Cav > Books: chemistry‎ (56)

"Do you imagine futuristic cityscapes? Do you feel hopeful? Do you picture billowing smokestacks? Do you feel terrified? Does it remind you of school? Does that hold a positive or negative connotation for you?
As to what you envisioned, it may have been any of the above, or something totally different still. But the general consensus of the American public on this matter can be quite easily traced through recent history. In the years following World War II, the American economy was booming. The middle class was gainfully employed, adequately fed and sheltered, and filled with optimism. Because of this, science was viewed as a gleaming obelisk of limitless advancement. It was Disneyland’s Tomorrowland. It was the Jetsons. It was longevity and prosperity."

"Prior to the internet, there were sources of information that were unanimously agreed upon to be trustworthy and reliable. Stories published by newspapers had to be heavily researched by professional journalists. Knowledge from an encyclopedia was not questioned by those who needed to reference a fact, because they were written by top specialists in every discipline, which contributed to their considerable cost. Whether we regard them as good or bad, those times are gone, and they are never coming back. Unlike the encyclopedias of old, the quality of information on the internet is not reliable. It ranges from outstanding to abysmal. For this reason, the internet can serve as a magic mirror, a place where people go to confirm pre-existing bias. Outlets that reflect what we already “know” are correct and trustworthy. Those that do not are ignored, deemed fraudulent, deceitful, paid for by malevolent institutions, or worse. This method of assessment rarely has any respect for the qualifications of those who produce the content we encounter, which has led to what is popularly referred to as the “post-truth era.”

"...I myself became curious about the drug when my father, a retired judge, started to consider giving microdoses of LSD to my mother to treat her Alzheimer’s disease. He had asked me why, if the drug was actually supposed to help, he couldn’t just get it at the pharmacy. This launched me on my research.
The more I dug into the history, the more fascinated I became. I began to see how much of the early history of LSD was shaped by the shadow that lies over the molecule, a result of the personal connection between a Swiss pharmaceutical CEO named Arthur Stoll, a kind of unwilling forefather of psychedelics, and Richard Kuhn, the leading biochemist for the Third Reich. This relationship aided the National Socialists, who were beginning to study the use of psychedelics as potential “truth drugs”—questionable research, which, after the war, sparked the interest of the US military and its intelligence agencies in these substances.
This book is what emerged from my curiosity. In this moment when, after many decades, we are finally reconsidering the nature of our laws surrounding psychedelics, it feels more important than ever to look backward and understand how we arrived at those regulations in the first place."

"...Red light and near-infrared wavelengths is not harmful because treatments occur in a controlled environment such as a licensed spa or medical center, or even using a high-grade red light device at home. This means the chances of the light wavelengths generated by pure red light burning the skin are very dismal."

"...Red light therapy has been around for decades, since the advent of lasers in the 1960s. Currently, there are dozens of FDA-cleared red and near-infrared light therapy devices on the market, mainly for skin care and aches and pains. Some estimates suggest that the light therapy market, including white light devices for seasonal affective disorder and devices of other colors, will reach $1 billion worldwide by 2025."

"The goal of this book is twofold: to inform and inspire curiosity and action. Because light therapy can seem like magic—how, after all, can a form of energy have healing effects on the human body?—this book lays out in plain language the science of this treatment and its possible results. It does not diagnose or treat, but it does explain which conditions respond best to light therapy and how to seek it out."

"More than 4,000 PBM lab studies have been conducted, as well as about 700 clinical trials. In total, more than 6,000 papers have been published on the subject—nearly 500 in 2018 alone, signaling a rising interest in the treatment.
Looking back over the last decade or so, we can point to a few particularly important papers. A major report was published in the journal Nature in 2006, highlighting the ability of near-infrared light to flush nitric oxide from cytochrome c oxidase, helping stressed cells return to their normal, healthy function.4 The report noted that “any solution to excessive [nitric oxide] binding might lower the risk of both cancer and degenerative diseases,” since it would encourage sick cells to die off and rejuvenate healthy cells. The following year, the Journal of Rheumatology published a review of research on treatment for chronic neck pain and found that low-level laser therapy effectively reduced pain and improved function in the intermediate term for acute and chronic conditions"

"PBM is also effective at treating wounds and illnesses in animals, which seems relevant to the conversation since there’s no such thing as a placebo effect in animals. As Dr. Praveen Arany, a PBM researcher at the University at Buffalo School of Dental Medicine, explained to me, “Animals do not have placebo. They do not pretend to get better because you’re shining light on them.” Take that, PBM skeptics."

"It is, of course, possible with no understanding of what is going on to learn to cook delicious meals, but you will be cooking by rote. If you step away from the things you know, or when things start to go wrong, you have no way to navigate back to a successful result if you don’t understand the processes involved.
There is also a huge and wonderful world of science behind the food we don’t prepare for ourselves. The processed food we buy from the supermarket is full of some of the most ingenious science I have ever come across."

"I have tried in this book to capture a little bit of the science that plays such a huge role in the production of food that you find on the shelves of your supermarket and in the meals that you prepare in your own kitchen. Taken together, I hope I’ve cooked up something that gives more than just a taste of the science of food."

"One of the persistent myths of nutrition is that meat contains all the essential amino acids and is thus a complete source of protein, whereas plants do not and are incomplete. This is now understood to be just plain wrong. Plant protein sources are also complete and contain the full range of essential amino acids. This doesn’t just apply to things such as beans, nuts and seeds that are traditionally seen as good protein sources. It’s also the case for things like cauliflower, spinach or lettuce. Admittedly, there is not much protein in these veggies, but what is there is as complete as beef-steak proteins."

"The evolutionary history of the human species is far from being a conveniently linear ‘March to Progress’. As we saw in the last chapter, it is hard enough with related living species to work out where one ends and the other begins. The task of working out our own lineage when all we have to go on is fossils is made much harder. The early Homo habilis may have been a separate species or one and the same as Homo erectus. Furthermore, it looks like Homo sapiens has been around for a very long time, although not sequentially but simultaneously with other Homo species. Which raises the interesting and potentially knotty problem of what happened when humans met Neanderthals?"

"...The chemicals in these products of nature are not a sideshow—they are the main event, and we’ve unwittingly stolen them from a war raging all around us. We use these toxic chemicals to greet our days (caffeine), titillate our tongues (capsaicin), recover from our surgeries (morphine), cure our infections (penicillin), mend our hearts (digoxin), bend our minds (psilocybin), calm our nerves (cannabinol), spice up our food and drink (myristicin), and enhance our social lives (ethanol)."

"This book explores the fascinating and sometimes surprising ways that toxins from nature arose, have been used by us humans and other animals, and have consequently changed the world. We will follow several interrelated threads, or approaches, as we examine how these chemicals have influenced evolution and how they have penetrated each human life, for better and for worse."

"...That is why we go to the edge of uncertainty: to quest, and question, and fight with ourselves and others until we have an answer. Then, aware that we have brushed against other questions and surprises, we stow our new discoveries safely, and dive back into the dark waters to wrestle more things into the light. We have been doing it for centuries, and we can only hope we will be doing it for centuries to come. This is, after all, the best thing humans have ever done.
This is how those mysterious and powerful brains compel us to behave: they endow us with the curiosity, the bravery and the tenacity to hunt out the truth as best we can. It’s not an easy way to live. By the end of this journey to the frontiers of human certainty and beyond, your brain will feel battered and bruised. But it will also cry out for more. Adventuring is addictive. You have been warned..."

"...It is the source of creativity and, further along the spectrum, madness; it is the key to addiction and the path to recovery; it is the bit of biology that makes an ambitious executive sacrifice everything in pursuit of success, that makes successful actors and entrepreneurs and artists keep working long after they have all the money and fame they ever dreamed of; and that makes a satisfied husband or wife risk everything for the thrill of someone else. It is the source of the undeniable itch that drives scientists to find explanations and philosophers to find order, reason, and meaning.
It is why we look into the sky for redemption and God; it is why heaven is above and earth is below. It is fuel for the motor of our dreams; it is the source of our despair when we fail. It is why we seek and succeed; it is why we discover and prosper.
It is also why we are never happy for very long..."

"Look down. What do you see? Your hands, your desk, the floor, maybe a cup of coffee, or a laptop computer or a newspaper.
What do they have in common? These are things you can touch.
What you see when you look down are things within your reach, things you can control right now, things you can move and manipulate with no planning, effort, or thought. Whether it’s a result of your work, the kindness of others, or simple good fortune, much of what you see when you look down is yours. They’re things in your possession.
Now look up. What do you see? The ceiling, perhaps pictures on a wall, or things out the window: trees, houses, buildings, clouds in the sky—whatever is in the distance. What do they have in common? To reach them, you have to plan, think, calculate. Even if it’s only a little, it still requires some coordinated effort. Unlike what we see when we look down, the realm of up shows us things that we have to think about and work for in order to get..
Sounds simple because it is. Yet to the brain this distinction is the gateway between two wildly different ways of thinking—two utterly different ways of dealing with the world. In your brain the down world is managed by a handful of chemicals—neurotransmitters, they’re called—that let you experience satisfaction and enjoy whatever you have in the here and now. But when you turn your attention to the world of up, your brain relies on a different chemical—a single molecule—that not only allows you to move beyond the realm of what’s at your fingertips, but also motivates you to pursue, to control, and to possess the world beyond your immediate grasp. It drives you to seek out those things far away, both physical things and things you cannot see, such as knowledge, love, and power. Whether it’s reaching across the table for the salt shaker, flying to the moon in a spaceship, or worshipping a god beyond space and time, this chemical gives us command over every distance, whether geographical or intellectual."

"From dopamine’s point of view, having things is uninteresting. It’s only getting things that matters. If you live under a bridge, dopamine makes you want a tent. If you live in a tent, dopamine makes you want a house. If you live in the most expensive mansion in the world, dopamine makes you want a castle on the moon. Dopamine has no standard for good, and seeks no finish line. The dopamine circuits in the brain can be stimulated only by the possibility of whatever is shiny and new, never mind how perfect things are at the moment. The dopamine motto is “More.”

"...But, we are told, this cannot continue.
While it might be convenient to drive gasoline cars and get electricity from coal in the short run, and while we might have needed them in the past, the argument goes, in the long run we are making our climate unlivable, destroying our environment, and depleting our resources. We must and can replace fossil fuels with renewable, green, climate-friendly energy from solar, wind, and biomass (plants).
This is not a liberal view or a conservative view; it’s a view that almost everyone holds in one form or another. Even fossil fuel companies make statements like the one the former CEO of Shell made in 2013: “We believe climate change is real and time is running out to take real action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”3 President George W. Bush was the person who popularized the expression “addicted to oil.”4 The debate over our addiction to fossil fuels is usually over how dangerous the addiction is and how quickly we can get rid of it—not whether we have one."

"This is the challenge: finding a source of energy that is cheap, plentiful, reliable, and scalable. As we’ve seen, it’s a challenge that is incredibly difficult to overcome. Power from sunlight has the problems of diluteness and intermittency and so requires too many resources to concentrate and store in order to create an independent, scalable power source. And plants are a form of storing solar energy, but they don’t scale well because of the resources needed to grow them and the amount of land available to grow them on."

"I understand that a lot of smart people are predicting catastrophic consequences from using fossil fuels... and I have studied their predictions extensively.
And what I have found is this: leading experts and the media have been making the exact same predictions for more than thirty years. As far back as the 1970s they predicted that if we did not dramatically reduce fossil fuel use then, and use renewables instead, we would be experiencing catastrophe today—catastrophic resource depletion, catastrophic pollution, and catastrophic climate change. Instead, the exact opposite happened. Instead of using a lot less fossil fuel energy, we used a lot more—but instead of long-term catastrophe, we have experienced dramatic, long-term improvement in every aspect of life, including environmental quality. The risks and side effects of using fossil fuels declined while the benefits— cheap, reliable energy and everything it brings—expanded to billions more people.

"Here’s a graph of the last hundred-plus years of temperature compared to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. We can see that CO2 emissions rose rapidly, most rapidly in the last fifteen years. But there is not nearly the warming or the pattern of warming that we have been led to expect. We can see a very mild warming trend overall—less than 1 degree Celsius (less than 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) over a century—which in itself is unremarkable, given that there is always a trend one way or the other, depending on the time scale you select. But notice that there are smaller trends of warming and cooling, signifying that CO2 is not a particularly powerful driver, and especially notice that the current trend is flat when it “should be” skyrocketing.
Given how much our culture is focused on the issue of CO2-induced global warming, it is striking how little warming there has been."

"This is the essence of the conflict: the humanist, which is the term I will use to describe someone on a human standard of value, treats the rest of nature as something to use for his benefit; the nonhumanist treats the rest of nature as something that must be served.
We always need to be clear about our standard of value so we know the goal we’re aiming at. Aiming at human well-being, which includes transforming nature as much as necessary to meet human needs, is a lot different from aiming to not affect nature. The humanist believes that transforming nature is bad only if it fails to meet human needs; the nonhumanist believes that transforming nature is intrinsically bad and that doing so will inevitably somehow cause catastrophe for us in the long run.
Because many of the people predicting dire consequences from fossil fuel use avowedly do not hold a human standard of value and because the vast majority of discussions on the issue are not clear about the standard of value being used, we need to always ask, when we hear any evaluation: “By what standard of value?”

"1. The aforementioned serotonin-oriented compounds, of which there are hundreds
2. “Dissociatives,” such as ketamine and salvia, which produce the sensation of detachment from one’s body
3. “Empathogens,” such as MDMA, which, although less overtly “trippy” than other substances, still amplify emotions and insights in a decidedly psychedelic way
4. “Unique” substances that can’t easily be categorized, including cannabinoids such as THC, which, in high doses, can induce visionary reveries"

"This book is not stuffy and academic. No background in botany, chemistry, or medicine is necessary—come as you are and learn about some of the most fascinating plants and molecules on the planet. Nor is this an instruction manual—for information on how to use these substances, readers will have to look elsewhere..."

"...Uranium will always be with us. Once dug up, it can never be reburied.
In this rock we can see the best and the worst of mankind: the capacity for scientific progress and political genius; the capacity for nihilism, exploitation, and terror. We must find a way to make peace with it. Our continuing relationship with uranium, as well as our future as a civilization, will depend on our capacity to resist mirroring that grim and never-ceasing instability that lies within the most powerful tool the earth has to give."

"...The only medication I now need, in order to treat two of my remaining Pd symptoms, is for insomnia, and until recently, mood swings. However, I do still have many of my Pd symptoms, but I am able to control them in ways that I will explain later. I stopped taking my normal Pd medication in 2003, when I was feeling a great deal better than I had been in 1992, when I was first diagnosed.
As a result of taking a special type of Pd medication and doing regular strenuous exercise, I now live a normal, happy life, no different to most other people..."
"...It is not my intention to falsely raise hopes, by leading you to believe that my Pd is cured. I still have most of the symptoms, but they are mostly under control and at a much lower level than they were in 1992."

"I have not invented a new gadget, which you can run out and buy. I have not come across a previously unknown chemical, which I could put into pill form, to pop into your mouth, three times a day. As I have already said, what I have discovered has been known to medical science for a long time, but that knowledge does not appear to have filtered down to the people dealing with Parkinson’s disease.
What I am going to recommend to you, only requires your time, a certain amount of energy, some possible discomfort and a lot of self-motivation and commitment."

"...Compared with hot-blooded spur-of-themoment murders, the planning and cold calculations involved in murder by poison perfectly fit the legal term malice aforethought. Poisoning requires planning and a knowledge of the victim’s habits. It requires consideration of how the poison will be administered. Some poisons can kill within minutes; others can be given slowly over time, gradually accumulating in the body but still leading inexorably to the victim’s death."

"This book is not a catalog of poisoners and their victims, but rather explores the nature of poisons and how they affect the body at the molecular, cellular, and physiological levels. Each poison kills in its own unique way, and the varied symptoms experienced by the victims often give clues as to the nature of the poison used against them. In a few instances such knowledge has led to appropriate treatment and full recovery. In other cases knowledge of the poison is not of therapeutic benefit, because there is simply no antidote."