this is pretty awesome. yay science

http://gizmodo.com/5921868/scientist...hout-breathing

link to the actual paper: http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/4/140/140ra88

I wonder if this will eventually be exploited by competitive runners and other athletes, sort of as a kind of blood doping for performance.

I think I remember Kurzweil predicting this. Yay Ray!

When I read this

This seemingly magic elixir carries "three to four times the oxygen content of our own red blood cells."

I immediately thought of the Tri-ox injections given by Bones in the old Star Trek series. Check out this link about Tri-ox Compound. At what point will the tech in Star Trek stop coming true?

no doubt

Would this mean an athlete could perform anaerobically for 30 minutes? Could we see Usain Bolt sprint the 10k in 15 minutes?

Why would it? The energy for anaerobic activity comes from metabolic processes that don't require oxygen, and they are limited in duration by lactic acid buildup in the muscles. The new particles just deliver oxygen for use in aerobic processes as a substitute for breathing.

The first thing I thought of was using it underwater. The article mentions taking a shot for diving, but it would be really valuable if you're trying to evade police in a car chase. Drive to the end of a pier, shoot up with this, peace out, bitches.

And anyone using this for a movie had better cite me.

I did too, because of that movie the Abyss where the guy breathes in the synthetic amniotic fluid. A navy SEAL once told us, if I understood him correctly, that they have actually experimented with something like that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing

If real, yay science. Also, no need for scuba gear anymore imo.

Yeah, that's it. They were experimenting to see if these guys could actually breath in liquid. Apparently this was extremely unpleasant.

Don't hold your breath.


PTB

This is badass, and I will probably be using it in my daily life if its all its cracked up to be, and its weird that I'm finding out about it here first

Right — this would have no direct effect on anaerobic performance. However, it would allow an athlete to increase aerobic output if the limiting factor thereof is oxygen delivery to muscle fibers, which is normally the case, and if the oxygen content per unit volume of vesicle laden blood is greater than that of fully oxygenated normal blood, which almost has to be true given the results of the study. In performance terms it would allow an athlete to, say, run harder before the anaerobic "kick" at the end, for as long as the pre-loaded oxygen vesicles continued to matter, so it would have the biggest effect on middle distance athletes, with none on anaerobic-limited performance and possibly not enough on long distance to make up for whatever the adverse effects turn out to be. (increased blood viscosity?) (I didn't see any indication that the technique increases the blood's oxygen transport capacity in a relevant way — rather, the study cited is using it as storage — though it might and if so would also affect the long distance athlete in a way similar to EPO doping, though of course it might be either more, or less, effective at that.)

It seems like it would have approximately the same effect as increasing muscle fibers' myoglobin levels (though not as useful because it would be better to have them inside the cells, rather than crowding out RBCs). We do know that endurance athletes have increased myoglobin levels, but I haven't seen anything about myoglobin doping actually occuring, perhaps because it's hard to do. (Selenium apparently does it a bit, but I don't know that athletes are using it.)

We also know that deep-diving animals tend to have far higher myoglobin levels than we do, by more than an order of magnitude. (human: 4–7 mg/g dry muscle; whales, ~100 mg/g) I didn't do the math myself but have read that if one somehow could increase myoglobin to whale levels that would be like adding about two full breaths of extra oxygen; it would seem the technique studied, which kept people alive 15–20 minutes, is equivalent to considerably more than that. So I guess the most obvious use, in theory, looks like it would be in free diving.

One amusing issue is that the article and study abstract (I don't have access to the full study) don't mention CO₂. If the particles don't take up carbon dioxide, and there's no reason to believe they would, then reliance on them would be associated with at least some respiratory acidosis, which might ultimately be the limiting factor for use by conscious humans, especially divers.