December 9, 2014 • 23 mins
What if you could suck all the oxygen out of a room with a nifty piece of material? Soon you may be able to with a crystalline material that stores, binds and releases oxygen. Find out how, and join Robert and Julie for a little Oxygen 101, including the question, "What lifeform provides half of the world's oxygen?"' Hint: It's not trees.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to stuff to Blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Buchlas. Julie,
what what is in this room with us right now? Pure? Sweeten?
It's not pure? A little oxygen in there. There's oxygen
(00:25):
in there because we are breathing and we are alive
right now, and we're not concerned about running out because
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
(00:47):
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,
(01:08):
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
(01:29):
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
(01:49):
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
(02:09):
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
(02:32):
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
(02:53):
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
(03:13):
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
(03:35):
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
(03:55):
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,
(04:19):
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
(04:39):
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
(05:00):
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
(05:22):
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
(05:42):
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
(06:04):
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
(06:27):
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
(06:49):
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
(07:12):
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
(07:33):
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
(07:54):
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
(08:16):
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
(08:38):
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
(08:59):
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
(09:20):
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,
(09:42):
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
(10:02):
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
(10:26):
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
(10:47):
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
(11:08):
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
(11:32):
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
(11:54):
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
(12:15):
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
(12:35):
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
(12:56):
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
(13:17):
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
(13:37):
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
(13:58):
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
(14:20):
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
(14:42):
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
(15:05):
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,
(15:29):
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
(15:50):
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
(16:19):
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
(16:39):
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
(17:02):
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,
(17:23):
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,
(17:43):
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
(18:04):
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
(18:24):
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
(18:46):
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.
(19:09):
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
(19:30):
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
(19:50):
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.
(20:11):
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
(20:33):
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
(20:54):
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
(21:15):
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
(21:37):
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
(21:57):
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
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(22:19):
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(22:41):
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Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to stuff to Blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Buchlas. Julie,
what what is in this room with us right now? Pure? Sweeten?
It's not pure? A little oxygen in there. There's oxygen
(00:25):
in there because we are breathing and we are alive
right now, and we're not concerned about running out because
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
(00:47):
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,
(01:08):
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
(01:29):
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
(01:49):
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
(02:09):
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
(02:32):
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
(02:53):
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
(03:13):
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
(03:35):
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
(03:55):
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,
(04:19):
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
(04:39):
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
(05:00):
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
(05:22):
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
(05:42):
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
(06:04):
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
(06:27):
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
(06:49):
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
(07:12):
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
(07:33):
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
(07:54):
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
(08:16):
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
(08:38):
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
(08:59):
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
(09:20):
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,
(09:42):
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
(10:02):
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
(10:26):
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
(10:47):
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
(11:08):
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
(11:32):
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
(11:54):
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
(12:15):
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
(12:35):
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
(12:56):
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
(13:17):
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
(13:37):
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
(13:58):
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
(14:20):
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
(14:42):
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
(15:05):
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,
(15:29):
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
(15:50):
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
(16:19):
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
(16:39):
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
(17:02):
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,
(17:23):
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,
(17:43):
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
(18:04):
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
(18:24):
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
(18:46):
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.
(19:09):
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
(19:30):
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
(19:50):
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.
(20:11):
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
(20:33):
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
(20:54):
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
(21:15):
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
(21:37):
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
(21:57):
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
(22:19):
the very beginning, with hundreds and hundreds of podcast episodes.
You can listen to a new one every day for
over a year and counting. It's uh, it's great stuff.
Check it out. And we also have our videos, our
podcast episodes links out the social media accounts, pictures of
what we look like, anything and everything. Find it right there.
And if you want to share your plots for a
just token future, well you can do that by sending
(22:41):
us an email. And you can send it to blow
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