Inert nitrogen, high concentration of carbon dioxide crystals, methane...

These granules contain three essential plant nutrients.

Each cylinder is about 10 percent ancient air, a pristine time capsule of greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide all unchanged from the day that snow formed and first fell.

You can take virtually any parameter that matters for human well being nitrous oxide, methane, deforestation, overfishing

What's a drug?

It is the spectrum of a planet like Earth, showing a presence of nitrogen dioxide, as a clear signal of life, and oxygen and ozone.

Different amounts of UV hit different parts of the Earth at different times of year, so you can actually work out those stores of nitric oxide the nitrates, nitrites, nitrosothiols in the skin cleave to release NO.

And we then thought to ourselves, with those big stores,

We think that the skin well, we know that the skin has got very large stores of nitric oxide as these various other forms.

Nitrogen bonds to oxygen, which in turn....

In summer, you might as well be at the equator.

We inject our own aerosols into the atmosphere, and we have trace gases, and not just carbon dioxide it's methane, ozone, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen.

Nitrogen, oxygen. Looks like enough CO2 for green leafy things.

Where have essentially, you have an equal amount and very

We suspect a lot of these come from diet, green leafy vegetables, beetroot, lettuce has a lot of these nitric oxides that we think go to the skin.

Ventura mid winter, well, there's still a decent amount.

Barbarically, we're killing sharks for shark fin soup, undermining food chains that shape planetary chemistry and drive the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the oxygen cycle, the water cycle our life support system.

So what you can do is you can multiply those data by the NO that's released and you can calculate how much nitric oxide would be released from the skin into the circulation.

This isn't Volvos this is volcanoes.

But I also became interested in research, and in particular I became interested in this substance, nitric oxide.

Nitrous oxide stopped being used as an anaesthetic a long time ago.

The algae are not going to suffocate because of CO2, as we would.

I'm just going to show you a basic idea. We're all breathing air right now.

If you look at carbon dioxide from burning tropical rainforest, or methane coming from cows and rice, or nitrous oxide from too many fertilizers, it turns out agriculture is 30 percent of the greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere from human activity.

Furchgott, Ignarro and Murad, won the Nobel Prize for medicine back in 1998.

It's great. Lots of NO is released.

A very simple example is this When the world was primarily plants, the environment, which had carbon dioxide and some oxygen in it when they first started,

Economic expansion has resulted in increases in atmospheric nitrous oxide and methane, ozone depletion, increases in great floods, damage to ocean ecosystems, including nitrogen runoff,

Then of course, there's all that

The air we breathe in, or inspire, has a mixture of gases including nitrogen, carbon dioxide and oxygen, which is the most important for our survival.

So nature created a balance, and the balance was called animals.

So why is this relevant? Because when you put animals and plants in the same environment,

And these are more stable, and your skin has got really large stores of NO.

And then above that, you're just adding more and more hydroxide.

We need to breathe.

But this is a bit like putting your head in a plastic bag.

Carbon monoxide is a poisonous substance formed by the incomplete combustion of carbon compounds.

And all of a sudden, if you have seven protons, you're dealing with nitrogen.

And the reason for this, it turned out, after two or three years' work, was that in the skin we have huge stores not of nitric oxide, because nitric oxide is a gas, and it's released (Poof!) and in a few seconds it's away, but it can be turned into these forms of nitric oxide nitrate, NO3 nitrite, NO2 nitrosothiols.

As you can probably tell from its name, carbohydrates contain carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.

We stopped tilling, so that we could prevent greenhouse gasses from going into the air.

And that waste could be all sorts of things, and one that kind of jumps to mind is carbon dioxide (CO2).

So if you're on the equator, December or June, you've got masses of NO being released from the skin.

But the real powers of this place come from phytoplankton.

And that wasn't easy because poisons were everywhere.