Scientists Invent Oxygen Particle, Allows You To Live Without Breathing | Hacker News Reader

Scientists Invent Oxygen Particle, Allows You To Live Without Breathing

techwench.com

44 pointsvlbeta39 comments

This is VERY early reporting of a finding that needs more work in an animal model before anyone can try it with human patients. Searching on the investigator's name turned up a more informative article

http://www.technologyreview.com/fromthelabs/428871/injectabl...

that indicates some of the development steps that are still necessary.

Thanks for the necessary groundwork.

The OP is a terrifying vision of the future of journalism. A warmed-over rewrite of some press release, with no links to the original material, tarted up with an array of unrelated links so huge that they even creep into the author's byline:

The author of this article is… an SEO tactician and SEM strategist. If you enjoyed this article, you can follow me on twitter... I am writing on behalf of Wilderness Aware Rafting who offer some of the best Colorado White Water Rafting trips in the state.

I thought Ghostery would have a stroke. I'm just going to flag this.

It's a tabloid, nothing to fear for the future over.

Especially since this is two month old news.

Thanks. And here's another article, with a bit more detail:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120627142512.ht...

This is early, but I want it, now. I have a huge number of questions.

My mother has idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a disease that irreversibly scars the lungs, restricting breathing over time. My grandmother died of it; my aunt just had both lungs transplanted; my mother is at the front of the list for a double-lung transplant (and can be called in at any time - we all have to keep our cell phones on). There's every chance I or my sister will be diagnosed with it in the future. And it kills as many people in the US as breast cancer each year.

This would dramatically increase quality of life. Instead of having to cart torpedo-sized oxygen tanks everywhere, sufferers could inject themselves with this substance, and either downgrade their oxygen equipment or do without it entirely. It wouldn't be a cure, but it would almost certainly increase health overall while waiting for a transplant, and increase the chances of survival during one.

Forget Mars exploration, or undersea military missions. For a lot of people, breathing normally while living normal lives is science fiction enough.

The sensation of shortness of breath is complex. It doesn't depend on oxygen levels in the blood much at all, until they are dangerously low. It has more to do with blood pH and CO2 levels, as well as perceived work of breathing, and a whole lot of other factors we don't understand. Maintaining adequate blood oxygenation is unlikely to do much to fix the shortness of breath caused by IPF.

If this technology comes to fruition, it would increase the number of people able to survive until transplant. There already aren't enough lungs about though...

Navy doctor here. I wish your family the best of luck. Pulmonary fibrosis is a tough disease, no magic pill. However, the O2 tanks are no where near the size of a torpedo, even a relatively small air-launched torp would be over 10x the volume. Probably irrelevant to the topic, except I don't want folks to misunderstand how huge torpedoes are.

That damn social bar is covering text. What an obnoxious website.

I just had an AdBlock frenzy on this website. First time I ever do that.

It's pretty bad... this is the list of blocked stuff from Ghostery:

AddThis Commission Junction Digg Widget etracker Facebook Connect Facebook Social Plugins Google +1 Google Adsense Google Analytics LinkedIn Widgets Pinterest Reddit Statcounter StumbleUpon Widgets Twitter Button

also, this sentence broke my brain: Well what if they really couldn’t “breathe” water” but since the urge to breathe is natural, that must take place…

To me, and I really have to think of the the Simpsons movie when I say this, that just goes to show when you dream a dream, it can also become a website with technology in it. At the end of the day, that's something you can take away from all this, and that's nothing short of okay.

Yeah that's completely disgusting.

Resizing the window slightly moves the bar to the correct place (tested on FF 14).

One quick trick is to refresh the page, and stop reload before social bar loads.

How do you remove carbon dioxide?

Indeed! So now you've got 30 minutes worth of CO2 hanging around in your blood... Surely that's going to cause some issues? Anyone with some biology smarts able to explain if this would be a problem?

That aside, I wonder what the nano-med applications are for this. For example an implant for high-risk patients that injects a dose upon respiratory failure etc. Heck if it were feasible such would be handy for anyone to have.

The only way the CO2 can leave is through the lungs. If your airways are blocked, you're going to be facing some major blood pH issues with all that built up CO2. This can happen really fast too. Simply hypo-ventilating can cause the pH of the blood to drop due to buildup of CO2.

Yes - the inability to expel CO2 can be a huge and often fatal problem. The technical term is hypercapnia.

I don't get it. How are you going to get enough oxygen (trapped in pockets of) a 3cc lipid injection to stay functioning? I breathe 10x that amount of air in a second. Even if I only get 1/10 of that as oxygen into my blood stream,... what that 3cc delivers is still practically nothing.

Inhaled air is about 20% oxygen... exhaled air about 15%. So a small volume of dense oxygen might replace many breaths of much larger volume.

(A speculative nanotech dream for decades has been a manufactured red blood cell replacement, able to store and gradually release far more oxygen than naturally available - allowing cessation of breathing for hours if not days.)

Breathing only extracts ~25% of the oxygen in the air (ie, the air we inhale is ~20% oxygen, the air we exhale is roughly 15% oxygen) (just as an FYI).

I'm having a hard time seeing where you're getting 3cc from? I'm looking around the article, as well as the one that tokenadult posted, and I can't get a volume listed anywhere.

But yeah, tidal volume (or a normal breath) is roughly 500ml, so you'll need like 25ml of oxygen supplied per breath. Normal adult does something like 20ish breaths a minute, so you need to put in at least 500mL of oxygen a minute to survive - at normal levels. You can probably get away with a lot less, especially if the patient is unconscious (somehow).

Liquids are much denser than gases.

The technique in the article is small bubbles filled with gas.

My first thought: increased endurance. Would this injection work while breathing, for an increased oxygen flow to organs?

Haha...

"The author of this article is Damien S. Wilhelmi, an SEO tactician and SEM strategist. If you enjoyed this article, you can follow me on twitter @JakabokBotch. I am writing on behalf of Wilderness Aware Rafting who offer some of the best Colorado White Water Rafting trips in the state."

Wow... he is good :)

If you can't breath wouldn't you still feel the suffocating sensation?

Only if carbon dioxide builds up in your blood. If you can remove the carbon dioxide, you may feel a sort of "reflex" to breathe, but not the crushing, burning sensation you normally get when you hold your breath too long.

Living on mars without a helmet? :D

The pressure difference because of lack of atmosphere would cause strange effects (I don't know what might be, I'm no physicist).

You might be able to gradually equalize internal/external pressure over time.

I saw it in a movie. I think it was called Total Recall :)

If you want your face to melt, sure.

So how long before this becomes the standard safety kit for moon/mars colonials?

I think since the moon doesn't have an atmosphere, the vacuum will quickly tear you apart from liquid evaporation anyway.

Not so. Your skin is actually more than strong enough to prevent your blood from boiling. And without an atmosphere, radiative cooling is really slow. Exposure to vacuum (or just really low atmospheric pressure) kills you by anoxia after a couple of minutes; less than a minutes of exposure tends to do no lasting damage, unless you try to hold your breath and end up rupturing alveoli.

I think you make it seem slightly more harmless than it is..

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_will_happen_to_a_person_witho...

After about ten seconds a victim will experience loss of vision and impaired judgement, and the cooling effect of evaporation will lower the temperature in the victim's mouth and nose to near-freezing. Unconsciousness and convulsions would follow several seconds later, and a blue discoloration of the skin called cyanosis would become evident.

At this point the victim would be floating in a blue, bloated, unresponsive stupor, but their brain would remain undamaged and their heart would continue to beat. If pressurized oxygen is administered within about one and a half minutes, a person in such a state is likely make a complete recovery with only minor injuries, though the hypoxia-induced blindness may not pass for some time. Without intervention in those first ninety seconds, the blood pressure would fall sufficiently that the blood itself would begin to boil, and the heart would stop beating. There are no recorded instances of successful resuscitation beyond that threshold.

The question of what happens to humans in the vacuum of space is a popular one. Below are some articles with answers.

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970603.h...

http://www.damninteresting.com/outer-space-exposure/

I didn't mean to imply they could all just jump around in their birthday suits... but considering how big of an issue (that is, end-all) oxygen leaks are in any sort of constructed microatmosphere, provided there is no catastrophic damage to infrastructure it seems like this would be a pretty big help.

Just close your mouth. You lose water via your lungs very quickly, but through your skin less so.

When 30 minutes of additional breathing are enough time to bring a crew back to Earth or a space station. That is to say, in 340 years, give or take 5 years. By then they'll also bring condoms, because we will have realized that space isn't much good for a whole lot, except to have sex in it.

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