, everything else in the tobacco leaf no so much.
On a scale from the-state-of-california cancer to exposed-to-sublethal-amounts-of-ionizing-radiation cancer, how worried should I be?
Re: Scientists solve 200-year-old puzzle of how tobacco plants make nicotine
#39It would be great if they could improve upon it. I find nicotine to be an underperforming chemical, despite its popularity. A bit more of a cognitive kick would be nice. Know what I mean?
Modafinil? Ritalin? The latter is great for tedious tasks.
It's also great for totally messing up your brain chemistry and your reward wiring. Wouldn't touch it myself.
I'm sure if you did it once or twice a year it'd be fine but let's be real, anyone who's willing to take it in the first place (outside of having a genuine medical reason like narcolepsy/ADHD) will want to take it a lot more than that.
Besides, in the long run - measured over weeks or months - these absolutely will not give you a productivity boost anyway comparable to sorting out your sleep/exercise/diet/mental health.
Re: Scientists solve 200-year-old puzzle of how tobacco plants make nicotine
#40The glucose part is especially interesting: the missing step wasn't just an unknown enzyme, but a transient intermediate that basically disappears by the end