Oxygen

When treating patients for certain conditions, it's important to monitor their blood oxygen levels. A new sub-dermal photosensitive sensor provides a new means of doing so, plus it could one day be used to measure other blood-borne substances.

The Moon may look like a big dry ball, but there’s more water up there than you might expect. In a new study, scientists have shown that at least some of it could have been showered onto the lunar surface from the Earth’s atmosphere.

It's a sad fact that people with severe respiratory illnesses are often confined to hospitals, where they must breathe through ventilators. A new portable device that harvests oxygen from the air, however, may someday allow them to stay at home.

If there are two things that are essential to human life, they're water and oxygen – neither of which are easily available on the moon. Thanks to a new technique, though, astronauts may someday be able to harvest those elements from lunar soil.

Diabetic skin ulcers often take a long time to heal, sometimes even leading to complications that result in amputation. A new hydrogel is designed to help keep that from happening, by delivering oxygen directly to such wounds.

Most of us have in our busy lives wished there were more hours in the day. That wish actually came true billions of years ago – and that might be why we have so much oxygen now, as photosynthesizing microbes took advantage of the productivity boost.

New research is describing the discovery of a link between cognitive decline and a protein in red blood cells. The research found mice depleted of this protein suffered from rapid cognitive decline pointing scientists to a potential novel anti-aging treatment.

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have identified an enzyme that may naturally protect the brain from damage caused by oxygen deprivation. This could be a potential drug target to prevent issues arising from strokes or heart attacks.

Scientists have made the surprising discovery that some mammals can absorb oxygen through their intestines. Mice, rats and pigs given oxygen enemas in gas or liquid form were found to survive much longer in a low-oxygen environment.

Perseverance has notched up another first by extracting oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. The rover's toaster-sized MOXIE unit converted carbon dioxide into about 5.4 grams of oxygen – a process that may one day help astronauts live off the land.

Engineers at University of California, Berkeley have demonstrated a new wireless implant that can detect oxygen levels in deep tissues, with hopes it could become a tool to track the health of transplanted organs, among other applications.

A new study has found that in about a billion years’ time, Earth will rapidly lose most of its atmospheric oxygen, returning to how it was billions of years ago. This may have important implications in the search for life on other planets.