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The city of Orlando and its water utility made an urgent appeal Friday afternoon for residents to cut back sharply on water usage for weeks because of a pandemic-triggered shortage of liquid oxygen used to purify water. If commercial and residential customers are unable to reduce water usage quickly and sufficiently, Orlando Utilities Commission may issue a system-wide alert for boiling water needed for drinking and cooking. Without reductions in water usage, a boil-water alert would come within a week, utility officials said. Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer asked residents to immediately stop watering their lawns, washing their cars and using...

When pressed for oxygen, some fish and sea cucumbers will use their lower intestines to get a little extra out of their environment. Now, a team of Japanese researchers say that mammals are also capable of respirating through their rectal cavity, at least in a lab setting. The team’s research is published today in the journal Med and describes the capacity for mice, rats, and pigs to survive longer and have more strength in low-oxygen circumstances when given oxygen gas or an oxygen-rich liquid through their rectums, in a process similar to an enema. While fish like loaches and catfish...

Six hospitals in the Indian capital Delhi have completely run out of oxygen and doctors say other hospitals have just a few hours' worth of supply left. A number of people have died while waiting for oxygen, and more than 99% of all intensive care beds are full. India is in the grips of a second wave of Covid infections and on Thursday recorded the highest one-day tally of new cases anywhere in the world. The country has recorded close to 16 million confirmed infections.

After making the first-ever powered flight on another world, NASA's Mars 2020 mission has managed another key first that could pave the way for future astronauts by making breathable oxygen out of the wispy Martian air. NASA announced that an instrument aboard the rover had successfully extracted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on Mars and then electrochemically split oxygen atoms from carbon dioxide molecules. The Martian atmosphere is about 95% carbon dioxide. The remainder is mostly nitrogen and argon. The feat, announced Wednesday, is considered vital to any long-term stay for humans on Mars, as bringing an ample supply of...

In the search for life on other planets, the presence of oxygen in a planet's atmosphere is one potential sign of biological activity that might be detected by future telescopes. A new study, however, describes several scenarios in which a lifeless rocky planet around a sun-like star could evolve to have oxygen in its atmosphere. The new findings, published April 13 in AGU Advances, highlight the need for next-generation telescopes that are capable of characterizing planetary environments and searching for multiple lines of evidence for life in addition to detecting oxygen. ...

(...) Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve read hundreds of studies on the science of medical masks. Based on extensive review and analysis, there is no question in my mind that healthy people should not be wearing surgical or cloth masks. Nor should we be recommending universal masking of all members of the population. That recommendation is not supported by the highest level of scientific evidence. (...)

Southern California hospitals, already overwhelmed by coronavirus patients, are now facing a new problem — a shortage of oxygen, according to a report. Officials say they’re having trouble getting the necessary amount of oxygen to critically ill coronavirus patients, with supply issues causing at least five Los Angeles County hospitals to declare an “internal disaster” on Sunday, which included turning away ambulances.

Theory was first postulated in 1930s. Scientists this week announced the landmark detection of elusive particles generated from the fusion of hydrogen in the Sun, confirming a nearly-100-year-old theory about the ways in which many stars generate energy. In a paper published in Nature, a team of researchers called the Borexino Collaboration reported detecting the presence of neutrinos produced during the carbon–nitrogen–oxygen cycle of fusion deep within the Sun. The scientists stated that the energy produced in the CNO cycle represents just a small fraction of the total energy output of our Sun, but “in massive stars, this is the...

Like all stars, our Sun is powered by the fusion of hydrogen into heavier elements. Nuclear fusion is not only what makes stars shine, it is also a primary source of the chemical elements that make the world around us. Much of our understanding of stellar fusion comes from theoretical models of atomic nuclei, but for our closest star, we also have another source: neutrinos created in the Sun’s core.Whenever atomic nuclei undergo fusion, they produce not only high energy gamma rays but also neutrinos. While the gamma rays heat the Sun’s interior over thousands of years, neutrinos zip out...

Click to watch 2 minute Youtube Video demonstrating unsafe oxygen levels per OSHA requirements when wearing a mask      Oppenheimer Ranch Project 62.5K subscribers   Cloth Masks Are Useless Against COVID-19 https://www.infectioncontroltoday.com... Why Face Masks Don’t Work: A Revealing Review https://www.oralhealthgroup.com/featu...

The Miserable Pseudo-Science Behind Face Masks, Social Distancing And Contact Tracing Once upon a time, there was something called science. It included the discovery of truth about nature, the elements, the universe, etc. It was practiced by honest and accountable practitioners called scientists and engineers. They often invented cool new things as a result of their studies, but generally they had no primal urge to use their knowledge to dominate other people, groups or even entire societies. Then certain other scientists and engineers rose up and made a discovery of their own. If true science was ever-so-slightly skewed and engineering...

Going without sleep for too long kills animals but scientists haven’t known why. Newly published work suggests that the answer lies in an unexpected part of the body. Feeling dead tired? Scientists may finally be on the verge of learning why too little sleep is inevitably fatal. Inside a series of tubes in a bright, warm room at Harvard Medical School, hundreds of fruit flies are staying up late. It has been days since any of them have slept: The constant vibrations that shake their homes preclude rest, cling as they might to the caps of the tubes for respite....

COVID-19 damages the hemoglobin, impairing the ability of red blood cells to transport oxygen throughout the body, compromising the lungs and resulting in Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), Italian pharmacology scholar Annalisa Chiusolo explained to The Jerusalem Post. If her thesis is correct, it would resolve many outstanding questions about the novel coronavirus, such as the greater vulnerability of men – specifically male diabetics – to become seriously ill from the virus, as well as the lower rate at which pregnant women and children contract COVID-19. Moreover, understanding this mechanism could lead the way to a quicker discovery of the...

FDA regulations block usage of a feature in Apple Watches that would help millions of users monitor their blood-oxygen levels. [Many Samsung cell phones have this capability, which is important for COVID-19.] Millions of Americans own an Apple Watch, which commands roughly a 50 percent share of the smartwatch market. Among its many features, the Apple Watch can take your pulse. It also contains hardware to measure your blood-oxygen levels, and it has been doing so since the watch was released—but the hardware is not operable by the watch’s wearer, who thus cannot obtain the results. Under current FDA regulation,...

After reading the paper, https://archive.is/ONUmi, about the way COVID-19 makes people ill, it strikes me that there may be a quicker, and cheaper, way to screen for infected people. It may not be 100%, but it may be a start.

Their prototype system mixes simulated lunar regolith — they have yet to try it with the real thing — with molten calcium chloride salt. The scientists then heat the mixture up to 950 degrees Celsius and run a current through it, releasing oxygen — a process called molten salt electrolysis. The electrolysis process has another useful byproduct: metal alloys. The scientists are also investigating applications to make best use of these alloys on the Moon. The team is looking to design a “pilot plant” that could be operated on the Moon by the mid-2020s.

The oceans are losing oxygen due to climate change, with dire consequences for marine life and vulnerable communities and fisheries, a nature conservation report revealed Saturday. This is the “ultimate wake-up call” for humanity on ever increasing carbon emissions, according to the report, published at the UN Climate Change conference in Madrid. The authors say the report, “Ocean deoxygenation: Everyone’s problem,” is the largest ever peer-reviewed study into the causes, impacts and possible solutions to the ocean’s oxygen loss. […] According to the report, areas of water with low oxygen concentrations are expanding, with roughly 700 ocean areas across the...

NASA’s Curiosity rover returned some seriously surprising data to Earth earlier this year, with readings of elevated methane levels that were hard to explain. Subsequent tests attempted to pin down the cause of the higher-than-expected readings but scientists have yet to come up with a definitive answer. Now, as questions about methane continue to swirl, scientists studying the behavior of gasses on Mars have noticed that oxygen on the Red Planet also acts much differently than it does on Earth. The observations were made in the Gale Crater, which the rover has called home since it landed there back in...

NASA has focused its vegetable-growing efforts on lettuce, which astronauts tend to while they live on the International Space Station. The orbiting laboratory poses different challenges than the Red Planet's surface, however, and crops that Mars visitors can expect to rely on may not be to everyone's taste. "In fact, in this particular area the soils are more alkaline so this would be OK for growing asparagus and beans and not potatoes," NASA chief scientist Jim Green said during a presentation held here last week as part of the International Astronautical Congress of soil studied by NASA's Curiosity rover. However...

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was jointly awarded to three scientists — William G. Kaelin Jr., Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza — for their work on how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability. The Nobel Assembly announced the prize at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on Monday. Their work established the genetic mechanisms that allow cells to respond to changes in oxygen levels. The findings have implications for treating a variety of diseases, including cancer, anemia, heart attacks and strokes. “Oxygen is the lifeblood of living organisms,” said Dr. George Daley, dean of Harvard Medical...