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Humans Make Ozone
MondoMor writes "Spotted this article at the Scripps Research Institute. Apparently humans have the ability to manufacture ozone, and do so as an immune response. Suppose we took a bunch of lawyers to the south pole, right under the ozone hole..."
I thought you said humans produce ozone?
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Oh,I have long known this, although I was thinking of the *other* way of producing ozone. Walk across a thick carpet or rub against an upholstered chair and accumulate some static. Then head to the nearest metal doorknob and put your finger near the knob..you'll probably see an arc jump from an extremity like a finger to the doorknob ("point discharge"). Electric discharges in oxygen can form ozone (O3), and you can actually smell it in some machine rooms, and after a burts of lightning. Of course, the static discharge is not exactly pleasant, but we all have to make sacrifices in the cause of science :-) Unless of course you're one of those people who liked touching battery leads or an electrode hooked up to a lemon to your tongue..
Suppose we took a bunch of lawyers to the south pole, right under the ozone hole...
Sure, and cut them all down with machine guns and bury them in a mass unmarked grave. I've had that dream too. But how does that help the ozone layer? And why the South Pole?
Ozone is ozone, but we only like it when it's it the upper atmosphere where it can block UV radiation. Down here it is a poison.
This Sig Kills Fascists
Methane too
How much Ozone does a person make while driving around in their SUV?
Dude, if you thought that ozone is bad news, singlet oxygen is highly toxic to just about everything biological.
As the article states, ozone is produced by neutrophils as a part of an immune response. Not too surprising; redox chemistry is critically important and we've evolved ways of protecting ourselves from harmful oxidation. For example the enzyme catalase converts hydrogen peroxide into water and hydrogen, while superoxide dismutase is a free radical scavenger. I wouldn't be too surprised if there's a specialized anti-ozone protein as well. Anyway, neutrophils engulf bacteria (and other things) and the engulfed matter ends up in an intracellular compartment called a phagosome. The neutrophil pumps in various nasty compounds--I imagine ozone may be one of them--to kill whatever it engulfed. I'd imagine that neutrophils have higher than normal expression levels for catalase and other protective enzymes to protect itself...from itself.
If I'm not mistaken, oxidants cause mutations in the DNA of your cells -- and if that mutation happens to occur in some vital bit of the DNA, you get cancer. Cancer cells are, fundamently, normal cells that have gone awry and reproduce extremely quickly. That's why chemotherapy is used to treat cancer -- chemotherapy targets fast-reproducing cells (also why it makes your hair fall out -- hair cells are another fast reproducing cell type). In any case, if your body produces oxidants to fight germs, couldn't those same oxidants be causing, as a side affect, mutations in your DNA? Maybe the dramatic rise in cancer rates over the past x*10^2 years isn't due entirely to our longer life spans -- maybe it's also, in part, due to the fact that we live much closer together and regularly infect and are infected by our family members/cow-workers/fellow K-mart shoppers. The common cold a cause of cancer? Maybe not so far fetched. And maybe it's the body's oxidant-loaded response to things like cigarettes that causes cancer -- not the cigarette chemicals themselves (though I am very poorly acquainted with cigarette research). Also, what impact would those anti-oxidant drinks/pills/suppositories that are all the fad these days have on your body's ability to fight off diseases?
This isn't listed on the main page. We all must be using some sort of headline grabber.
-1 (Troll) is antihammer
this reminds me of the terraforming discussion we had a few days ago. Accelerated technology on ozone production is not only good for our planet, but for others in the future. Wasn't there a release in Nature or some such magazine that stated that the hole in the ozone wall was repairing itself, though? Kinda harsh if we get up these billion dollar ozone making plants and they're obsoleted by good old mother earth...
this is not a sig.
Well, this is quite interesting. We could create biomass in the atmosphere, and let it generate Ozone up there, using biological technology. I bet it would work!
Put a bunch of laweyrs there, and they will get a court order of every body else out of planet earth
The lunatic is in my head
And they would need to be very sick lawyers anyway.
You mean like personal injury attorneys?
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Come to New Zealand.
Spend 20 minutes in the sun in the afternoon, THEN tell me you think there is an ozone layer above you...
There are only two things in this world that smell like fish. And one of them's fish...
Right. The sun is getting noticably hotter. In just the past 200 years. Right.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Sun to Blame for Global Warming
by John Carlisle
Those looking for the culprit responsible for global warming have missed the obvious choice - the sun. While it may come as a newsflash to some, scientific evidence conclusively shows that the sun plays a far more important role in causing global warming and global cooling than any other factor, natural or man-made. In fact, what may very well be the ultimate ironic twist in the global warming controversy is that the same solar forces that caused 150 years of warming are on the verge of producing a prolonged period of cooling.
The evidence for future cooling is supported by considerable scientific research that has only recently begun to come to light. It wasn't until 1980, with the aid of NASA satellites, that scientists definitively proved that the sun's brightness - or radiance - varies in intensity, and that these variations occur in predictable cyclical patterns. This was a crucial discovery because the climate models used by greenhouse theory proponents always assumed that the sun's radiance was constant. With that assumption in hand, they could ignore solar influences and focus on other influences, including human.
That turned out to be a reckless assumption. Further investigation revealed that there is a strong correlation between the variations in solar irradiance and fluctuations in the Earth's temperature. When the sun gets dimmer, the Earth gets cooler; when the sun gets brighter, the Earth gets hotter. So important is the sun in climate change that half of the 1.5 F temperature increase since 1850 is directly attributable to changes in the sun. According to NASA scientists David Lind and Judith Lean, only one-quarter of a degree can be ascribed to other causes, such as greenhouse gases, through which human activities can theoretically exert some influence.
The correlation between major changes in the Earth's temperature and changes in solar radiance is quite compelling. A perfect example is the Little Ice Age that lasted from 1650 to 1850. Temperatures in this era fell to as much as 2 F below today's temperature, causing the glaciers to advance, the canals in Venice to freeze and major crop failures. Interestingly, this dramatic cooling happened in a period when the sun's radiance had fallen to exceptionally low levels. Between 1645 and 1715, the sun was in a stage that scientists refer to as the Maunder Minimum. In this minimum, the sun has few sunspots and low magnetism which automatically indicates a lower radiance level. When the sun began to emerge from the minimum, radiance increased and by 1850 the temperature had warmed up enough for the Little Ice Age to end.
The Maunder Minimum is not an isolated event: it is a cyclical phenomenon that typically appears for 70 years following 200-300 years of warming. With only a few exceptions, whenever there is a solar minimum, the Earth gets colder. For example, Europe in the 13th and 15th Centuries experienced significantly lower temperatures and in both cases the cold spells coincided with a minimum. Similar correlations were found in the 9th Century and again in the 7th Century. Since 8700 B.C., there have been at least ten major cold periods similar to the Little Ice Age. Nine of those ten cold spells coincided with Maunder Minima.
There is no reason to believe that this 10,000-year-old cycle of solar-induced warming and cooling will change. Dr. Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and one of the nation's leading experts on global climate change, believes that we may be nearing the end of a solar warming cycle. Since the last minimum ended in 1715, Baliunas says there is a strong possibility that the Earth will start cooling off in the early part of the 21st Century.
Indeed, it could already be happening. Of the 1.5 F in warming the planet experienced over the last 150 years, two-thirds of that increase, or one degree, occurred between 1850 and 1940. In the last 50 years, the planetary temperature increased at a significantly slower rate of 0.5 F - precisely when dramatically increasing amounts of man-made carbon dioxide emissions should have been accelerating warming. Further buttressing the arguments for future cooling is the evidence from NASA satellites that the global temperature has actually fallen 0.04 F since 1979.
Of course, it is impossible to precisely predict when solar radiance will drop and global temperatures will begin falling. But one thing is certain: There is little evidence that mankind is responsible for global warming. There is considerable evidence that the sun causes warming and will most likely stimulate cooling in the not so distant future.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Arg. Yeah that's right.