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In a pinch, you might be able to breathe through your butt

 
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Gord Green
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 19, 2022 11:12 pm    Post subject: In a pinch, you might be able to breathe through your butt Reply with quote

In a pinch, you might be able to breathe through your butt

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/pinch-might-able-breathe-butt-140003847.html?.tsrc=fp_deeplink

We generally don’t like to think about the fact that there is a large worm-like organ inside of our abdomens. That’s the sort of thing which you usually only have to make peace with when watching horror comedies like Slither, but it doesn’t stop it from being true. Your intestines stretch for roughly 15 feet inside your body, winding a path between your stomach and rectum.

Despite being among the creepiest of your internal organs, your intestines play a crucial role in your everyday life, taking up nutrients from the food you eat and ridding your body of waste, but their job ends at your end. They can’t, for instance, help you breathe . . . right?

Getting the oxygen needed for survival is achieved through various processes in the animal kingdom. Insects gather oxygen through holes in in their bodies known as spiracles, and some vertebrate animals can breathe through their butts. Sort of.

In the winter, turtles slow their metabolism and get most of their oxygen through their cloaca in a process known as cloacal respiration. Other reptiles and amphibians use similar respiration techniques to breathe without using lungs. If you happen to be a mammal, however, it’s long been believed that if your lungs are out of commission than you are out of luck. At least until recently.

We’ve long known that the intestines could take up chemical components and deliver them to the rest of the body. That’s one of the ways your gut microbiome communicates with your brain, but it was unclear if the same or similar processes could be used to get oxygen into the blood stream.

To test the hypothesis, scientists created a scenario in which pigs and mice in a laboratory were deprived of normal respiration, and ventilated via the intestines. To improve the likelihood of oxygen uptake, some animals had their intestines scrubbed in order to thin the mucosal lining and reduce the barrier to the blood stream. Their findings were published in the journal Clinical and Translational Resource and Technology Insights.

Unsurprisingly, control animals who were deprived of respiration and received no intestinal ventilation, died after about 11 minutes. Animals who received intestinal ventilation without the intestinal scrubbing survived almost twice as long, about 18 minutes, indicating that there was some oxygen uptake. Lastly, 75% of those animals who had been scrubbed and received pressurized oxygen into the rectum, survived for an hour, the total length of the experiment.

This seemed to prove that mice and pigs are capable of intestinal respiration under the right conditions, giving researchers reason to believe that other mammals — like humans — might have the same capability.

However, the process of scrubbing the intestines is potentially dangerous and researchers wanted to uncover if there was an alternative solution which could achieve similar results. Their answer turned out to be oxygen-rich liquids known as perfluorocarbons. They repeated a similar experiment, again using mice and pigs, but this time they flooded the intestines which perfluorocarbons instead of gaseous oxygen. They found that the animals experienced increased blood oxygen levels which measured at normal levels.

While the effect has not yet been tested on humans, scientists suggest it might serve as an effective alternative respiration technique when conventional methods like mechanical ventilation don’t work. It’s also possible that introducing high levels of oxygen into the digestive tract will have a negative impact on the microbiome, but that’s generally a secondary concern if you can’t breathe. Further testing is needed to determine if intestinal ventilation might be an effective lifesaving tool in people.

With any luck, most of us won’t ever been in a situation where we’ll need intestinal ventilation. However, if a respiratory disease knocks us on our butts and our lungs are bottoming out, we might be willing to consider a little derri-air.

It sounds very logical that we should be able to breath through our ass since we all know someone who talks through it!

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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Tue Jun 21, 2022 1:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

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Amazing, Gord! This concept really took my breath away! Laughing

The beauty of this discovery is that it puts a brand new slant on something we see in Robinson Crusoe on Mars.






I'm referring to the idea that Friday and astronaut Christopher Draper took "oxygen pills" to survive on the Red Planet.

However, if a pill could somehow deliver oxygen to the digestive system (as shown in the experiment described above), then those oxygen pills aren't as far fetched as we thought. But how could a pill contain enough oxygen to provide more than a few seconds of air?

Ah-ha! Maybe that's asking the wrong question. Mr. Green

Perhaps the pill causes water (H2O) in the men's stomachs to break down into hydrogen and oxygen. Whenever Friday and Christopher drank water, they were providing their bodies with oxygen which was absorbed through their intestines.






How could it do this? Well, to answer that question we must think like citizens of the 21st century — which we are! Cool

Supposed these "pills" are composed of nanites surrounded by a shell which dissolves in the stomach, When that happens the nanites go to work breaking down some of the water the men consumed, turning it into oxygen and hydrogen.






If that doesn't sound like it could produce enough oxygen for the two men, I looked up the following question.

How much breathable oxygen is in a gallon of water?

The answer shocked me!
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One gallon of water contains 3.785 kg of water or about 210 moles.

If completely decomposed into hydrogen and oxygen, 210 moles of water would yield 105 moles of pure oxygen..

At 1 atmosphere and 20°C, this oxygen occupies a volume of 2.52 cubic meters.

A quick search puts the average human oxygen consumption at 5–6 ml/minute. At this rate, 2.52 cubic meters of oxygen would last . . . 290–350 days!

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Holy crap! Friday and Christopher could drink and few extra cups of water a day and survive on the oxygen which the nanites produce!

After these self-propelled nanites have created oxygen and hydrogen molecules from the water molecules, they'd carry them down into the small intestines where they would be delivered into the blood stream. This would occur much more efficiently than in the experiment described above by Gord.

The nanites would then deactivate and pass on through the intestines.

As for the hydrogen they also created in the process, I discovered this.
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Inhalation of 2.4% hydrogen gas does not appear to cause clinically significant adverse effects in healthy adults.
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So, the nanites could actually allow some of the hydrogen to be mixed with the oxygen in the blood without harming Friday or Christopher. But most of it would, of course, be retained by nanites and carried out of the body.

Since the movie indicates that the oxygen pills have to be taken periodical, we know the nanites in a single pill apparently can't remain in the body and perform the oxygen creation over and over. Obviously they have a limited life span.

However, some of the nanites themselves could enter the blood stream with a "cargo" of oxygen molecules, which would then be released as needed whenever the blood oxygen level was low.






Guys, if anybody thinks I'm giving the alien slave masters too much credit for such advanced technology, consider the fact that they have interstellar spaceships which use an inertia-less drive! Very Happy





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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)


Last edited by Bud Brewster on Tue Jun 21, 2022 2:39 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Gord Green
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Joined: 06 Oct 2014
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PostPosted: Tue Jun 21, 2022 2:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Great idea Bud!
Now imagine....Since the oxygen is absorbed through the digestive track and mainly the large intestine instead of a pill it should be a suppository! Once a week should be enough to keep a person alive.

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