Greek plane crash questions

Jose wrote:

Ok, so why don't I collapse right away after taking a breath of helium
to talk like Donald Duck?

Because at anything close to sea level, the oxygen that is already in your
bloodstream stays there. At altitude, it comes out of your bloodstream. At
altitude, none of the blood leaving the lungs contains enough oxygen to do you
any good. When you take a breath of helium, there won't be any transfer of
oxygen into the bloodstream from that breath, but there is still oxygen left in
that portion of the blood from the last time it passed through the lungs.

George Patterson
Give a person a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a person to
use the Internet and he won't bother you for weeks.

When you take a breath of helium, there won't be any transfer of oxygen into the bloodstream from that breath, but there is still oxygen left in that portion of the blood from the last time it passed through the lungs.

There was an earlier message concerning somebody breathing nitrogen by
accident (I presume at sea level) and going into immediate convulsions.

Why nitrogen and not helium?

Jose
--
Quantum Mechanics is like this: God =does= play dice with the universe,
except there's no God, and there's no dice. And maybe there's no universe.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

Jose wrote:

There was an earlier message concerning somebody breathing nitrogen by
accident (I presume at sea level) and going into immediate convulsions.

Why nitrogen and not helium?

Dunno.

George Patterson
Give a person a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a person to
use the Internet and he won't bother you for weeks.

Jose wrote:

There was an earlier message concerning somebody breathing nitrogen by
accident (I presume at sea level) and going into immediate convulsions.

Nobody said immediate.

The point is you can't entirely empty you lungs by just exhaling, the
human body just isn't built for this. So there's still oxygen in the
lungs even when you take one or two breathes of pure helium (or
nitrogen, for that matter). If however you continue to breathe pure
helium, you will loose consisiousness pretty quickly.

If the environmental pressure falls, this is an entirely different
situation.

Stefan

Isn't our atmosphere made up of 70% nitrogen?

"Jose" wrote in message
...
When you take a breath of helium, there won't be any transfer of oxygen
into the bloodstream from that breath, but there is still oxygen left in
that portion of the blood from the last time it passed through the lungs.

There was an earlier message concerning somebody breathing nitrogen by
accident (I presume at sea level) and going into immediate convulsions.

Why nitrogen and not helium?

Jose
--
Quantum Mechanics is like this: God =does= play dice with the universe,
except there's no God, and there's no dice. And maybe there's no
universe.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

"Dave" wrote:

Isn't our atmosphere made up of 70% nitrogen?


Closer to 78 %. But why quibble over 8-9%

Ron Lee