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[LegoLord]

Well bugger the current derailment and gimme some o' that nanogel.  I just managed to cut my fingertip open and this bandaid is playing havoc with my typing.

Oops.  Sorry about that derail (and the finger, while I'm at it).  The nanogel sounds pretty cool.  But how pricey is it?

[zchris13]

Cancer. It costs one cancer.

[Muz]

The first thing I thought when reading about this was "petroleum jelly"

[Neruz]

Correct, in which case I would be wrong. Unless of course as you get older you get more and more information until your brain can't handle any more and just randomly erases bits to let new stuff in.

Senility is actually physical degredation of the brain, so preventing the death of brain cells should deal with it nicely.

There's actually no real upper limit to what your brain can handle, so to speak, technically if you ended up with the maximum density of neural connections you'd have hit a roadblock, but no-one's ever come cloe to that (if it's even possible.)

Your brain does and will forget information it deems not worth remembering however, and it's constantly ignoring information it deems irrelevant.

[Kagus]

That, and your brain is perfectly capable of building more brain cells should it need the extra storage.

Only thing you'd have to worry about is maximum cranial capacity, thanks to ol' Skully-Skull...  But by that time, we'll probably have mastered the art of uploading our memories to a disk or cube or whatever we use then.

Screw photo albums, we'll post galleries of our personal experiences...

[Neruz]

That, and your brain is perfectly capable of building more brain cells should it need the extra storage.

That too. Although the creation of new Neurons is a bit of a fuzzy field at the moment.

[Kagus]

That, and your brain is perfectly capable of building more brain cells should it need the extra storage.

That too. Although the creation of new Neurons is a bit of a fuzzy field at the moment.

Same as the rest of the brain and its functions...  As of now, we still don't really know how we know.

[Neruz]

Yeah, it's kind of difficult to get experimental data on the brain.

[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

Cancer. It costs one cancer.

Then we need to make cancer-eating goo.

[Virex]

I doubt it will cause cancer. What the makers have done is made some peptides (small proteins) that, when exposed to a bleeding wound (or something with similar conditions, so don't drop it in the sea) almost instantly combine to form a hard outer layer, thereby sealing off the wound. It works in a way similar to how a body closes a wound, but it's many times faster and more effective.

When your body starts to repair the wound itself, it'll degrade the peptide and all you get is a bunch of nutrients. Nothing carcinogenic about it.

As for the method of making this, I'm betting they want to use genetically modified bacteria. Chemical synthesis is possible, but generally only favorable for abnormal peptides since it's slower and more expensive then using genetically modified bacteria, especialy since nowadays it's possible to make genes on demand. Also, synthesis of longer polypeptides requires the use of hydrogen fluoride, because other methods are too slow. But working with Hydrogen Fluoride is expensive and dangerous and requires specialized equipment.

[zchris13]

What's so especially dangerous about hydrogen flouride?

[LegoLord]

What's so especially dangerous about hydrogen flouride?

Instability, I should think.  The wierd semi-halogen thing (some tables put it in the middle with dotted lines between the normal place and the one to the right of helium) combined with one of the more reactive halogens sounds explosive.  Let's check wikipedia!

Edit:  It has a penetrating odour that damages the lungs and then it can be dissolved to make hydrofluoric acid. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_fluoride

[zchris13]

Dude. It IS hydrofluoric acid. And as far as I know, a weak acid.  Because the Fluoride ion is too grabby.

Oh. Wikipedia says that I'm right, but it doesn't mean what I thought it did.

[LegoLord]

Not quite.  It's only an acid when dissolved in water.  Being a weak acid doesn't mean much, either.  It only describes how well it dissolves (less than 100%).  High enough concentrations can still burn a hole through some things.

[Tack]

I long ago accepted the fact that everything gives you cancer, either directly or indirectly.

But - in other news. This stuff sounds pretty stable. The poly-peptides indicate that it would be organic chemicals, not bacteria.