Word: nitric
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Robert Furchgott, 92, helped uncover the important medical benefits of nitric oxide, a gas that helps mediate blood pressure and flow. He won the Nobel Prize in Medicine...
Geothermal has its share of critics. The power plants release low levels of carbon dioxide, nitric oxide and sulfur, and some people worry that drilling holes deep into the earth destabilizes the land around it. This summer, police arrested a group of environmental activists who had chained themselves to machinery at a drill site near the nation's largest power station outside Reykjavik to protest the plans for a new aluminum factory. Iceland's government has responded to such criticisms by trying to diversify and attract companies like Microsoft, Cisco and Yahoo!, all of which have discussed building massive server...
...Stamler and his colleague Dr. Timothy McMahon may at last have an explanation. In studies reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they sampled pints of donated blood from banks and healthy volunteers, subjected them to 26 different analyses and found dramatic deficiencies in levels of nitric oxide (NO). A workhorse component of normal blood, NO is responsible for helping red blood cells ferry oxygen to tissues and for propping open tiny vessels. A shortage of the gas could lead to precisely the kinds of heart problems the team was investigating...
...McMahon, whose work was funded in part by another such firm, are thinking about using transfusions of NO-fortified donor blood to treat such ills as heart disease, stroke and diabetes. "We want to open up blood vessels, and blood knows how to do that," he says. Perhaps a nitric oxide boost would help it do its job even better...
Wouldn't it be more effective if banked blood could simply be improved? Stamler's study suggests it can: by replacing nitric oxide in stored blood, Stamler showed that the risk of heart attack and death from transfusion dropped dramatically, at least in mice. And there's reason to believe such replenishment could work in human patients as well; already, premature babies born with lung and respiratory problems are placed in NO-rich environments to ensure that their still developing tissues get the oxygen they need to grow properly. For now, the American Red Cross, which oversees 14 million units...