> generates oxygen by splitting water vapor found in the body
This will also generate hydrogen. Is there any mention in the paper about what happens to the waste hydrogen? I can't get past the paywall and I'm curious
The article says it will "diffuse away" which implies they just let it escape the device. It'll then move through the tissue / fluids, reach the blood and eventually be breathed out. I did a quick google search to see if we already had some level of hydrogen gas in our body.
It seems that bacteria in the human gut already produce some hydrogen gas and that breath contains measurable levels of it[0]. This was news to me, but means that dumping a tiny amount of H2 into the body is probably fine.
Hydrogen in the body is not normally a problem. It's such a light gas that it diffuses out the lungs readily, if it's in diatomic form, and your body has good mechanisms for dealing with ionized hydrogen already.
Most people's gut already produces hydrogen (normal levels at or below 16ppm in breath)
It's an interesting question, but I suspect it's not a big deal. H2 is _very_ good at escaping, doesn't really do anything biologically, and our bodies already have ways to get rid of small amounts of gas from various places.
I'm curious if it'd just do the same thing that CO2 does. That might all just be governed by physics and there probably isn't much chemistry involved in that being expelled after it's generated in cells?
I looked up the solubility of H2 in water, and it is _much_ worse than CO2's, so maybe that does suggest it'd at least not use the same mechanisms to escape, not sure.
It seems that bacteria in the human gut already produce some hydrogen gas and that breath contains measurable levels of it[0]. This was news to me, but means that dumping a tiny amount of H2 into the body is probably fine.
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00216-013-7606-6