Imagine what it can do to software
Those damn electrons!
Antioxidants exist.
I’ve currently been reducing my oxygen intake. My wife keeps telling me it’s impossible and my doc says I’ll supposedly die, but they’re just hating on my progress.
This is a valid athletic technique. Usually achieved by training at altitude.
Big O lackeys are everywhere. They want to keep you alive so they can sell you more O.
I got my oxygen intake down to single digits! My family wasn’t supportive however and got me a new pair of lungs, haters
Statistically speaking, for humans, breathing oxygen does eventually have a 100% fatality rate.
There are quite a few sci-fi stories and short stories built on a similar concept. One of my favorites is an alien ship lands on a random farm in the US and (leaving a lot of details out, read the book!) it comes to light that the aliens normally live at insanely hot temperatures like 900F (480C) and consider Earth an “Ice World” (that’s also the name of the book). Anyway, one of the catches in the book is that farmer figures out the alien wants to trade (again skipping a lot of details) but all he has on him that he can give up is a cigarette (the farmer doesn’t know it’s super hot inside the ship). He does the trade and we later find out that most of the galaxy is INSANELY vulnerable to being 100% completely utterly addicted to nicotine. When the alien took in the cigarette it instantly vaporized and sent the nicotine into the air and they breathed it and became instantly addicted worse than any opiod addiction IRL.
Did you see what oxygen did to the Hindenburg? I’m not going to let that happen to me. Say no to big oxygen!
Have you ever seen asbestos catch fire? Me neither. So it’s your choice what you’d prefer breathing in.
Delicious fluorine for me please
Don’t forget, water is only one atom in it’s molecular composition away from rocket fuel
Or an extremely deadly poison. Or an explosive, flammable gas.
On the topic, as oxidation is a pretty prevalent negative side effect of living, our body has multiple mechanisms to deal with it, no? So my question is: where do the “antioxidants” that we can eat come into the picture here? Are they like preventing oxidation from even occurring, or are they like the shields that our cells use to protect themselves from oxidative stress, or what have you?
Cell mechanisms cause oxidative stress in the body which can lead to inflammation and faster aging. Antioxidants provide the body with an easy way to neutralise the bi-products.
Oxidation is the loss of electrons, whereas reduction is the gain of electrons. The mnemonic is OIL RIG: Oxidation Is Loss, Reduction Is Gain.
Oxygen is highly electronegative (second only to fluorine), meaning that it will strongly attract electrons. So, oxygen is good at oxidizing things. It’s good at stealing their electrons. (When the oxygen takes the electron, the oxygen becomes reduced!)
The reason that oxygen is so important in your body for respiration is because of its high electronegativity. It is used as the final electron acceptor in a chain of chemical reactions that are used to convert high energy molecules that you’ve eaten into different high energy molecules that your body can use.
Think of the analogy of a staircase and a ball. The ball is an electron and the stairs are energy states of different molecules along the metabolic pathway. As the ball goes down the stairs, the electron loses energy (which is usually converted to ATP or NADH). At the bottom of the stairs is oxygen, once the electron gets there, it doesn’t have anymore potential energy to lose, unless maybe you have some fluorine around. The final, reduced state of oxygen in this pathway is carbon dioxide. It’s no longer useful for respiration and thankfully can just be exhaled. How convenient!
An oxygen missing an electron (an oxygen radical) is highly reactive. This is not good. It’ll just steal an electron from whatever molecule is nearby. That may be DNA or any other molecule that it’s in your best interest to keep intact. Antioxidants are helpful as electron donors, neutralizing radicals before they do damage.
antioxidants are our internal sacrificial anodes?
Oxidation is how red blood cells collect oxygen to pass to the rest of the body. In fact it is iron in hemoglobin that “rusts” to collect the oxygen. You would die if your blood didn’t “rust”.
Antioxidants have nothing to do with this.
Thanks, this is an unexpected image and a fun fact for the next party.
ooh, then I must have gotten the terms wrong…
What I was thinking were the free radicals that are generated during basically most oxygen related reactions in the body, I thought that was called oxidation (at least, in terms of the body).
So, you know anything about how (or if) antioxidants are used against free radicals?
That actually depends on the type of antioxidant. The body has certain innate antioxidants (e.g. enzymes like catalase) to deal with reactive oxygen species but antioxidants that you get through your diet are also very important in that system (like vitamin c and e to prevent oxidation of cell membranes for example). Also some phytochemicals (like polyphenols) can act as an antioxidant.
I actually thought about this a few years ago, is it possible that we age because of oxidation to some degree? Is there a way to prevent that? I thought about it, how blood can rust and just had the connecting thought but I’m not smart enough to know if there’s any actual correlation.
Edit: Got some really cool responses out of this to think about, thank you everyone!
Pretty sure oxidation plays a major role in aging, but can’t tell you the exact mechanism, I have no idea about it.
But about the blood rust idea, I don’t think that can work, cause we don’t have just iron particles that can directly interact with oxygen just floating around in our blood, we have a complex (I.e. hemoglobin) that contains significant amounts of iron, which somehow makes it really good for binding to and carrying oxygen.
Deviating a bit, carbon monoxide poisoning is really akin to suffcation iirc, cause it binds and occupies the hemoglobin, effectively reducing the amount of oxygen that can be carried by your blood.
However, do fact check me, I might be wrong about something…
Edit: BTW, it seems that “oxidation” might not be the right term to use here, so do understand that I am referring to free radicals here.
You’re pretty much right about everything. Oxygen (especially as free radicals) is damaging to pretty much all your tissues, so your body moves it around in little bodyguard proteins (hemoglobin). These each contain 4 small iron molecules as part of the much bigger structure and doesn’t rust or function like iron in any way. The iron is mostly used for electrons (and also damages your body if it’s not inside the hemoglobin and causes more aging)
Carbon monoxide has a higher affinity for hemoglobin than oxygen, so it sticks to your blood cells and makes them useless for hours. Super dangerous.
Point being “oxidative stress” is bad for you and a major cause of aging that your body tries to fight. If your body doesn’t fix this well, you age faster. If it repairs damage too well, you’re more prone to cancer. Just wear and tear of using your body.
So to the original question of can this process be stopped… Absolutely! Hold your breath - the oxygen will stop coursing through your body and you will stop aging. Just ten minutes is enough to end aging indefinitely! Then you have to worry about other problems like body decomposition, but the oxidative stress will be cured!
Carbon monoxide, not dioxide.
I’m no expert but I’m fairly sure that is basically true in a way. As per zr0’s top-level comment. Forms of life that can make do with less cellular respiration, for example by using external sources to regulate temperature (cold- blooded), don’t need to invite as much oxygen into their cells, and so they get less weird damage over time. Mammals in general have not adopted this strategy.
Great now I’m gonna stop breathing.
Look at what it did to the Linux kernel too.
Tap for spoiler
Ssshhh. It made it better
OOTL? 🥺👉👈
Rust programming language
Oh, but of course! Please excuse my old brain, and thank you.
You think that’s bad, wait until you hear about dihydrogen monoxide! It’s in almost everything, even the water you drink and the air you breathe!
Took me some time
More information about this dangerous chemical: https://dhmo.org/facts.html
Have you heard about the dangers of dihydrogenoxide?
You can combat dangerous oxygen with black smoke from burning oil.
Lol obviously. Thanks!
It makes my blood run blue just thinking about it
