[removed]

Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. There's not exactly a constant amount of these, because for instance radiation can convert nitrogen atoms into oxygen at some very slow pace, but it doesn't change very much even over a long time. Chemical reactions generally can't change what element an atom is, but they can take particles apart to build something else out of them. So as long as water particles have their hydrogens taken off to build hydrocarbons out of them, that reduces the amount of water, but the amount of hydrogens and oxygens remains the same.

And, contrarywise, when a hydrocarbon burns, the hydrogens from it rejoin with oxygen to make water again.

Its adorable that this question sounds like the OP feels that global pharma and the health plans want to save the patients money. IF...any new improvement happens, they will charge the same amount they always have (bankrupting common people), and they will pocket the difference.

[removed]

I was kind of lumping that in with water being stored in the plant (either as water or as a part of biomass), but you are definitely correct.

[removed]

Water in plants consumed by organisms will be respired, excreted in waste, or ultimately also returned to the environment when the organism dies. There is always some amount of water locked up in the biosphere, but this water is not lost in a real sense.

> Is there a chance that the r in the equation in this case would actually represent the distance between the surface of the sphere and the point, rather than the center?

The charges for a conducting sphere distribute themselves uniformly on the surface of the sphere. Each little element of charge on the surface contributes an infinitesimal amount of the final electric field. To calculate the final field, you need to (vector) integrate the contributions from all these elements. So you can't just use kq/r^2 but with r the "altitude" of the test charge.

If you do this calculation, you'll find that it actually can apply E = kq/r^(2) with r the distance to the centre of the sphere -- the uneven contributions cancel out. From the outside, a spherical shell of uniform charge looks exactly like a point charge at its centre.

This is actually true for any company spherical charge distribution, and you can prove it very elegantly using Gauss's law.

[removed]

Have you been reading the news during covid? They engineered a vaccine for a new decease using a new delivery method in a few months. The way science works nowadays is not based in big breakthroughs but small incremental optimisations that together lead us to big changes in a medium period of time. However, no there are no nano machines in hospitals yet.

Agreed on all of your 3 points. But Apart from all the water it releases back into the atmosphere , it actually has taken some water to grow and that water is not present in the plant when it die only a percent of what it has taken to grow is present when it dies.

if we eat plants , then it has to be lost forever.

Also i think there is always some water lost when converting from one form of it to another.

Iirc some of it is also used in sugar production with the CO2 they absorb, as hydrogen

Eventually though the molecules will end up back in the atmosphere or other ways to recombine into water.

While a plant is alive, it is taking up water. Some of that water is stored in the plant itself and the rest is returned to the atmosphere via transpiration. When a plant dies, whatever water that is stored within the plant itself is going to be (1) returned to the atmosphere directly via evaporation as the plant biomass breaks down, (2) consumed by an organism eating the plant biomass, or (3) buried and contribute to soil moisture (or some mixture thereof). None of this water is "lost", though it may be transferred to a different part of the hydrologic cycle.

The primary issue (IMO) is the remarkably large number of scientists and physicians who abandoned facts and science in favor of ideology. A large number did not abandon their patients, but their voices were ignored or silenced. Which of course takes us back to the death of journalism, but that is another topic.

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]

So the breakthroughs in "nanomachines" are actually coming in biology. Cell and gene therapy is absolutely exploding right now with methods of reprogramming cells and viruses to do things like deliver payloads, rewrite the genome, kill or replace diseased cells, etc. Turns out the real nanomachines were the friends we made on the way. Viruses are absolutely self assembling and self replicating nanomachines with a programmable instruction set that we are learning how to re-write. It's not how we conceived it in the sci-fi of the past because progress in physics and computing seemed much faster than the glacial pace of biology, but biology is absolutely nanotechnology and the tools for manipulating it have come into their own in the last 20 years.

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]

Viruses on their outside are a collection of well fitting proteins. It turns out the shape of a protein is very important, it lets the protein do its "job". Or as much of a job as a physical shape can have. Think of a hammer, its shape makes it very good and driving nails but not very good at smoothing concrete. These viral protein shapes allow the virus to attach to human cells, open the cell wall and "inject" the malicious genetic code to the cell. Antibodies attach to those protein shapes and can rip apart the virus, make it easy for immune cells to find and destroy, and/or prevent the virus from attaching to human cells.

Each mutation in a virus alters the proteins and their shapes a little. Too much mutation and none of the parts fit and it is no longer self replicating. So asking how different does it need to be is a very difficult question to answer. A little bit and the various shaped antibodies the body produces will still bind to some of the virus's protein shapes, a little more and it might stop attaching to human cells (though it might attach to a different animal cell and thus you've found a variant that is ready to hop species), and too much more and now you've either killed the virus or it's something new entirely.

Tldr: these mutations affect the very being of the virus, too many and it stops being the virus it is.

Thank you! This is exactly the answer I was looking for.

[removed]

[removed]