What's some tasty plants I can grow in Nevada or Arizona desert/drought? Also would it be possible to grow agave (for tequila and syrup) industrially in desert regions?

"as the patient may become aware that the treatment is not producing a genuine therapeutic effect"

Remarkably the placebo effect even works when patients are told they are receiving a sham treatment.

Are there any unique plants other than cacti found in the deserts? It may sound stupid but I am no plant expert but I am curious.

Do the desert plants you've studied have mycorrhiza in their roots?

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If an area that was once extremely fertile becomes deserted and loses all its flora and fauna , will the plants that ever grow there later be something similar to cactus ? How did plants like Cactus 🌵 get into deserts ? Is it due to millions of years of evolution in that specific area ? I'm supposing , for something like cactus to evolve , that area should have been a desert for millions and millions of years such that there was enough time for something like cactus to evolve. So what happens due to our deforestation? How long before things spring back ?

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The immune system is very adapt in recognizing foreign biological matter like bacteria, viruses and even another eucaryote organism's cells.

On the other hand, the body selects it's own immune cells for low responsiveness to its own proteins to prevent autoimmunity.

Cancer is essentially constituted of a body's very own cells gone aberrant. That means, these cells usually share several of the following characteristics:

• Internally and/or externally unregulated growth, proliferation, and expansion
• Loss of tissue function
• Migration to neighbouring tissues
• Denial of internal and/or external apoptotic stimuli (self-destruction)
• Evasion of immune cell recognition
• Inhibition of immune cell signalling

To break it down in terms of your question: cancer cells are naturally less likely to be targeted by immune cells than external pathogens, as they are basically a body's own cells. Immune cells, nevertheless, will kill wildly aberrant cells rapidly. That basically means cancer cells are naturally selected for variants that circumvent this line of defense. Either, they lose receptors by which they are primarily recognized by immune-cells, or gain/upregulate mechanisms by which they suppress immune cell-responses despite proper recognition.

Now, mRNA vaccines can reverse these effects by different mechanisms. You could potentially use them to

• increase the expression of receptors the immune cells use naturally
• decrease the expression of receptors inhibiting immune cell response
• introduce new epitopes the body knows how to react to, like surface proteins of a bacterium

All of these increase efficiency, efficacy and precision of the immune cell response against the targeted tumor cell.

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Bionic eyes already exist. There was a story this year about how a handful of people who had them went blind because the company that designed them went out of business and stopped supporting them.

Another example is the dry lands west of the great dividing range in Australia

Rain usually happens because the hot air around the ocean carries water up above into the air and then falls into the land. Due to the rotation of the earth the prevailing wind mostly goes from east to west near the equator. Sometimes due to the mountains or due to the large stretches of land between the west coast and the east seas, rain is unable to reach the western coast. When the humid air from the east doesn't reach the west coast a coastal dessert forms. Even if there is some sea on the west, it evaporates and carries the rain to the west, not to the east.

This is a simplified explanation, since there are other factors to consider such as the temperature of the oceans, latitude, lakes, rivers, seasonality of the air currents or the direction of the prevailing winds.

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Bionic eyes are currently in development by the bionic ear team and they aren't that far away, although it'll probs start with simple shapes with poor resolution. But it's a simpler problem because you can interrogate the patient's optic nerve and augment stimuli to inform the way your device communicates.

On the other hand, transplants are much more challenging - the visual pathway from cone/rod passes through complex, multi-synapse neuronal processing. Neurons tend to degrade quickly and they aren't very good at repair. Then there's the rejection question. So you don't have a good way to figure out if you're connecting the right donor/patient neurons, and even if you did, they'd rapidly degrade.

A full eye transplant would require detaching the retinal nerve and grafting it on to someone else, which is not currently a feasible form of technology. If we could perform those kind of nerve graphs, we could repair damaged spines and restore people who are paralyzed from spine severing. To the best of my knowledge this is still generally impossible.

The optic nerve carries information from different parts of the retina to the brain in a very specific way. This means essentially we would have to be able to one-to-one remap and reconnect nerves at the level of single axons, extremely microscopic it involving tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of specific connections. It's not as simple as taking one nerve and then smashing it to another and hope they all link up. If we could get random events to link up together, the person receiving the eye transport plan would essentially receive White Noise Vision to their brain, with everything all mixed up and wrong.

We can currently do cornea transplants, and fun side bar, some recent advancement in transplanting retinal cells and restoring Vision when people have damage to the retina

https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2021/scientists-take-important-step-toward-using-retinal-cell-transplants-to-treat-blindness

Personally I believe the widespread use of bionic style and implants, such as a robotic eye, will never become a big thing because the biology will outpace the engineering. So at least from a recovery of function perspective I don't think it'll take off. It's always possible that doesn't the form of human enhancement, for example producing biotic eyes that have different kinds of vision. But I think the biology will be a lot faster

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Is this known as the "Fool me once, shame on you but fool me twice, shame on me" effect?

So, let's take an obvious one like Namibia. Namibia has a very cold current running north up it's coast called the Benguela. It is quite cold. The air above it is also quite cold, and therefore dry.

This cold air hits the hot desert dunes and warms rapidly and heads straight up. Very little moisture makes it inland.

So temperature difference between land and sea due to ocean and wind currents can cause the situation you are describing.

I was an RH Disease baby. Needed several blood transfusions while still in the uterus, was born 10 weeks premature for further transfusions.

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as the other commenter said, this doesn’t answer the question of why need the mRNA vaccine to activate that response from the immune system when those chemicals are already present in cancerous cells in the body