Unrelated but the bottom navbar in that screenshot makes me long for the Alien Blue days of Reddit. I also just miss that iOS design (along with the OS X Mavericks design)

Those damn electrons!

Oxidation is the loss of electrons, whereas reduction is the gain of electrons. The mnemonic is OIL RIG: Oxidation Is Loss, Reduction Is Gain.

Oxygen is highly electronegative (second only to fluorine), meaning that it will strongly attract electrons. So, oxygen is good at oxidizing things. It's good at stealing their electrons. (When the oxygen takes the electron, the oxygen becomes reduced!)

The reason that oxygen is so important in your body for respiration is because of its high electronegativity. It is used as the final electron acceptor in a chain of chemical reactions that are used to convert high energy molecules that you've eaten into different high energy molecules that your body can use.

Think of the analogy of a staircase and a ball. The ball is an electron and the stairs are energy states of different molecules along the metabolic pathway. As the ball goes down the stairs, the electron loses energy (which is usually converted to ATP or NADH). At the bottom of the stairs is oxygen, once the electron gets there, it doesn't have anymore potential energy to lose, unless maybe you have some fluorine around. The final, reduced state of oxygen in this pathway is carbon dioxide. It's no longer useful for respiration and thankfully can just be exhaled. How convenient!

An oxygen missing an electron (an oxygen radical) is highly reactive. This is not good. It'll just steal an electron from whatever molecule is nearby. That may be DNA or any other molecule that it's in your best interest to keep intact. Antioxidants are helpful as electron donors, neutralizing radicals before they do damage.

Cell mechanisms cause oxidative stress in the body which can lead to inflammation and faster aging. Antioxidants provide the body with an easy way to neutralise the bi-products.

This is a valid athletic technique. Usually achieved by training at altitude.

More information about this dangerous chemical: https://dhmo.org/facts.html

Took me some time

Did you know that dihydrogen monoxide kills more people than any other liquid? And yet, the government does nothing to ban it. This deadly liquid could be anywhere, even in your home!

F you.

Or an extremely deadly poison. Or an explosive, flammable gas.

Have you ever seen asbestos catch fire? Me neither. So it's your choice what you'd prefer breathing in.

There's a whole website dedicated to raising awareness of its danger : https://www.dhmo.org/

Wait till you hear about this ancient roman curse called gravity.

So to not die, we just need to stop breathing !

To sum up - because I taught this to a kid yesterday - for a period, basically all life photosynthesized and oxygen was toxic to most living things. There were large growths of photosynthetic Cyanobacteria that pumped the air full of oxygen. Living things at the time (like, bacteria and microbes, nowhere near vertebrates) couldn’t handle all the O2 and died.

Iron had been taking in most of the oxygen, but it got all rusted up. There’s beautiful geological evidence of this.

This pic sexy as fuck: