Bring Your Own Oxygen

the room is relatively well ventilated. I mean they had to cover up most of the ventilation with soundproofing, but I think there's a little air is getting in just enough. As long as we don't go three or four hours in here, will probably not die, which is a good thing, right, Um. And typically we don't go three or four hours in here anyway, No one podcast followed by a second like two hours max. Yeah, you go over. Maybe we could punch in a little bit towards that three hour point,

but there's still plenty of oxygen. That's my point. And yeah, that's the main concern here, and that's what we're talking about today. Oxygen. How did it get here and into us? Um? How can we manipulate it? Because that's always a question, right, like this is so cool, how can we use it for our own gain? And um, of course we're going to explore as you already sort of alluded to one of those tropes and films like oh there's not enough

oxygen in thirty seconds, we're going to run out. Oh yeah, I mean, especially in your space your space movies, you're underwater movies. That's always an important trope. I mean, because the core idea here is that humans have evolved to live in a very particular portion of our atmosphere. And if you start going too high, you start going too low.

If you move outside of that atmosphere and into an underwater environment or out into the into orbit, then you have to bring a portion of your actual atmosphere with you in some sort of pressurized compain or at least an air mask. UM. I was recently looking into Winston Churchill and uh during the Second World War. UM, they they developed this egg for him to recline in and

smoke in and read in. UM. Egg egg a big pressurized egg because the planes that they were depending on they were not pressurized, so you would have to wear an air mask to go at a high altitude and you would need to be at a high altitude, uh, you know, to be safe in in a war torn world. Um,

the sadly than ever actually used this egg. But it's just another example, like you want Winston Churchill up there out of a comfortable area of the atmosphere, Well, then you have to have an egg of atmosphere for Winston Churchill to take with him. So this was this idea like if everything went to crap with the war, how

do we say Winston Churchill? When it was just more like, how do we fly him around at a high altitude and keep him comfortable and stay And it just turned out that it was too large to fit in the airplane and then it was too heavy to fit in the airplane. After that, I have a blog post on it you can go check. Oh yeah, and he was going to smoke in it too, And that was that

was a core design principle there. Well, we have been trying to uh you know, take oxygen into our own hands for a long time, and I would say this is this is something that was pretty popular. I don't know, maybe in the early two thousand's oxygen bars. I I've heard a lot about these and now I've I've read a little bit, but I've I've never seen one. I've never visited one. Um, I just heard. I'd remember hearing

stuff about how Michael Jackson. Jackson supposedly slept in an oxygen tent, and I guess that's that's partially really like a hyperbaric one. I think so. But again, this may be a complete hearsay, and I don't want to tarnish man's good name. Sure, Um, all right, So there's this idea that there's a purity in this oxygen, right, if you just get more of it, then maybe you could think clear. And so that's what these oxygen bars were trying to sell to people, Like, sit down and have

a twenty minute huff of some of this oxygen. Like, I don't see. I think the concentration was compared to that we normally get. Yes, but the thing is you're not really getting anything out of it. Yeah. It kind of reminds me of the there's certain vitamins, of course that you can mean some vitamins you can you can have a toxic reaction to, but other vitamins, if you take over the recommended amount, you're just gonna pee it out. Anyway.

I mean, your body has evolved to deal with certain levels of intake, and if you exceed some of those levels, uh, if it doesn't hurt you, then it it's not really going to do you any good, right, because, as you said, that's what we're sort of molded for, that's what we crawled out of the muck and UH and evolved to

deal with. So yeah, if you if you have something tremendously stronger than you start, it's not gonna really pay off, right because at that level, the blood is almost completely and we're talking about saturated, So that means there's really no need for more oxygen. Now. Of course in UH, in hospital environments, you'll sometimes see a hundred percent oxygen

administered for a very short amount of time. But but they still they have to be careful with that because it can result in various health problems in some individuals if it's if there's prolonged use. So again, it underlines the fact that we've we've developed, we've evolved to deal with and going higher doesn't help and it could conceivably hurt in some situations. Yeah, and if you're wondering, like, well,

why is oxygen really important in the first place. We we should celebrate it at all times, really, because it's one of the reasons why life here on Earth exists in the first place. That's right, If you travel back far enough in time, you will encounter a very different

world than we have now. Yeah, because if you think about it, for the first two billion years of earth existence, we're talking about this modeled volcano popped planet, it had little oxygen about point zero zero zero one percent of current levels. But then about two point three billion years ago there was a really big change when This change had a lot to do with photosynthesizing bacteria, which began to create oxygen. And Elizabeth Barber, writing for the Christian

Science Monitor, had this great disc ccryption. She says, it was, so far as we know, a moment unlike any other in the universe. While Mars, just sixty million years older than Earth browned and reddened, Earth was furnished in greens and blues, and later in all the brilliant colors that decorate its planet and animals and all the protests in between. The modern Earth owes about eighty five of its oxygen to phytoplankton, beginning with the cinobacteria blue green algae that

first quilted the planet those billions of years ago. I love that quilted the planet with his blue green algae. Yeah, I love that description. Um, it's it's interesting. I was reading around different accounts of the Great Oxidation event and uh, Phil Plate of Bad Astronomy and his right up on this. He actually framed it more as this is really a mass extinction event of one uh species, like really kicking into high gear to the detriment of most of the

other life forms. Because before before this guy hit the scene, Um, we're talking about the the Santo bacteria. Not late Um, you had you had a world of simple bacteria, mostly in the ocean and uh, and you know, these these bacteria just doing their thing and then the one superstar kicks it up and begins to to change the environment,

to change the atmosphere ultimately change the climate as well. Yeah, and um, I mean what I think is so interesting about Santo bacteria is not only did it contribute to the creation of diurnal and nocturnal patterns, which we talked about in our last episode. I believe it's called the

dark um. But yeah, as you say, it completely changed the profile of life and the oxygen profile, and in turn, in doing that it helped to create multicellular life which then would turn around and munch on the sino bacteria. And so thanks a lot for all the oxygen and creating us. I think we're going to feast upon you.

I mean, it's kind of kind of like a horse race, right where everything everything is kind of running neck and neck, and then one of the horses just really starts running ahead of the pack and it's clear that this, this is going to be the winner. And in this case, the winner is going to be the kind of the initial model for everything that comes afterwards. Yeah, so you have,

I mean, photosynthetic life forms are dominating here. And the interesting thing about this is that you look, you're kind of travel back in deep time and you think about this, and the interesting question becomes, well, did it happen just in little pockets around the Earth or did it just sort of spread willy nilly, And we can't answer that, of course right now, but it's interesting to even think

that this huge sea change was happening. Yeah, there was a two thousand and thirteen paper post in Nature that actually suggested that the Earth's atmosphere was already somewhat oxygenated. Um, you know, not oxygen rich or anything, but but there was already a certain amount of oxygenation going on about three billion years ago, and so that that would revise the timeline some some what kind of in sort of

a six hundred million year transition point. Yeah, And I think trans action is key, right, because that's not when the sea change happened. It just sort of like it was round in pockets. And if you look at that study, its researchers at the University of Southern Denmark, they actually analyze a pair of two point nine two to two point nine six billion year old rocks for evidence of oxidation and lo and behold they found it. So that's how we know that it was it was lurking, shall

we say. So fast forward to the present. We live in this world that has a plenty of oxygen and uh and and we all have sort of the grade school science understanding of how it happens. I think we can all picture that a diagram of administration. It always looks like it's all going down, like just at your local neighborhood park. Sure, and then you see that, you know, you see the human breathing out the CEO two and then the human breathing in the oxygen that plants and

trees create. And so this idea is that if we lived in this treeless world, this shrub less world, we wouldn't have any oxygen. And that's partly true, but it's not the whole story indeed, because we can really lay most of the credit at the feet if they had feet of the phytoplankton. These are single cell plants that live at the ocean surface. They only need two things for photostints of this, and that is energy from the sun, new troots from the water, and uh, they're actually responsible

for producing half the world's oxygen half of it. Yeah, so it really recasts your idea of I think, how the atmosphere is formed, because we tend to think more land base. But of course, the more and more we learn about the ocean, the more we understand how much it is informing our atmosphere and how that changeability of the ocean can really cause some some very drastic changes. Yeah.

I mean, when you look at this and when you look at just models for global climate in general, we really live on a water world and the way that water behaves um is tremendously important in our various systems. The the the be the creation of oxygen, or be at our weather, weather patterns. Yeah, and we could dive deep into the ocean and have an entire episode on this, and we perhaps will later. Um. I know that we have covered it before, and we've talked about this idea

of dragging the ocean really disturbing the life forms. There is completely sort of a stab in the dark by humans not realizing that our entire ecosystems that were disturbing that that actually affect us land lovers. Um. So all right, you guys, put that in your pipe and smoke it, because we're gonna take a quick break and we get back. We're going to talk about binding and storing oxygen like

oxygen ninjas. All right, we're back. We've been talking about the the origins of oxygen, the importance of oxygen, where oxygen is coming from in the world that we, uh, we experience every day. But now we're gonna get a little high tech, because you know how humans are. We can't help but but hack into everything. We we we hack into our bodies, we hack into the world around us, and of course we also hack into digital infrastructures of

our own creation. But but we can't help a tinker and try to figure out how to manipulate things a little more in our favor. And of course we've done that with oxygen as well. Its particularly in this case with the binding and storing of oxygen. Yeah. I like to think about this is a couple of scientists sitting around, perhaps on the rooftop of their building one night, saying, wouldn't it be cool we could just like suck all the oxygen out of the room. And then they're like, yeah,

we could do that. I could literally do that. We could literally do that. And it turns out the researchers at the University of Southern Denmark had that kind of stoner moment. They synthesized a crystalline material that absorbs and stores oxygen in large quantities. As you say, it can be used to bind, store, and transport oxygen like a dense artificial hemoglobin. I love that, that idea that you

just have your own portable hemoglobin. Yeah, I mean the idea that you have this material that works like like a biological system, that's it's capable of just sucking all this oxygen out of the room. And and I have a feeling that a lot of you have probably caught some of at least the headlines that have made their way regarding this, because people really latched onto that sucks all the oxygen out of the room, because it's it's an amazing stat but of course it can't help but

stir our imaginations. But we can't help but imagine somebody, say, pulling this out at a dinner party, and then all the air in the room just rushes into this material. Thanksgiving, I don't think so. Yeah, conversation starts getting a little uncomfortable, you just whip it out and uh takes the breath

literally out of everyone's face. Yeah. And I think this was exacerbated because when it was first put out the media, it was something like, oh, a spoonful of this stuff was like out of all the oxygen in the room. In fact, a ten liter bucket of this solid material would be enough to store all the oxygen in a room. And we're talking about a few grains could contain enough

oxygen in a single breath. Now, once trapped, this oxygen can be stored until the material is heated gently to release the oxygen and the cool thing about this is that it can absorb and release oxygen a whole lot, like many different times without losing its ability. And this is according to Christine Mackenzie. She's a physics professor at the University of Seven Denmark. She said, it's like dipping a sponge in water, squeezing the water out of it

and repeating the process over and over again. Yes, she pointed out, the material is both a sensor and a container for the oxygen. It can be used to bind, to store, to transport. So I mean you can really the mind can run wild with the various potential uses for this that was obvious. One of course, would be for any kind of environment where you needed to take

oxygen with you, be it diving, traveling into space. But I mean also it would have tremendous potential for use in automobiles that use fuel cells and need a regulated oxygen supply. So and it's again when you think about the fact that we live in such an oxygen dependent world and we have oxygen dependent lives. Uh, there from

this tremendous application for this technology. Yeah. Now, the key component of the material is cobalt because it's bound in a specifically designed organic molecule, and again this is from mackenzie. She says that cobalt gives the material precisely the molecular electronic structure that enables it to absorb oxygen from its surroundings, and she said the mechanism is well known from all breathing creatures on Earth. Humans and many other species use iron,

while other animals like craps and spiders use copper. She said, small amounts of metals are essential for the absorption of oxygen. So actually, it's not entirely surprising to see this effect

in our new material. So here again is another example of biomimicry, right right, Yeah, And indeed, that's one of the tremendous things about this material is that it's it's it's just a it's a material that when we manipulate it a little bit, it can it can actually replicate some of the processes that they go on inside the human body. Yeah. No, McKenzie and her team are researching whether light can trigger oxygen's released from the material, which

would be halfway too artificial photosynthesis. Again, the implication of this is is pretty widespread, and especially when you're thinking about terror forming. Yes, so in this we get into the quest to create a material that is essentially an artificial leaf. Um not in the it looks like a leaf necessarily, but then it can carry out photosynthus and so in this we turn to the Royal College of Art where Julian Melakori has developed a photosynthetic material. It

allegedly lives and breathes just like a leaf. It sorbs carbon dioxide and water and releases oxygen, and it works by suspending chloroplast. These are the part of the plant where photosynsus actually happens in a material made from silk protein. Yeah, Melchiori envisions the facades of buildings and lampshades covered in this photosynthetic material, and it would essentially exhale fresh air for us. I love. I love these sort of utopian

futuristic technologies. Yeah, yeah, you can imagine somebody's kind of waxing poetic about it. In the future of the lamp will not only illuminate the room, but if we'll breathe, the lamp is a living thing and deserving of our respect. It is a is a cohabitative that's your utopian voice. Yeah,

I like it, of course. The the other implication of this again is, hey, you know, we know that we can grow plants in zero gravity, but a material like this could produce oxygen with less management and in time and effort required for growing plants. So again terraforming off planet, you know. And it's I have to say though, it's kind of it's kind of scary in a way because it's like saying, oh, but we don't necessarily need the

plants to get what we need, right. Maybe it just ends up with a situation like in uh, like in Silent Running, where they decided to just blow up all the gardens that they have in space. They don't need them anymore. Maybe that's why they didn't need them need them anymore, because they had it. They developed a technology like this that they could run on Earth and just build all the plants they wanted it plastic trees, if

you will. It's funny how technology like this makes the movie Wally even more relevant, this idea that what we will be on this generation ship or generational ship and looking back at like this specimen of a plant and all this footage of growing things. Now it's worth noting that both of these examples of these types we've talked about. I mean, these are early goings with these materials. They're

they're not being manufactured yet. You're not gonna be buying them even it's sharper image in the next a few months. But they show tremendous potential and it really helps us um get a better idea of where we're headed in the future. Well, and you know, you can sit here and think about all it could you know, maybe it could even help with our atmosphere. Things got out of whack, right, You could create some sort of balance there. Yeah, not

a replacement by any means. I was being a bit hyperbolic with all that, but but in terms of just sort of tweaking things a little bit more in our favor. Yeah, and then you know, emergency room medicine and space exploration. It has really some some great ideas tagging along with it.

And then of course you have more of the dystopian negative view, and this is where things get probably much more fictional and dark, and you start thinking, oh, but then perhaps the world takes a turn and there is no ability to restore balance, and you know, the oxygen is is poorly saturated throughout and it becomes a question of the oxygen haves and the oxygen have not. I love that. That's that's a tremendous vision of the future where we're just the oxygen you breathe that we take

for granted. Now he's no longer free. Um. And of course I can't help but think of like a potential like cinematic layout where a uh you know, a guy walks into a bank, puts on a gas mask and whips out his his bucket of material and sucks all the oxygen and then he runs off with the money or uh you know. It's easy to to to run loud with those today as well. But where where I see the real potential for possible weaponization of this kind of thing is not so much like an oxygen sucking device.

But it makes me think, Um, you know, what else is possible with meta materials in the future. Could we create one that generates a toxic chemical compound instead of just creating oxygen? I don't know, but it makes me wonder what is possible? Yeah, this is the interesting dark territory. So does it enter into bioterrorism? I think it's what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, could if we can create a

material that that traps oxygen. If we can create a material that acts like a leaf, you know, what's what's to say that in the future we can't create materials capable of other chemical transitions. Good good questions here? Um, you know what I'm gonna throw in here, just because that's a bit depressing that. Um, the question about how

baby birds breathe inside and egg. I came across this during our research, because you know how you can kind of go down that sort of research vortex and you're like, oh, I don't it's not really relevant, But that's quite interesting. I don't think i'd ever thought about that. Well, what's the answer. Well, the folks that mental plust did um, and they have an article on it, and it says like, you know, obviously we know that when we're babies, we we have the luxury of an umbilical cord to give

us oxygen. But baby birds, well they have to sit inside of that egg. And it turns out that when the eggs are laid by the mother, they're really warm, and as they cool, the material inside the egg shrinks a little bit and the two membranes they pull apart a little and create a small pocket or sack of air, and then as the developing bird grows, it breathes in

oxygen from the air sack and exhales carbon dioxide. And there are several thousand microscopic pores all over the surface of the egg and this allows that CEO two to escape and fresh air to get in. Well, that's beautiful. I never never even thought about that, right, I mean, talk about a portable atmosphere. Yeah, and it brings us right back again to the egg, from church shells to

the egg of your common bird. It's right here we go three six yeah, all right, Well, then you have it, a little crash course in oxygen where it comes from, what we do with it, and what we're trying to do with it with some cutting edge technology. Um hey, why don't check out our website. Go over to us stuff to Blow your mind dot com. That is where you'll find all of our podcast episodes way back to the very beginning, with hundreds and hundreds of podcast episodes.

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