Oxygen

A Deale couple suffered burns after a fire started when the wife fell asleep while smoking and using home oxygen early Thursday morning, according to an Anne Arundel County Fire spokesman. The incident was reported at 5:26 a.m. in the 5000 block of Deale Churchton Road, said the spokesman, Capt. James Rostek. The woman suffered serious and life-threatening burns and was flown to the regional burn unit at Washington Hospital Center, he said. Her husband had minor burns and was taken to Anne Arundel Medical Center for treatment, Rostek said.

Thanks to quick thinking by a Level Volunteer Fire Company firefighters and paramedics, a dog trapped in a burning house earlier this month was successfully resuscitated without a pet oxygen mask. The incident pointed up the need for local fire companies to be equipped with such equipment, and the staff of the Humane Society of Harford County stepped up earlier this week to make a donation of an animal resuscitation mask kit to the fire company. The donation was presented to the fire company Monday afternoon at the firehouse.

PASADENA, Calif. - Candice Bergen, whose Murphy Brown character was attacked by Dan Quayle during the 1992 election campaign, responded to Quayle's recent remarks in support of the family values he perceived in MTV's The Osbournes. "That Dan," Bergen said, shaking her head and smiling. "You just can't predict him." Bergen is at the summer 2002 Television Critics Association press tour this week talking about her new Oxygen cable series Candice Checks It Out, which launches Aug. 18. A follow-up to her previous Oxygen series, Exhale, this new effort has Bergen spending time with people whom, for one reason or another, she finds compelling.

The "dead zone" that forms every spring in the Chesapeake Bay is smaller than average so far this year, state officials report. Water sampling done in early June by the Department of Natural Resources found dissolved oxygen levels too low to be suitable for fish, crabs and shellfish in just 12 percent of the bay, according to the department's "Eyes on the Bay" website. That's well below the long-term average since 1985 of 17.1 percent of the Chesapeake experiencing low oxygen levels.  It's also a dramatic improvement over last year, when a third of the bay's waters was starved of the oxygen that fish, crabs and shellfish need to breathe.

My doctors tell me that I can no longer fly unless I have oxygen available. How do I alert an airline to my special needs?Most domestic airlines that provide what is known as supplemental oxygen need 48 hours' notice, although some say they will try to accommodate passengers who give less notice. But beyond mere notification, airlines generally require a letter from a doctor declaring that the passenger is in stable health and can fly and stating how many liters per minute of oxygen are needed.

It is probably no coincidence that the summer of 1992 was an excellent one for fishing and also the healthiest in at least eight years for oxygen levels throughout the bay.You can't prove that link conclusively. It's not what a scientist would call hard evidence; but baked, fried or poached, it tasted good just the same; and it gave us a little taste of why we're spending so much time and money restoring the bay.Although the bay is far from dead, it's been down so long that fewer each year can recall how good it really could be. "I worry more and more about leaving a generation that has no idea of what this river was like," Bernie Fowler, a state senator from southern Maryland, told me at an environmental rally this summer on his native Patuxent.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Less Browne, B.C.'s veteran cornerback, will be playing in his fifth Grey Cup on Sunday. Two weeks ago, he thought his career was finished.Browne, who is retiring after the season, tore cartilage in his left knee during B.C.'s 24-23 win at Edmonton in the Western Division semifinals. He didn't expect to return, but after spending some time in an oxygen chamber -- a popular method of treatment in B.C. -- he noticed improvement in the knee and was able to play the next week in Calgary.

This summer, as scientists with the state and federally funded Chesapeake Bay Program follow their annual ritual of reporting on the size of the low-oxygen "dead zone" in the Chesapeake Bay, they will be using a more relaxed standard of what "low oxygen" means. Some environmentalists are concerned that the Environmental Protection Agency's move will weaken water-quality standards in a way similar to what the Ehrlich administration tried this spring, before backing off last month under heavy criticism.

Two Charles County men drowned after becoming trapped i a narrow well -- some 40 feet deep but only 31 inches wide -- they were cleaning yesterday.The men's claustrophobic predicament some four stories below ground level frustrated attempts at rescuing them over several hours.Three rescuers passed out because of a lack of oxygen during attempts to pull George L. Montgomery, 49, of Nanjemoy and Gregory J. Keys, 40, of Indian Head from the well at a home in the 3400 block of Washington Ave. near La Plata.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- What if you were always logged on to a computer, no matter where you went or what you did?If you needed information or wanted to communicate with someone, all you had to do would be to speak.The computer would always be there, a silent helpmate, part of the fabric of your daily life -- so integrated with your existence it would be like the very air you breathe.Like oxygen.That is the vision behind Oxygen, a $40 million research project unveiled last week at the 35th-anniversary celebration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science.

State officials are investigating what killed thousands of fish in Marley and Furnace creeks in northern Anne Arundel County, but suspect they suffocated after an algae bloom sucked the oxygen out of the water, a Maryland Department of the Environment spokesman said Tuesday. Investigators saw an estimated 6,000 dead and apparently dying fish Monday, mostly in Marley Creek but some as well in adjoining Furnace Creek, said MDE spokesman Jay Apperson. There were at least nine different species of fish involved, including Atlantic menhaden, silversides, silvery minnows and sunfish, he said.

A Deale couple suffered burns after a fire started when the wife fell asleep while smoking and using home oxygen early Thursday morning, according to an Anne Arundel County Fire spokesman. The incident was reported at 5:26 a.m. in the 5000 block of Deale Churchton Road, said the spokesman, Capt. James Rostek. The woman suffered serious and life-threatening burns and was flown to the regional burn unit at Washington Hospital Center, he said. Her husband had minor burns and was taken to Anne Arundel Medical Center for treatment, Rostek said.

Something new is floating in the Inner Harbor. Not litter this time, but a space age-looking gadget meant to see whether new life can be breathed into the troubled body of water. Local environmentalists and an engineering firm teamed up Thursday to place a Solar Bee, a sun-powered water-mixing device that resembles an old-fashioned satellite, off the end of the Recreation Pier in Fells Point. It will be anchored there for the next 21/2 months to test whether it can make even a small dent in the oxygen-starved "dead zone" in the Northwest Branch of the Patapsco River every summer, stressing and killing fish.

There was something different about Marisa. "The moment she was born, she was blowing bubbles," recalled her father, Joel Easterly, 32. "Some of the nurses were saying, 'Wow!' They'd never seen that before. " Bubbles seemed innocuous enough. The pregnancy had gone well, the delivery was quick and Marisa was a healthy 6 pounds 4 ounces. But it was the first hint of an extremely rare medical ailment that has been reported in about 30 people worldwide. The problem, caused by a genetic deficiency, has exhausted the young family physically, emotionally and financially.

A contractor for Baltimore's department of recreation and parks is working to smother a smoldering compost pile at a facility just south of Cold Spring Lane, according to a spokeswoman. The contractor was adding more dirt to reduce the flow of oxygen to the pile at Camp Small, she said. The facility is west of Interstate 83 and the smoke was visible to morning commuters. Compost piles heat as the organic materials decay, said the spokeswoman, Gwendolyn Chambers. Occasionally, the pile may grow warm enough to smolder if there's enough oxygen, she said.

In the infield, three blondes sat with green cloths draped around their necks, as if they were about to get haircuts or a touch-up on their roots. Their images were projected onto a screen and, through the magic of "green-screen technology, their heads appeared atop three shimmying bodies dancing to the Black-Eyed Peas' "Boom Boom Pow." They left with free DVD copies of their performance. Meanwhile, young people bellied up to an oxygen bar and willingly strapped on the sort of plastic facial tubing that looks so sad in a nursing home but passed for hip in the Preakness infield.

"Dead zones" in the Chesapeake Bay - areas with so little oxygen that fish can't live - grew to cover a record portion of the estuary last summer, according to a federally funded monitoring program. An average of 5 percent of the bay was classified as "anoxic" during the summer months, meaning the water had almost no dissolved oxygen, researchers from the Chesapeake Bay Program reported yesterday. The lack of oxygen suffocates oysters and drives fish and crabs in search of water where they can breathe.

With August's sweltering temperatures, you may be experiencing reduced crab catches because of high algae growth decreasing the oxygen in the bay's deeper sections, making it harder for the creatures to survive.Crabs, less active to conserve energy, often retreat to shallow water, where oxygen levels, though abnormal, are higher.Because you must now crab in 4 to 6 feet of water, crabbing becomes somewhat tricky.You have to be careful not to tangle your equipment in the motor. Moving your equipment often helps in catching the inactive crustaceans and should result in between one and two bushels.

Water clarity and oxygen levels in the St. Mary's River in Southern Maryland are at failing levels, a condition activists and scientists attribute mainly to development. Data collected by the St. Mary's Watershed Association and other scientists show that between 2000 and 2008, water quality has decreased in streams that feed into the St. Mary's River near the Lexington Park development district, including fewer macro-invertebrates, the tiny organisms that live in the bottoms of streams and rivers.