Nitrous Oxide Quotes

Whereas CO2 is the dominant greenhouse gas overall, it accounts for only 11 percent of agricultural emissions.2 The rest is nitrous oxide (53 percent) and methane (36 percent). Nitrous oxide is 296 times more potent per pound than CO2 as a climate-change gas, and on farms it results mainly from the use of fertilizer but also from cattle pee, especially if there is excessive protein in their diet, and from the burning of biomass and fuel.3 Methane, which is 25 times more potent than CO2, is mainly emitted by cows and sheep when they belch. Some is also emitted from silage. The CO2 comes from machinery but also from the heating of greenhouses to grow crops out of season or in countries that just don't have the right climate. ~ Mike Berners-Lee

Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide. ~ Terry Pratchett

The four highest-impact things an individual can do to tackle climate change are eat a plant-based diet, avoid air travel, live car-free, and have fewer children. Of those four actions, only plant-based eating immediately addresses methane and nitrous oxide, the most urgently important greenhouse gases. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

In the early 1800s there arose in England a fashion for inhaling nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, after it was discovered that its use 'was attended by a highly pleasurable thrilling11'. For the next half-century it would be the drug of choice for young people. One learned body, the Askesian Society, was for a time devoted to little else. Theatres put on 'laughing gas evenings'12 where volunteers could refresh themselves with a robust inhalation and then entertain the audience with their comical staggerings. It wasn't until 1846 that anyone got around to finding a practical use for nitrous oxide, as an anaesthetic. Goodness knows how many tens of thousands of people suffered unnecessary agonies under the surgeon's knife because no-one had thought of the gas's most obvious practical application. ~ Bill Bryson

Life is an ecstasy. Life is sweet as nitrous oxide. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide ~ Terry Pratchett

All that we "know" is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts - as Sir Humphrey Davy noted when self-experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

Dentists and surgeons frequently used nitrous oxide as an anesthetic. Travis ~ Dean Koontz

Carbon dioxide isn't the only greenhouse gas out there. Other substances, such as water vapor and nitrous oxide, also trap heat to varying degrees. ~ Jamais Cascio

There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference. ~ William James

(he was a great believer in the healing powers of cheerfulness, if not of open mirth). Yet he had some faults, and one was a habit of dosing himself, generally from a spirit of enquiry, as in his period of inhaling large quantities of the nitrous oxide and of the vapour of hemp, to say nothing of tobacco, bhang in all its charming varieties in India, betel in Java and the neighbouring islands, qat in the Red Sea, and hallucinating cacti in South America, but sometimes for relief from distress, as when he became addicted to opium in one form or another; and now he was busily poisoning himself with coca-leaves, whose virtue he had learnt in Peru. ~ Patrick O'Brian

The moment after, I began to respire 20 quarts of unmingled nitrous oxide. A thrilling, extending from the chest to the extremities, was almost immediately produced. I felt a sense of tangible extension highly pleasurable in every limb; my visible impressions were dazzling, and apparently magnified, I heard distinctly every sound in the room and was perfectly aware of my situation. By degrees, as the pleasurable sensations increased, I last all connection with external things; trains of vivid visible images rapidly passed through my mind, and were connected with words in such a manner, as to produce perceptions perfectly novel. I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas. I theorised - I imagined that I made discoveries. When I was awakened from this semi-delirious trance by Dr. Kinglake, who took the bag from my mouth, indignation and pride were the first feelings produced by the sight of the persons about me. My emotions were enthusiastic and sublime; and for a minute I walked round the room, perfectly regardless of what was said to me. As I recovered my former state of mind, I felt an inclination to communicate the discoveries I had made during the experiment. I endeavoured to recall the ideas, they were feeble and indistinct; one collection of terms, however, presented itself: and with the most intense belief and prophetic manner, I exclaimed to Dr Kinglake, 'Nothing exists but thoughts! - the universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and ~ Humphry Davy

There are no specific memories of the first time I used ketamine, which was around age 17 or 18. The strongest recollection of ketamine use regarded an instance when I was concurrently smoking marijuana and inhaling nitrous oxide. I was in an easy chair and the popular high school band Sublime was playing on the CD player. I was with a friend. We were snorting lines of ketamine and then smoking marijuana from a pipe and blowing the marijuana smoke into a nitrous-filled balloon and inhaling and exhaling the nitrous-filled balloon until there was no more nitrous oxide in the balloon to achieve acute sensations of pleasure, [adjective describing state in which one is unable to comprehend anything], disorientation, etc. The first time I attempted this process my vision behaved as a compact disc sound when it skips - a single frame of vision replacing itself repeatedly for over 60 seconds, I think. Everything was vibrating. Obviously I couldn't move. My friend was later vomiting in the bathroom a lot and I remember being particularly fascinated by the sound of it; it was like he was screaming at the same time as vomiting, which I found funny, and he was making, to a certain degree, demon-like noises. My time 'with' ketamine lasted three months at the most, but despite my attempts I never achieved a 'k-hole.' At a party, once, I saw a girl sitting in bushes and asked her what she was doing and she said "I'm in a 'k-hole.'" While I have since stopped doing ketamine because of availa ~ Brandon Scott Gorrell

The business of raising animals for food (with its continuous heavy waste stream of methane and nitrous oxide - leading global warming gases) is responsible for about 18% of global warming. Some scientists actually say the number is closer to 50%. ~ Kathy Freston

Laugh if you will ... They laughed at all great ideas and inventions. They laughed at nitrous oxide. ~ John Sladek

One event that is both history and myth is the rain of blood around the year 1000 in Aquitaine and elsewhere in France. Reports exist from the early eleventh century of a blood rain that "fell upon the clothes of many men, and so stained them with gore that they shuddered at the sight of their own garments and tore them off." Fulbert of Chartres wrote that account in a letter to King Robert of France, after the worried king received a report from Duke William V about a rain of blood that fell in Aquitaine. Scientists today believe that historical reports of blood rain may have been due to dust containing iron oxide, ~ Joseph Finley

On the 1st of August, 1774, I endeavoured to extract air from mercurius calcinates per se [mercury oxide]; and I presently found that, by means of this lens, air was expelled from it very readily. ... I admitted water to it [the extracted air], and found that it was not imbibed by it. But what surprized me more than I can well express, was, that a candle burned in this air with a remarkably vigorous flame ... I was utterly at a loss how to account for it. ~ J.B. Priestley

Nitric oxide production by immune cells is one of the key mechanisms that our bodies use to destroy diseased cells. Enhancement of these types of immune responses is seen consistently with many medicinal mushrooms that have been tested by cancer researchers. ~ Paul Stamets

In deriving a body from the water type I intend to express that to this body, considered as an oxide, there corresponds a chloride, a bromide, a sulphide, a nitride, etc., susceptible of double compositions, or resulting from double decompositions, analogous to those presented by hydrochloric acid, hydrobromic acid, sulphuretted hydrogen, ammonia etc., or which give rise to the same compounds. The type is thus the unit of comparison for all the bodies which, like it, are susceptible of similar changes or result from similar changes. ~ Charles Frederic Gerhardt

Nitric oxide is a key biological messenger within the body. When released by the cells lining your arteries, it makes the walls of the arteries relax, allowing more blood to flow. ~ Michael Greger

Without enough nitric oxide, your arteries can stiffen, raising blood pressure and your risk of heart attack. ~ Michael Greger

Aubade"

Who lives where summer
ends knows the hard cold of

autumn is blissfully
close, although it feels
each season newly un-

known. You are constantly
newly unknown to me,
my night-glowing open-hearted

sting-of-salt weather.
Rains and winds, sleights-of-
hand. Who if not you

could weigh me enough
down. You'd paint my eyes
blacker and warmer than they are

and soon they would carry
whole calendars of
black night in them.

You say you're pulled back,
but it is a rare thing inside those

shocks of minutes that
holds without our even
needing to touch it.

Maybe you think you trade
one clean joy for

another. But mine is darker,
slanted, nitrous blue at the root,

an acrostic of what is
most free and
far. To be another

person than the one
you were before means
more than I understand.

But my gradual hands
move in streams
over you whether you travel or not,

as you drop into sleep or not,
and in the book of this
most-alone-place I am

there only when you feel
need, a coat so thin and so like

skin you can touch the
slopes, the smoother

pools, dust-mooded
winds over roads, the skeleton
instrument of your voi ~ Joanna Klink

CEREMONY OF FLIES hits the road like a nitrous-fueled GTO ... and then pulls the ultimate stunt of getting better. What starts as a deceptively simple hard-boiled noir story twists on itself and adds layers and grows stranger and before you know it, BAM - it's the end of the world and all you can do is hang on by your fingernails. This really, truly is one of the best novellas I've read in years. ~ Lisa Morton

On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness
The tusks which clashed in mighty brawls
Of mastodons, are billiard balls.
The sword of Charlemagne the Just
Is Ferric Oxide, known as rust.
The grizzly bear, whose potent hug,
Was feared by all, is now a rug.
Great Caesar's bust is on the shelf,
And I don't feel so well myself. ~ Arthur Guiterman

A small bubble of air remained unabsorbed ... if there is any part of the phlogisticated air [nitrogen] of our atmosphere which differs from the rest, and cannot be reduced to nitrous acid, we may safely conclude that it is not more than 1/120 part of the whole.
[Cavendish did not realize the significance of the remaining small bubble. Not until a century later were the air's Noble Gases appreciated.] ~ Henry Cavendish

Because sometimes the Church seems like those posed circus tableaus where the curtain lifts and men, white, zinc-oxide, talcum-powder statues, freeze to represent abstract Beauty. Very wonderful. But I hope there will always be room for me to dart about among the statues, don't you, Father Stone? ~ Ray Bradbury

Beet juice is rich in dietary nitrates, which are precursors for nitric oxide, a chemical that the body uses to cause blood vessels to dilate. Consuming beet juice before exercise increases vasodilatation and blood flow and reduces the oxygen cost of exercise. These ~ Matt Fitzgerald

Your spirit is the duster of any spider web. Behind every finish line, there is a start one. Behind every success, there is another challenge. While you are alive, be alive. If you miss what you once did, do it again. Don't live in yellow photos ... Continue although everyone expects you to give up. Don't let oxide the iron that is inside you. Do that instead of pity, and they will respect you. When because of years you cannot run, jog. When you cannot jog, walk. When you cannot walk, use a cane. But never stop! ~ Mother Teresa

The wounds of self-love turn incurable when the oxide of self-love gets into them. ~ Honore De Balzac

For, in the end, Brearley did manage to create cutlery from stainless steel, and it's the transparent protective layer of chromium oxide that makes the spoon tasteless, since your tongue never actually touches the metal and your saliva cannot react with it; it has meant that we are one of the first generations who have not had to taste our cutlery. ~ Mark Miodownik

The planet's famous red colour is from iron oxide coating everything. So it's not just a desert. It's a desert so old it's literally rusting. ~ Andy Weir

Imagine trying to live in a world dominated by dihydrogen oxide, a compound that has no taste or smell and is so variable in its properties that it is generally benign but at other times swiftly lethal. Depending on its state, it can scald you or freeze you. In the presence of certain organic molecules it can form carbonic acids so nasty that they can strip the leaves from trees and eat the faces off statuary. In bulk, when agitated, it can strike with a fury that no human edifice could withstand. Even for those who have learned to live with it, it is an often murderous substance. We call it water. ~ Bill Bryson

The atmosphere of Venus consists of ammonia, sulfur, and nitric oxide. Man must have lived there once. ~ Andre Brie