Oxygen

Latest news on oxygen

Gallery: Distilling 2.0 -- Bye-Bye Boiling, Hello Health Care

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.comPASADENA, California ? For all you moonshine makers who thought your hobby was just a guilty pleasure, a new spin on distilling may actually help save lives. Using ancient technology reduced to a microscopic scale, scientists at Caltech have created new tools to detect disease and purify water using tiny stills. The creation of the still around A.D. 500 was one of humanity's earliest, and still quite popular, technological advancements. Traditionally, a still boils liquids in order to vaporize and separate them. Now, using nanoparticles and lasers, liquids no longer need to be boiled to be separated. Removing the heat requirement from distillation means the process could be used to separate living cells without killing them, which could lead to advanced disease detection. Other applications include extracting water cheaply and efficiently from sea water in low-energy saltwater distillation plants. How do they do it? Take a tour through professor David Boyd's lab and go behind the scenes of this revolutionary process. Left: A green laser evaporates the water from a liquid. This is the final stage of nano distillation. : Here is a diagram of the basic nano still technique. At top is the initial setup with gold nanoparticles sitting on top of a glass slide. The fluid waiting to be distilled is enclosed from above by a silicone rubber chip. In the bottom diagram, a green laser operating near the resonant frequency of the gold particles is applied. The laser heats the gold nanoparticles, which then transfer the heat to the surrounding fluid. This small amount of heat is just enough to cause controlled evaporation over the gas bubble barrier, leaving pure water on the right-hand side of the diagram. Click through to the next photo to take a closer look at each of these steps. Illustration: Chemical Separations by Bubble Assisted Interphase Mass-Transfer, David A. Boyd, James Adelman, David Goodwin, and Demetri Psaltis: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.comThis spin coater is used to spread out the thin layer of gold nanoparticles on the glass slide. A drop of the gold solution is placed on the slide and the coater spins extremely fast. This spinning spreads the solution evenly and coats the slide with a nearly uniform 15-nanometer layer of gold. To get a controlled spacing of particles there needs to be a structure in place to hold them. To achieve this, scientists add a polymer to the gold solution. This polymer forms a uniform lattice to structure all the gold. But observant readers will notice there was no polymer in the previous diagram. Where does it go? Click to the next photo to find out. : Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.comThis is an oxygen etcher. Once the glass slide is covered with the polymer-and-gold solution, this etcher burns off the polymer, leaving just the gold behind. : Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.comThis is a sample slide covered with a matrix of gold nanoparticles. The purple streaks on the slide are the nanoparticles, visibly spreading out from the initial drop applied to the slide during the spin coating. For those readers expecting the entire slide to be purple, scientists actually need only a small portion of the slide to be covered uniformly by the gold, so these streaks will suffice. The particles have a unique property of rapidly dissipating heat, which is a key factor in how the still works. : Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.comIn another part of the lab, the piece of silicone rubber is made. If you think back to the second image in this gallery, you'll recall that the silicone rubber encloses the fluid between itself and the glass slide. This piece of silicone is called the microfluidic chip because of the fluid channels carved into it. The machine pictured at left is called a mask aligner. It creates a mold for the microfluidic chip. It does this by exposing an image (in this case, the shape and design of the chip) to a photosensitive material. The unexposed portion of the material is discarded, and the shape of the mold is all that's left. It's similar to a photo enlarger, but instead of a two-dimensional image, a fully formed nano structure is made. The final mold is then used to create fluid channels in a piece of silicone rubber. This silicone rubber ends up being the microfluidic chip. : Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.comHere, the silicone rubber chip is drilled to create ports for the nano still. These ports will be used to inject solutions for distillation and to extract the distilled liquid.: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.comTiny plugs of silicone are the doughnut holes of the micro-fabrication world. Sadly, these plugs will remain uneaten.: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.comAfter fabrication of the microfluidic chip, we're ready to put it all together. The chip is glued to the gold-coated slide that we made earlier (pictured at center-left inside petri dish). Now we have a nano still, which has an electronic sensor attached for measuring the conductivity of the fluid.: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.comSometimes science is messy. This workbench is covered with a collection of syringes and gold nanoparticle-coated glass slides. The syringes are used to inject fluids through the ports into the channels in the still, which we'll see in the next photo.: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.comIn this photo, blue "Smurf blood" food-grade dye is injected into the nano still through a syringe. The dye makes it easy to see when the liquid has been distilled. The distilled water will be clear and the remaining water will become darker due to the higher concentration of dye.: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.comA low-powered green diode laser shines down into the still. The laser is roughly the same strength as an off-the-shelf laser pointer. Very little energy is needed in the microdistilling process thanks to the heat-dissipating properties of the gold nanoparticles. Professor Boyd, the lead researcher on the project, reveals that this process was largely discovered by accident. "We had this problem with [an] air bubble, so we started hitting it with a laser. Instead of getting rid of it, we saw that we were actually causing the distillation process to occur, which was completely unexpected," Boyd explains.

Oxygen is my drug of choice

Oxygen is my drug of choice From the FAI: 10 July 2008 Dear FAI Members, The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Prohibited List 2008 specifically prohibits the artificial delivery of oxygen, whereas the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) mandates the use of supplemental oxygen to counter the effects of hypoxia. WADA agrees that the health and safety of our athletes is paramount and does not consider the transportation of oxygen in an aircraft to be an anti-doping rule violation. FAI is therefore pleased to inform members that they may use supplemental oxygen in aircraft during FAI events. If you need any further information, please contact the undersigned. With best regards, Rob Hughes General Projects Manager Fédération Aéronautique Internationale Avenue Mon-Repos 24 CH-1005 LAUSANNE Switzerland Thanks to those who caught this little email and sent it to me. Discuss Oxygen at the Oz Report forum   link»

What, Too Far?

For the past few years, I've been the 'captain' of our Thursday night volleyball team. I put 'captain' in quotes because there's really not a lot of captainosity involved. I pay the team fee to the league. And I send out emails every week to badger people to show up. That's the full extent of my 'captainly' duties. Just once, you'd think I'd get to perform a civil marriage service or keelhaul a mutineer or something. I'd even settle for getting to wear the funny hat and drinking rum on the job. But no. "Just once, you'd think I'd get to perform a civil marriage service or keelhaul a mutineer or something." The trickiest part of my responsibilities is getting the right number and proportion of people to play. It's regulation volleyball, and a co-ed league, which means that ideally, we need six players -- two or three women and three or four men -- to field a full squad. Six people working as a team is what you call a 'system' -- the front left, middle and right and back left, middle and right positions have certain responsibilities, and each gets just enough space to cover that we can mostly do it without calling time outs for emergency CPR treatment. Less than six people is what's known in volleyball parlance as a 'screaming bumblefuck'. Does the rightish-back-middly person cover the corner on this play? Who comes over to block the middle when the setter's playing double duty on the wing? Why the hell is our server curled up in a fetal ball on the ten-foot line chanting, 'so many holes... so many holes...'? And where do they keep the oxygen tank and Band-Aids around this damned gym, anyway? Needless to say, I do my level best to ensure that six warm-to-tepid bodies show up every week. Mostly, that's accomplished by keeping four hundred and thirteen people on the active roster, and begging for players several days in advance. But there's still the question of the ratio of attendees, and -- as is always the case in a life like mine -- we can never seem to find enough women. If you're sporting less than two in our league, your team is penalized a few points every game. Also, the refs say disparaging things to you. And the girls on the opposing team give you strange looks, like maybe you locked your team's women in the trunk of your car, and they're next. It can be awfully distracting, when all you're trying to do is play your game and focus on teamwork and drown out the muffled sounds coming from the back of your Honda in the parking lot. Enough, already. Which brings us to this afternoon, when one of the regular guys called to ask whether we needed him tonight. Some other obligation -- a late night at the office or a pregnant wife or massive internal bleeding or something; I really wasn't paying much attention -- was vying for his time, but he said he'd try to swing by if we were going to be short-handed tonight. So I tallied up the email replies I'd received for the week, and found only four definite 'yes' calls. Plus me is just five, so I let him know that we could absolutely use his services, once the project was finished or the baby popped out or his intestines were sewn back up, whatever. Since I was tearing him away from something he might deem 'important', I tried to soften the blow with a little humor. "Definitely show up if you can. You know how we miss you when you're not around." He chuckled politely, and probably thought that was the end of the conversation. Which it should have been. But I was busy doing math in my head, and realized that though we'd have six people with him, we still only had one girl showing up. Without bothering to explain this line of reasoning, I said: "Although, you'd be more useful if you had boobs." Another chuckle -- which I later realized was far more nervous than the first. At the time, though, I was drunk on the high of getting two laughs in a row. The jester in me took over, and I went for the hat trick: "Of course, I've always said that about you." Silence. Probably of the stunned variety. I said goodbye and hung up the phone, figuring I'd just bombed the joke. It wasn't until I replayed the conversation in my head that I realized how batshit crazy it must have sounded. Now I wonder whether the guy will bother to show up tonight at all. Or ever, frankly. If he does show up, it could get pretty awkward. And if he shows up wearing a padded bra, it's going to get really awkward. But hey -- if he's convincing enough, at least we'll get the points back for the extra girl. Sometimes, even making an ass of myself has a silver lining. Not often. Just sometimes.

Oxygen Bottle Burst on Qantas Flight

Air investigator says bursting oxygen bottle caused hole in July Qantas flight.

Oxygen bottle behind Qantas blast

Australian investigators confirm that an exploding oxygen cylinder blew the huge hole in a Qantas plane last month.

Cluster Watches Earth's Leaky Atmosphere

Oxygen is constantly leaking out of Earth's atmosphere and into space. Now, ESA's formation-flying quartet of satellites, Cluster, has discovered the physical mechanism that is driving the escape. It turns out that the Earth's own magnetic field is accelerating the oxygen away.

Ryanair boss in row with explorer Pen Hadow over emergency landing

Michael O'Leary is embroiled in a row with a polar explorer over claims that oxygen masks "failed to work" during an emergency.

Ryanair flight's oxygen masks 'failed'

Passengers on flight forced to make emergency landing in France claim several masks didn't work

Ryanair flight emergency landing Oxygen masks 'failed'

Holidaymakers claim that oxygen masks failed to work when a plane lost air pressure and plunged around 22000ft.

Cheats of Strength: 10 Next-Gen Olympic Doping Methods

While the International Olympic Committee is busy trying to catch today's performance enhancers, athletes are already looking for the next big boost that will give them the edge in 2012. Most of the positive doping tests in Beijing -- and the IOC president estimates there will be as many as 40 -- will likely be for steroids and the blood-boosting hormone erythropoietin, known as EPO. But the future of doping could get a lot more complicated. Here are some of the most promising -- or threatening, if you're the World Anti-Doping Agency -- candidates for the next Olympics. Use your genes to grow more muscle Manipulating genes to block naturally occurring muscle-growth inhibitors could allow athletes to boost their muscle mass. A lot. In tests on mice, blocking the protein myostatin gave the mice up to 60 percent more lean muscle mass. Even more promising, Johns Hopkins' Se-Jin Lee recently found that overproduction of one myostatin inhibitor pumps the mice up even more: up to 81 percent in females and a whopping 116 percent in males. Results of human clinical trials are pending. Complicating the picture, particularly for WADA, is a small number of people with naturally inhibited myostatin who will have to be distinguished from the dopers somehow. Pop a blood-boosting pill Who wouldn't love a pill that delivers the same record-breaking benefits of synthetic EPO without the hassle of injections or getting caught? Clinical trials are under way for a pill that tricks the body into thinking blood-oxygen levels have dropped, causing it to produce more red blood cells, thus improving muscle endurance. When blood-oxygen levels drop, hypoxia-inducible factor, or HIF, kicks in to stimulate red blood cell production. Once oxygen is back to normal, the HIF breaks down and cell formation stops. The drugs, known as HIF stabilizers, stop the breakdown and keep blood production up. Some suspect athletes may already be using HIF stabilizers, but the health risks are unknown. Grow more blood vessels If you don't mind injections directly into your heart and limbs, vascular endothelial growth factor may be for you. VEGF causes new blood vessels to grow, which in theory could move more oxygen and nutrients between muscles, lungs and the heart with less effort. So more effort could be expended on athletic performance. VEGF gene therapy could potentially help patients with heart and arterial diseases form new blood vessels, keeping them alive and avoiding amputation. But it's not a simple hack, and a failed gene-doping test isn't the only risk. Unregulated VEGF-induced vessel growth appears to also promote tumor growth and metastasis. Feel less pain, get more gain Athletes know how to suffer. Raise an athlete's pain threshold, and suffering will occur at a higher level of exertion. Tests on rats suggest that injecting the beta-endorphin gene into spinal fluid through a spinal tap causes the body to release its own painkilling endorphins. Pain signals get blocked before they reach the brain, without the sleepiness and cloudiness associated with morphine and other painkilling opioids. Raising an athlete's pain threshold may improve performance, but it may also cause them to ignore warnings of overexertion and injury. Beef up specific muscles Say you're a cyclist who wants powerful legs but a light upper body so you don't have to haul the extra weight when riding uphill. Or a tennis player who needs a bit more shoulder muscle. Injecting insulin-like growth factor, or IGF-1, into specific muscles sparks those muscles to grow while avoiding the full-body muscle growth usually associated with IGF-1. Physiologist H. Lee Sweeney at the University of Pennsylvania discovered this while looking for a treatment for muscle-wasting that avoids side effects from unwanted growth, such as cancer and heart enlargement. The targeted therapy may also make IGF-1 harder to detect in a doping test. Sweeney estimates that since his research was published, half of his e-mails are from athletes. He has worked with WADA, but others developing similar techniques may not. Get more muscles, fewer zits Want the muscle-building benefits of steroids without the testicle-shrinking, moob-growing, acne-popping side effects? That's the promise of selective androgen receptor modulators. SARMs bind to specific tissues, such as muscle and bone. Unlike some steroids, they don't indiscriminately also bind to prostate, liver and other tissues. And SARMs come in a pill. No needles or skin patches. These pills could be a boon to people suffering from muscle-wasting diseases and for athletes concerned about health risks associated with steroids. Sound too good to be true? Perhaps: A test to detect SARMs may be ready before the drugs are widely available. WADA won't tell until they catch an athlete. Fill up with new blood substitutes With EPO and blood transfusions increasingly detectable, athletes could return to blood substitutes for an extra hit of oxygen. Several athletes reportedly used substitutes in the past, and one cyclist may have almost died as a result. Some new substitutes could have similar problems. A report in the Journal of the American Medical Association in April criticized blood substitutes such as PolyHeme and Hemopure for causing heart attacks and deaths in test subjects. But there are alternatives. Oxygen Biotherapeutics claims their experimental substitute, Oxycyte, carries oxygen 50 times more efficiently than natural blood without the risks of older substitutes. And Dendritech patented a blood substitute built from 3-D nanoparticles that the company builds in precise oxygen-carrying shapes. At least some blood substitutes may be easy to detect, but there are rumors the test isn't regularly used. Take a next-gen EPO At the Tour de France in July, Ricardo Ricco got caught using a new EPO-like blood booster, CERA, recently released by Roche. Before CERA was on the market, the pharmaceutical giant cooperated with WADA to have a test ready to trap cutting-edge dopers like Ricco, a sign that WADA is catching up to, and perhaps even staying ahead of, dopers. Or it's a sign that WADA needs help developing tests to detect each EPO variant, a tall order considering EPO and related drugs make up a $12 billion market. There are also dozens of EPO-stimulating agents available or in the works around the world. Pump up your muscle fiber Athletes already have more fatigue-resistant muscle fibers than couch potatoes. But new research shows they may be able widen that gap further by boosting levels of the gene responsible for adding new fibers. Recently, researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego found that an existing medication, called GW1516, raises the levels of this gene, resulting in a 68 percent endurance improvement in fit mice. The Salk researchers are working with WADA on a test to detect use of GW1516. But several other drugs are known to manipulate the muscle-fiber genes, and others are believed to do the same. A test to detect this type of gene doping would need to cover a lot of uncharted territory. Lastly, use mustard? Athletes turned off by the latest biotech breakthroughs can try this recipe: Strip down and rub mustard oil all over your body. While exploring the role skin plays in the production of red blood cells, Randy Johnson's team of researchers at UC San Diego found that rubbing mustard oil on mice caused spikes in natural EPO production, and that led to increased red blood cell levels. It's unclear how much mustard oil a human athlete would need to enhance performance, or how much mustard oil could lead to strokes and heart attacks. With all the crazy, complicated doping schemes out there could the journey to the top of the podium simply require a trip to the grocery store?