Family members of COVID-19 infected patients stand in a queue with empty oxygen cylinders outside the oxygen filling centre in New Delhi, India.
Photo by Naveen Sharma/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
An effective oxygen system requires prompt recognition of who needs oxygen, a reliable oxygen supply and safe delivery to those who need it.
Medical oxygen.
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A microscopic sponge can be used to trap oxygen from the air.
Shutterstock/Choksawatdikorn
These tiny organisms play a huge role in fighting climate change, but they’re under threat.
Police personnel escort a truck carrying medical liquid oxygen to the Guru Nanak Dev hospital in Amritsar, India, on April 24, 2021.
Photo by NARINDER NANU/AFP via Getty Images
For now, governments and health services should invest in bedside oxygen concentrators and oxygen generators to supply whole hospital needs.
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This discovery will shape the hunt for life on exoplanets.
David Clode/Unsplash
Rather than breathing in and out through the mouth, fish use a one-way system, passing water in one direction over their gills.
Artist’s concept of astronauts and human habitats on Mars.
NASA
It is becoming increasingly clear that there is plenty of brine on Mars.
Breathing pure oxygen would be like fireworks exploding in your body. And that’s not always a good thing.
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You might think the more oxygen you breathe in the better. But too much oxygen can make you sick.
Purple microbial mats offer clues to how ancient life functioned.
Pieter Visscher
How ancient microbes survived in a world without oxygen has been a mystery. Scientists discovered a living microbial mat that uses arsenic instead of oxygen for photosynthesis and respiration.
Her deep breath has to get to the baby.
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A fetus needs oxygen long before its lungs work and it’s exposed to the air. Some ingenious biochemistry explains how the mother’s blood delivers it.
Cold and sweet in the heat.
Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times via Getty Images
Have you ever felt a piercing pain in your head when you eat something cold?
Yuan Zheng/EPA
In the most severe cases, COVID-19 patients need oxygen pumped directly into their airways, or even be hooked up to a machine that does the job of their heart and lungs.
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New research suggests that Earth’s oxygenation didn’t require difficult and complex evolutionary leaps forward.
Alfred Nobel made his fortune through the invention of dynamite.
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Oxygen is vital for life, so much so that cells can sense when there isn’t enough and adapt almost instantly. So how do they do it? The winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physiology figured it out.
Fire consumes an area near Jaci Parana, state of Rondonia, Brazil, Aug. 24, 2019.
AP Photo/Eraldo Peres
If the Amazon rainforest functions as our planet’s lungs, what do raging wildfires threaten? An atmospheric scientist explains why the fires, though devastating, won’t suffocate life on Earth.
Fighting fire during training session.
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What exactly is inside those red fire extinguisher canisters, and does it work better than water?
Take a deep breath.
Flickr/Shenghung Lin
A sigh is the brain’s way of stopping the tiny sacks in your lung from collapsing.
The more fuel there is for the fire to burn, the bigger the fire. Leaves, trees and grass fuel the fire.
Flickr/bertknot
Bushfires require three key ingredients to ignite: heat, fuel and oxygen.
A John Deere tractor makes its way through floodwaters in Fargo, North Dakota.
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Recent extreme rains and weather in the Midwest are causing a multitude of problems in the topsoil that much of the nation’s food supply relies on.
Westy48/Flickr.
Put simply, it’s the outcome of a chemical reaction, which humans learned how to make some 400,000 years ago.